Category: Rowan Williams

If you are asked what are the characteristics you would regard as marks of maturity, or having grown up as a human being, what would you say? Let me try a few suggestions. The human adult I imagine is someone who is aware of emotion but not enslaved by it. A human adult is someone who believes that change is possible in their own lives and the lives of those around them. A human adult is someone who is aware of fallibility and death, that is who knows they are not right about everything and that they won’t live forever. An adult is someone sensitive to the cost of the choices they make, for themselves and for the people around them. An adult is someone who is not afraid of difference, who is not threatened by difference. And I would add too, an adult is someone aware of being answerable to something more than just a cultural consensus – someone whose values, choices, priorities are shaped by something other than majority votes…

if we don’t know what it is we are ‘inducting’ people into when we try and help them grow as humans, we cannot be surprised if chaos results.

What if we live in a climate where our emotions are indulged but never educated? That is to say where we never take a thoughtful perspective on how we feel, that brings in other people and their needs. What if we live in an environment where apathy and cynicism are the default positions for most people on issues of public concern? What if our environment is short on dialogue and learning and self-questioning? What if it is characterised by a fear and a denial of human limitations, by a fundamentalist belief in the possibility of technology in solving our problems for example? By the constant bracketing or postponing of the recognition that we have limits and that we are going to die. What if our environment is passive to the culture of the global market, simply receiving that constant streams of messages which flows out from producers and marketers? Because one of the things that implies is that the world ought to be one in which difference doesn’t matter very much because we are all flattened out, as you might say, in the role of consumers. What if our environment is characterised by intense boredom and an addiction to novelty? Or characterised by an obsessive romanticising of victim status, and a lack of empathy? What if it is characterised by secularism, that is to say by an approach to the world which is tone deaf about the sacred and the mysterious?

Archbishop Rowan Williams Formation: Who’s bringing up our children?

The ‘product’ of the university, then, is not simply the person who has acquired skills – technical skills, even research skills; it is the person who has acquired the habit and virtue of learning, and who sees the social world as a place not primarily of struggle and conflict over control but as a context where conversation may be pursued with patience.

And this is a deeply political matter, in the fullest sense of the much abused word ‘political’. It alters what we think we can expect of each other; it challenges any assumption that conflict is the natural position for human beings; when there are clashes of interest, it tells us how to question what we have taken for granted about our own best interests and encourages us to seek for something new that is not just the property of one individual or faction. The university nourishes ‘civility’ – in the narrow sense of patience and courtesy in dispute, and in the much larger sense of concern for proper and open public life in the civitas, the city, the community of citizens.

Archbishop Rowan Williams What is a university? Speech given in Wuhan, China

A simple postmodernist assumption that diversity is just a fact of life that needs no exploring and exchange would be a recipe for a depressingly tribal and static intellectual life.

The university, then, sustains a culture of its own, a culture of conversation and mutual criticism and appreciation, in the context of which people may grow into a deeper understanding of what characterises human beings as such in their social interaction. That understanding has to do with seeing human beings as essentially engaged in learning – in enlarging their mental and imaginative worlds and approaching one another with curiosity, patience and welcome, being free to imagine how others ask different questions of the world around them. Within that common culture of a ‘learning humanity’, a university may as matter of historical fact have a visibly dominant cultural presence – perhaps religious, as often in Europe, perhaps deeply bound up with national identity and independence. But if it is to function as a university, this historical legacy will need to be, not neutralised or denied, but understood precisely as a legacy to be used as the soil on which debate can grow. Its tradition, religious, national, or whatever, is not an orthodoxy to be insisted upon (as was the case in English universities until the early nineteenth century) but as a secure space in which other voices are welcome and respected, and where the interaction of different voices and perspectives within the institution is not seen as any sort of contest for dominance. In many circumstances, an intellectual institution that is clear about its history and tradition can be a more rather than a less hospitable place because of this lack of any need to fight for a dominant voice.

Archbishop Rowan Williams What is a university? Speech given in Wuhan, China

First – and perhaps surprisingly – there is a profoundly political element in the university. It is taken for granted that those who exercise power in a society need to be formed in a particular culture. They need to learn how to reflect on the social interactions around them; they need to learn how to evaluate the reasons that people give for actions and policies. Part of that training in how to evaluate reasons and arguments – and also ideals and aims – has always involved reference to the basic texts of a culture, sacred or not, which are regarded as setting out patterns of human life in society that continue to serve as an orientation….

Universities should devote serious resource and energy to encouraging public debate on the shared values of their society. This does not mean that a university as such should be a nursery of simple activism and criticism; it does mean, though, that a good university is always looking for ways of opening up general intellectual debate about common hopes and values to the community around it. It does not exist only to refine the work of the specialist…

It is only when universities are free to pose their own questions that they fulfil their function of enabling people to ask about the foundations of what others take for granted.

What is distinctive about the university is that it seeks to nurture the ability to understand political processes and to weigh political arguments rather than giving uncritical loyalty to any programme.

The student who is in this sense discovering what it is to be a ‘political agent’ is discovering what it is to exercise thoughtful responsibility in the life of a society. And this is where a narrow definition of what the social and the political might mean has to be balanced by some historical perspective; it is in fact where (in a very broad sense) the ‘classics’ of a society are relevant, so that a good university allows space for students to test their ideals and concepts against a historical tradition expressed not only in opportunities for discussion but also in the university’s public ceremony and its standards and protocols for intellectual exchange. By its very existence, the good university expresses certain philosophical commitments – to civil discourse, to liberty of expression, to careful and honest self-questioning, and to the possibility of creating trust through the processes of fair argument and exploration of evidence. This cannot be reduced to the narrow atmosphere of pressure-groups.

Ideally, then, the elements of awareness of history and tradition, openness to intellectual innovation and concern for the widest possible engagement with public life should come together in the university to help nurture adult and responsible citizens. But for us in Europe, there are, of course, two major factors which complicate still further the position of the university. One of these has already been hinted at: it is a political and economic climate in which the expectation of short-term and practical results has affected attitudes to ‘free’ intellectual endeavour in some very adverse ways. A proper concern for accountability has produced a real anxiety about the volume of work produced by universities, and an increasingly sharp competitive spirit between institutions. Every university has to promote itself in two directions – towards the public, to keep up recruitment, and towards funding bodies, which in Britain and much of continental Europe will be under government direction, to persuade them of its profitability. This is not a climate that will disappear overnight; it is part of the way in which ‘market’ models have come to dominate so many areas of social and institutional life in our context.

The second of these challenges is the sheer diversity of the cultural scene in the modern West; not only has British culture, for example, lost a degree of contact with and confidence in a history or identity shared by British citizens, it is now inclusive of active and often lively immigrant cultures, whose relation with the majority may be in various ways strained. Against such a background, what would it mean to see the university as offering an induction into some kind of culture appropriate to people who will grow into public responsibility? Isn’t this bound to be hopelessly compromised by the existing dominance of one culture or class or ethnic group (as has been the case in Britain)? In the vast perspective of China’s diverse cultures, similar questions are bound to be in evidence; what role has the university in promoting social and political stability in a context where much rests upon the ability of government to sustain national cohesion and a universal pattern of law, welfare and equity?

Any university now attempting to promote the advantage of one racial or class interest would forfeit its credibility and authority. But the alternative is not an acceptance of pure ‘postmodern’ diversity, a chaos of non-communicating discourses for mutually isolated communities.

Archbishop Rowan Williams What is a university? Speech given in Wuhan, China