Speaking of Universities

by Stefan Collini

One of the most striking features of those accumulations of deepened understanding and exact knowledge that we call scholarship and science is how small a proportion of them were created by those who presently hold posts in universities. What a ‘customer’ ‘buys’ from an individual university is not a ‘product’ or ‘service’ that that university has created: it is access to a complex intellectual and cultural inheritance that is only maintained and passed on in the present by the combined efforts of scholars and scientists all over the world, a population that is frequently mobile and constantly being renewed. A single, isolated university is, strictly speaking, a mirage, just as inconceivable and unsustainable as Marx long ago pointed out was the Robinson Crusoe model of ‘economic man’.