ABSTRACT
Teaching, training, and fundamental research have been the responsibility mainly of universities and related academic institutions and have been the main functions of these institutions in modern societies. In most countries universities contain the greatest concentrations of intellectually gifted people in general, and of the intellectually gifted young in particular. At the height of the disturbances it seemed that universities all around the world would be irreversibly politicized. Today the situation is much less clear. The propensity to adopt radical fashions is also related to social characteristics. When the idea that the university is, and should be, a place of social criticism emerged in Britain and the United States, universities were safely remote from the centers of political struggle. The danger that their academic activities might be influenced by that struggle was negligible, and the possibility that political pronouncements at the universities might influence actual policies was remote.
