ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns some of the benefits of its institutional inheritance. Some of these elements – that of academic self-government, for example – are obviously of the first importance and have been widely discussed. But there are equally evident features of academic institutions whose importance is less widely recognized. Such a bias resembles a deformity of growth. All social institutions suggest analogy with organisms: they are born, they grow, they wax and wane, and all of them seem destined to extinction. It is certainly true that teaching and research may be seen as distinct activities, and that each is carried on in a great variety of institutions. The chapter considers the logical distinctness of the academic world; but the conclusion here must be that the university ought not to be regarded as the pure flame of rationality burning in the world.
