Stefan Collini has a book out with that title, with an excerpt in The Guardian. Looks essential. It’s a shame academics are unable to set compulsory reading for their managers as well as their students.

Universities are not just good places in which to undertake such fundamental questioning; they also embody an alternative set of values in their very rationale. If we are only trustees for our generation of the peculiar cultural achievement that is the university, then those of us whose lives have been shaped by the immeasurable privilege of teaching and working in a university are not entitled to give up on the attempt to make the case for its best purposes and to make that case tell in the public domain, however discouraging the immediate circumstances. After all, no previous generation entirely surrendered this ideal of the university to those fantasists who think they represent the real world. Asking ourselves “What are universities for?” may help remind us, amid distracting circumstances, that we – all of us, inside universities or out – are indeed merely custodians for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance which we did not create, and which is not ours to destroy.