What we need to learn from Newman, says Alasdair MacIntyre, is ‘that undergraduate education has its own distinctive ends, that it should never be regarded as a prologue to or a preparation for graduate or professional education, and that its ends must not be subordinated to the ends of the necessarily specialised activities of the researcher’. (‘The very idea of a university: Aristotle, Newman and us’, 2009)

In other words, an undergraduate education should be regarded as an end in itself; it is about the ‘making of men’.