ABSTRACT
The authentic university offers the prospect of another feasible utopia. But, as with all such ideas of the university, it has its own characteristics and it poses challenges of its own. It is not enough to ask: ‘What is it to be an authentic university?’, as if there was some Platonic form of authenticity waiting to be discerned. Rather, the authentic university has to be created afresh continually, amid the circumstances of the age. Authenticity is realised through an engagement in and with a particular setting. It is realised through its overcoming difficulties that contemporary circumstances present, whatever they may be. Authenticity is always authenticity in a particular context.
