John Henry Cardinal Newman 
Idea of a University [PDF ebook] 

"The Idea of a University [is an] eloquent defense of a liberal education which is perhaps the most timeless of all [Newman’s] books and certainly the one most intellectually accessible to readers of every religious faith and of none. . . . [O]nly one who has read The Idea of a University in its entirety, especially the nine discourses, can hope to understand why its reputation is so high: why the first reading of this book has been called an ‘epoch’ in the life of a college man; why Walter Pater thought it ‘the perfect handling of a theory’; why the historian G. M. Young has ranked it with Aristotle’s Ethics among the most valuable of all works on the aim of Education; or why Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch told his students at Cambridge that ‘of all the books written in these hundred years there is perhaps none you can more profitably thumb and ponder.’" -from the introduction by Martin J. Svaglic