(46) When Newman prepared his discourses, the view that a university was more than a place for teaching universal knowledge, that it was also a place for professional education and primarily a place for the "endowment of learning" or research, was prevalent enough for him to reassert the older Oxford position. He was aware of the pressure being exerted on Oxford and Cambridge to provide greater opportunities for teaching that was related to investigation and not to character formation. (47) For centuries scholars and scientists had sought openings within universities for work that was not necessarily directly related to the teaching of young persons or at least teaching dominated by literary, theological and mathematical subjects. There were some successes, and new histories of Oxford and Cambridge universities are uncovering more. Even within the collegiate system, where teaching tutors rather than research professors predominated, research was never altogether out of the question for universities. (48) A life spent in teaching will at some point shade over into research, or perhaps it is better to say "study," since research is systematic study in a given area of knowledge and its subsequent dissemination, although not necessarily through the medium of the lecture hall. But although university professors wrote books, some of them original treatises and not texts, and learned papers were produced by classicists, philosophers and scientists, the overall intellectual environment was as Newman wished, whether in England or Scotland. The research function had not been raised to the level of an ideology. There was no p culture of research that put a premium on originality and stressed the importance of discovery and a division of intellectual labour. It was not an era of Ph.D. candidates and graduate schools, extra-mural grants and contract research. University appointments were not made because potential fellows and chairholders were evaluated for their original contributions to knowledge or could be praised for being on the cutting edge of intellectual life. (49) Learned. yes; but that most often meant an impressive command of existing knowledge with no expectation that scholarly work of seminal importance to a particular field of inquiry was some day likely to emerge and—most importantly—be systematically diffused. The principal institutional victories of Victorian researchers and their predecessors lay elsewhere, in the creation of learned societies, botanical gardens, museums, libraries and specialized institutions.
If the "object" of a university "was ... scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a university should have students," wrote Newman. The teaching of students had assumed new importance during Newman’s lifetime. In arguing for the traditional view that research, while a possible function for universities, should always be secondary, Newman was reflecting important internal transformations that had occurred in his youth. (50) The new examinations culture introduced at Oxford by the reforms of 1800 and developed earlier at Cambridge had reinforced teaching and strengthened the hold of colleges on the university’s pedagogical mission, and a new generation of students, of which Newman was one, had in effect demanded more attention from dons and stimulated many of the changes that improved the intellectual standing of the ancient universities of England.
