This lecture provides a historical perspective within which to consider the situation of contemporary universities. It argues that there has long been a tension between, on the one hand, the open-ended quest to extend and deepen human understanding, which universities have over the past two centuries taken to be part of their raison d’etre, and, on the other, the imperative to serve practical social purposes, which their host societies have attempted to enforce by various means.

The conceptions of ‘accountability’ and ‘performance-management’ fostered by contemporary market democracies (fuelled by unprecedented quantities of data) have exacerbated this long-standing tension in ways that may fundamentally alter our sense of what universities are and what they do. This lecture focuses these anxieties by asking the hard-to-answer question: ‘Who does the university belong to?’