Tickling the ivories

What Are Universities For? By Stefan Collini. Penguin; 216 pages; £9.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

UNIVERSITIES are in a paradoxical position. As Stefan Collini points out in this eloquent and impassioned book, these ancient institutions have never been so numerous or so important. They receive more public money than they ever did. They are lauded as the engines of economic growth and technological advance. And yet they are frequently defensive and troubled, harried by politicians and lacking a clear sense of purpose and direction.

Mr Collini, professor of English literature and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge, is eager to rebuild their confidence. Universities, he says, “provide a home for attempts to extend and deepen human understanding in ways which are, simultaneously, disciplined and illimitable.” It is the side-effects of this activity that public debate has seized upon: the impact on the student's capacity for understanding, or on a country's development of new technologies. But these are not the core purpose of a university.

In making his case, Mr Collini rejects the definition of Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California, who described a university as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking”. Instead, he goes back, somewhat sheepishly, to Cardinal Newman. Sheepish because, unlike most of those who quote Newman, Mr Collini has actually read “The Idea of a University”, including some of its more embarrassing passages. He understands the curious purpose behind Newman's “silky prose”: the quixotic and doomed attempt to found a Catholic university in Dublin, an institution “marginal to English social and cultural traditions”. But Newman has a way with words: “A university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society…It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them and a force in urging them.”

Mr Collini is moved by Newman's insistence that a liberal education is not about what students learn or what skills they acquire but “the perspective they have on the place of their knowledge in a wider map of human understanding”. But this is a far cry from the mechanisms government now uses (and Mr Collini's focus is almost entirely on the British government in Westminster) to set goals for the proper expenditure of public money and to turn university students into demanding “consumers” of higher education.

The second half of the book is a disappointing and repetitive collection of previously published attacks on various parts of British government policy. Mr Collini scores many strikes against concepts such as “impact” as a basis for distributing research funds or the insistence on universities as a tool for boosting GDP. “Society does not educate the next generation in order for them to contribute to its economy,” he insists. Ultimately, though, universities have to be paid for, and financing them cannot be justified on Newman's grounds alone. Governments have to make a case to those whose taxes foot the bill. They have to play some role in the decision whether to pay for research into medieval poetry or muscular dystrophy. Moreover, the more families carry directly the cost of educating their young people, the more they will want something more from universities than a place on the map of human understanding.

Universities will always feel the tension between the intellectual purity that Mr Collini demands and the grubby business of picking and preparing the future middle class. Reconciling these two roles is the mark of a great university. Indeed, the tension created by these conflicting roles is what helps even the most workaday academic retain some independence of thought and intellectual vigour. The government may fret about outputs and the students care only about their lifetime earnings; but lecturers need the odd dose of Newman to do their job well.