On the Feast of All Saints, 1st November 2025, Pope Leo XIV declared St John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Universal Church. He will be the 38th person to be declared a Doctor of the Church, and only the second English person to be so declared, after the Venerable Bede.

One of Newman’s lasting achievements was his series of lectures, later collected and published in a book, “The Idea of a University,” one of the most influential and enduring texts on the subject of what a university should be.

To mark the occasion of Newman’s elevation, Policy Exchange has published a report that reflects on the history, evolution and purposes of our university system in the context of both St John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University and the Government’s recent Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper, published on 20 October.

The report’s core thesis is that universities matter, and our system of higher education needs radical reform but that although the White Paper has some merit on Skills and FE, it has no sense of the history of thinking about universities, and very little sense of its own as to the purposes of a university or a university system.

The report discusses issues such as governance, fees and civic engagement, reflects on lifelong learning and makes the case for maintaining the richness and diversity of the system, in the face of potential calls from government and other parties for utilitarian thinking and over-specialisation. It argues that system thinking is lacking in current approaches to reform, and that we need to move from thinking about the idea and purpose of a university, to the idea and purpose of universities, collectively.