ABSTRACT
The university is the key knowledge institution of modern society. It is the producer of much of the theoretical knowledge which our society increasingly uses as an organising technology. The liberal university saw its responsibility as to reproduce professions, but professions defined as much by social custom as by technological requirements, and to transmit cultural capital in its broadest and perhaps most metaphorical sense by the formation of elites. The first important characteristic of the liberal university was and is this custodianship of an intellectual tradition that has been derived from the culture of an elite rather than the codification of scientific principles by a corps of experts. General education at university level runs not only into social difficulties such as the lack of a fixed 'public' intellectual culture to which a stable majority is prepared to give its consent, but also into difficulties of an ideological or philosophical nature.
