'Faith, Reason and Quality Assurance - Having Faith in Academic Life' Questions & Answers Session

Archbishop answering Questions at Babbage Lecture Theatre

The lecture: 'Faith, Reason and Quality Assurance - Having Faith in Academic Life'

Listen to 'Faith, Reason and Quality Assurance - Having Faith in Academic Life' Questions & Answers Session [11Mb]

Question:

How can citizens who are unable to study at university become better citizens equipped with critical and discerning decision-making skills? Should more citizens be encouraged to attend universities to develop these skills and virtues?

Archbishop:

I very much welcome that question because it does remind me, first of all, that the university can be a privileged environment for the formation of the critical mind and that not everyone has that privilege. And therefore, secondly, issues around access are crucial. How are these skills and critical virtues communicated? Universities have got better as time has gone on, I think, about their interaction and outreach with the community, and in my time as a Bishop in Wales I was privileged to sit on the governing body of a very different academic institution: the University of Wales College, Newport, an institution profoundly committed to access, an institution which worked intensively and very imaginatively with a deeply deprived and depressed region of South East Wales, making it possible for some of these skills to be developed. And I think that is part of the answer: universities need to work repeatedly at that issue of access. Sadly, we're often confronted with what I think is a false antithesis between access and excellence in higher education. I don't think that's a necessary stand-off, but working it through is not easy. I welcome the question and think that widening of university access within the framework of some clear understanding that what you're trying to do is not simply produce people with qualifications but people with qualities ...

One of my tutors was fond of saying that the most interesting figures in the history of ideas were those who turned out to be wrong. How might universities encourage the excellence of being wrong.

I think the answer is partly that a university ought not to see itself as primarily a risk-free, sanitized intellectual environment. The history of our intellectual life in this country and Europe more generally and the world at large is of course a history of risk-taking. The history of science is a history of risk-taking. There would have been absolutely no advance in science at any point had people not been willing to make fools of themselves, to offer wrong answers to questions that nobody else seemed to be asking but which needed asking. So, I think there's a very considerable place for being wrong in university life. Heaven help us if the first consideration of any working intellectual is 'how can I be absolutely sure I'm not making a mistake?' That's a recipe for absolute stasis, I think.

Can you say more about the skills, dispositions and virtues of the teacher in a university context, from a theological perspective?

There's been some quite interesting writing about this in recent years and I would say that the skills of a teacher are primarily those of a learner. By which I mean a good teacher is somebody who has not finished with his or her subject and whose engagement in communicating it is part of their own exploration. Which is why I think a glib and facile separation between teaching and research will never be for the good of any university or any intellectual institution. A good teacher is a good learner who in communicating what he or she loves, and is committed to, is themselves developing. That means of course that a good teacher is a good listener as well as a good speaker, someone who is prepared to learn even from their students. When I look back on nearly twenty years of university teaching in my own life, I can without exaggeration point to perhaps four or five moments when students of mine have said things to me that have actually changed my perspective for good and all. Not necessarily even that they have argued me out of a position, but that simply by coming to a field or subject new to them and just a little stale to me, have made me think afresh. And my most vivid memory of that kind is of one of my students, now a distinguished cleric in the Church of England, saying to me as I was trying to explain a theological point to him '...but why is that a problem?' and he was absolutely right to ask that. I'm still asking about that particular subject! But that's some of what I'd say about the virtues of the teacher. And from a theological perspective more specifically, I think that in the New Testament there is in the letters of Paul especially, there is a wonderful kind of shot silk, double-sided portrayal of the Christian teacher who is also, in communicating truth, discovering it. I sometimes used to say to my students that St Paul didn't know he was writing the New Testament, so his argumentation is not tidy and his prose is convoluted, and he is feeling his way into a deeper understanding of the truth as he communicates. Because his primary sense of what his duty is as a teacher, is to let truth be in him, not to describe it, categorize it or imprison it, but to let it be. Theologically, I'd say that's where teaching begins, can truth find a home here, and be alive?

Do you believe in ultimate truth?

The answer is yes. I don't believe that the world is simply the construct of what we choose. I don't believe that the world is a kind of minimal agreement about what we can just about manage together. I believe the world, because it comes from the hand of an absolutely real God, the world is thus and not otherwise, and that education therefore is always education in reality in knowing how to relate to a truth, a reality, a life which doesn't change as we do. And it's precisely because I do believe in ultimate truth that I'm wary of premature attempts to say 'and we've now got it', because of its solidity and infinity, it's glory, we have to be very cautious about supposing that we have it now wrapped up, though we can believe it draws us and compels us and has authority over us.

Why does society find it easier to admire excellence in sport and the arts etc, than excellence of the mind?

I guess it was ever so, though there are societies other than ours which seem to be a little more generous to the life of the mind than we sometimes are. But I wonder if it's something to do with the sheer fact of performance? You know what it looks like for somebody to be good at sport, you know what it looks like for somebody to be a great artist. What does it look like for somebody to be a great mind? Imagine a great mind, and all you can think of is probably some bloke, sitting in a study somewhere, looking slightly pained. As performance goes, that's not very exciting! We are a very image-obsessed, performance-focused culture aren't we? And I suspect it may have just a little bit to do with that ...

Several linked questions:

How far do you think reason and science should approach religion and the question of God's existence?

God is outside time and space: why would he care about us who live in such a minute part of it?

If God cannot be demonstrated with evidence, in what sense can he be said to exist? Isn't it avoidance of argument to say it's down to faith?

In all sorts of areas of our human life we make commitments that are not absolutely compelled by evidence. We do what the late, great philosopher Gillian Rose called 'staking ourselves'. There is enough to make us feel compelled or drawn by something, to say 'here I must be.' And I take the risk of moving into that space where I'm committed. It's not peculiar to religious faith, though religious faith is a particularly sharp and extravagant form of it. And that means that when we look academically at what faith is all about, two things at least are going on: one is the very general work of mapping out some of those things in the human world that do as a matter of fact, rightly or wrongly, draw people to the edge of commitment. What are the sorts of argument and the sorts of experience that impel people to the edge of commitment? We can at least look at how that happens. And then we can look at how people argue when they are committed. How do they draw conclusions about the divine and the interaction of the divine with the human world? What do their arguments look like when they are committed? And in between those two moments is of course, that inaccessible and mysterious moment of transition when you make the commitment, when there is a choice. And while the academic analysis could say quite a lot about what happens on the way to that and what happens after it, there remains somewhere in the middle something which does resist pure academic study. I hope that's not too evasive an answer, because I think it's not quite as uncommon a feature of our human existence as we might think uless we have a rather simplistic view that we always act when the evidence has stacked up and we can say 'allright, there's really no decision to be made, that's the obvious thing to do'. In how many areas of our lives or even our intellectual lives, do we actually work like that? Not all of them: which is why I said that quite a lot of what goes on in a university is actually the study of things that are not wholly unlike religious faith.

© Rowan Williams 2008