ABSTRACT
The gulf between Michael Oakeshott's idea of a university or schole, as outlined in a number of essays on the subject written between 1949 and 1967, and that of the UK's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills 2015 Green Paper, could not be wider. His essay 'The Universities' is a review of Sir Walter Moberly's 1949 The Crisis in the Universities, a set of essays that Oakeshott, at times diplomatically, at times mercilessly, tears to shreds. As with schools, Oakeshott regarded universities as 'places apart' in which it was possible 'to step aside from the brittle formulations of the world, from the current vulgar estimates of its predicament, from the 'burning questions' and the world's slick answers'. Universities were at a disadvantage faced with an external world 'of power and utility', of government and business, a world keen to exercise patronage over universities for its own ends. 'It is very powerful world', he wrote, it is wealthy, interfering and well-meaning.
