The theme of this book first appeared at the very dawn of theoretical inquiry, in the famous story about Thales, who fell down a well because he was so busy looking at the stars. The habit of seeing the university in functional terms has become so widespread that it can pass itself off as a historical truth. To explore the concept of a university requires that we should present a more or less philosophical argument which must straddle, rather uneasily, the fields of education and of social and political theory. The kind of distortion imposed upon universities by a functional view may be illustrated by a further analogy. Just as yacht clubs were established by people who just liked 'messing about with boats', so universities were established and sustained by people who liked inquiry and scholarly cultivation.