Agreeing to affirm the intrinsic values of a university is one thing; agreeing what those values are is quite another. It might be doubted whether there really is anything distinctive that universities are for: students may see them as places to escape their parents, lose their virginity, and make friends for life; parents may see them as places to fit their offspring for financial independence; researchers may see them as places to be paid to do what they want; politicians may see them as places to keep the unemployment figures down; philanthropists may see them as places to be fawned on by the same dons who treated them so superciliously when they were students. Universities are all of these things and more; are they intrinsically any one thing in particular?
via How to defend universities? | TLS.
Yikes. If this is how we view universities, and I think these descriptions fit a good many people’s vision (and he didn’t even mention the entire Athletics Industrial Complex that plagues the American system), then we are in trouble.