Liberal arts focus at Campion College

Sydney
10 August 2003

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Liberal arts focus at Campion College

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Liberal arts focus at Campion College

By Marilyn Rodrigues

There is a growing awareness of how specialised, vocational focus in higher education is detracting from student’s broad intellectual development, says Karl Schmude, executive director of the Campion Foundation.

The Campion College Australia at Old Toongabbie, which is set to take its first students in 2005, is the foundation’s response to the perceived over-specialisation of university education.

It will offer a three-year liberal arts undergraduate degree with the aim of preparing students for life and to give rational arguments for the Catholic Church’s position on societal issues.

It will be overtly Catholic in its curriculum, but will accept non-Catholic students as well.

Subjects will include philosophy, history, literature, mathematics and sciences, along with Latin and theology.

The course will be provided full and part-time, residential and non-residential and by correspondence. There will also be links with other universities, allowing for some cross-accreditation.

“More and more, the universities are moving to training rather than the broad educational approach that people still look for universities to provide,” says Mr Schmude.

“Universities can try to do both, but it is very hard.

“Most have been down that path of offering mostly vocation training; it’s commercially-driven and very understandable, but makes it difficult for people to obtain a broad education.

“If you follow the major papers, there’s a growing awareness in all sorts of circles, and certainly among academics in universities, that we should be focusing on education rather than training.

“I mean in no way to be anti-training.

He said the purposes of students and society were not fulfilled “if they learn the language and jargon of one discipline and not the range of foundational knowledge so necessary in life; whereas the liberal arts have long been a means of providing a breadth of intellectual development, including development of communication and analytical skills”.

The foundation, named after the 16th-century English scholar and martyr St Edmund Campion, takes its inspiration from Pope John Paul II’s apostolic constitution on Catholic universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (Born from the Heart of the Church).

“There is a long tradition of Catholic involvement in establishment of universities, going right back to the middle ages,” says Mr Schmude.

State-funded universities in a secular culture either exclude or discard faith, he says, but Campion “will endeavour to bring a Catholic identity to bear on the whole of life in the institution, especially in the curriculum”.

It plans eventually to offer some fourth year vocational programs, too, beginning with education, journalism and business studies.

The venture is not without its critics.

One parishioner, Victor Zammit, has written to the Parramatta diocese to complain about a lack of community consultation about the plans for the private university on the former Marist Fathers seminary site (pictured).

He argued that it might be put to better use for local schoolchildren and activities that benefit the whole community rather than a “select group”.

But Mr Schmude says: “We’re not after a closed society here. The college will be elitist in that it tries to produce the best possible minds, but not elitist in the financial sense.

“We plan to provide scholarships, bursaries, and other financial aid to make that possible.

“We believe our task is to cultivate a Catholic mind and character and the intellectual ability to interpret and respond to immediate challenges in the light of the Church’s tradition and teaching.

“We want to encourage public articulation of the Church’s position on contemporary issues.

“The aim is to provide an intense educational program that prepares people to personally and culturally engage with the issues of the day in relation to Christ’s teaching,” Mr Schmude says.

The college will be the third privately funded tertiary institution in Australia after Bond University in Queensland, and Notre Dame University (a Catholic university) in Western Australia.