Professor Gerald Pillay, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of Liverpool Hope University, emphasised the need for spiritual values in higher education, during his Greencoat Forum lecture in the IofC centre in London

Professor Gerald Pillay, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of Liverpool Hope University, emphasised the need for spiritual values in higher education, during his Greencoat Forum lecture in the IofC centre in London, 22 November. He particularly traced the Christian roots of university education in Europe in his talk on “Challenges facing higher education: can a university be a catalyst for social change?” Universities, he said, should be the conscience of society.

Liverpool Hope University, which gained university status in 2005, transcends secularism in higher education, "a magnificent experiment in ecumenism", he said. He attributed the university’s birth to the friendship between Liverpool’s two former religious leaders, the Catholic Archbishop, Derek Warlock, and the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard. Liverpool Hope is now one of 14 British universities with a recognised Christian ethos.

“Universities in the West began with the Church and theology,” Professor Pillay said. “The moorings were religious, Christian and theological. The old mediaeval sense held that at the heart of the humanities was the queen of the sciences: theology. You cannot conceive of Europe without that.” Cathedral schools were the forerunners of universities and terms such as “vice-chancellor” and “dean” were borrowed from the mediaeval church. “The very underpinning of modern scholarship is the Christian faith,” he claimed. “Universitas, in its best and universal sense, is theological.”

Professor Gerald Pillay talking with guests at the Greencoat Forum

He paid tribute to the role of Islamic scholars in the rediscovery of Aristotle in the West, since they had preserved his writings in Arabic. “When we get hung up by Islamic extremism, [we should recognise] it is not the real Islam. We have lost the long-term view.” He added that Muslim students “have a confidence about their faith which I am afraid that we [Christians] are losing.” He said that “those of us of Christian beliefs are suffering from a loss of nerve. Our inability to hold a vision is a challenge from within.” He also pointed out that the world’s first universities, Takshila and Nalanda, were Buddhist with 20,000 students, long before Christ.

Professor Pillay asserted that the founders of the Enlightenment were devout people. “The Enlightenment was not anti-religious. The view that religious experience should be privatised is a very recent development.” The secularisation of academia was a late 20th century development. Three 19th century acts of parliament had widened university participation for the whole population: the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act; the 1832 Education Reform Bill which made education compulsory for all, including those of working class background; and 1834 Act which abolished slavery.

But he also said that “change has to come from within, a kind of inner Damascus Road experience”. His own university stopped all activity for one hour every Wednesday at 1pm, to give everyone space “to reflect on first order principles”. The search for truth and meaning, alongside philosophy and science, included faith, he said.

Professor Pillay deplored a culture in Britain that had turned scepticism into cynicism. “We’ve idealised a contrived objectivity,” he said, turning “enquiry into cynicism”.

He also expressed concern about the level of student debt, since the abolition of state-funded higher education for all. Forty per cent of school students now went on to tertiary education, approaching the government’s target of 50 per cent. But this could not be paid for by government. “We spend more on war than we do on education,” he asserted. But he also had doubts about the high level of student loans, which he believed had led to a rise of alcohol consumption among students, “because there is too much cash in the pocket”.

He announced that Liverpool Hope University will host Archbishop Desmond Tutu next June when the university opens its new Desmond Tutu Centre for Peace and War Studies. Paying tribute to the statesmanship of President Nelson Mandela, Professor Pillay said, “We’ve got to hang onto stories of hope, because the human spirit is resilient.”

Professor Pillay, who was born in Natal in South Africa, is a citizen of New Zealand, where he was also an academic.There, it is recognised that “the university has to be the critic and the conscience of society,” he said. “What a marvellous thing it is to restore that vision of the university in British life,” he concluded.

Michael Smith