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Professor Liebig of Giessen University is looking back with pride on his career in organic chemistry and his keen young team of researchers in their lab ‘almost exclusively devoted to the improvement of organic analysis . . . The only complaints were those of the attendant who in the evenings, when he had to clean, could not get the workers to leave the laboratory.’ All quite typical—except that he is describing a laboratory he created in 1826. It was the first research laboratory based in a university. There were a few other laboratories but they were usually sponsored by learned societies (you can still see Michael Faraday’s laboratory at the Royal Institution) and were nothing to do with universities. Professor Liebig knew the significance of what he was doing: ‘there began at the small university an activity such as the world had not yet seen’. It was the birth of one of the most important institutions of the modern world—the research-based university systematically creating new knowledge—and it was conceived in Germany, as we saw in Chapter One. Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote a short policy paper which proved to be one of the seminal documents in the emergence of the modern university, proposing that the university should become a centre of research. Underneath the idealist Hegelian prose he wrestles with issues which are still live today. He argues that research based in the university is enhanced by teaching, compared with the alternative model of research in a separate academy: . . . If one declares the university as destined only for the teaching and dissemination of science, but the academy to its expansion, one clearly does the former an injustice. Surely, the sciences have been just as much—and in Germany more so—expanded by university professors as by the academy members, and these men have arrived at their advances in their field precisely through their teaching. For the free oral lecture before listeners, among whom there is always a significant number of minds that think along for themselves, surely spurs on the person who has become used to this kind of study as much as the solitary leisure of the writer’s life or the loose association of an academic fellowship. . . .

Universities are important, sophisticated institutions but they are not well understood even by academics themselves who are busy researching gravitational waves or the rise of populism. They may, very reasonably, find their discipline much more interesting than their institution. Instead the campus novel, from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim to Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, David Lodge’s Brummidge, and Howard Jacobson’s Sefton Goldberg, is the main way people working in universities investigate what they are like and communicate it to the wider world. But they can’t tell the whole story. There are also academics in British universities researching universities but not many of them— most of the books about the university are American. Meanwhile crude conspiracy theories claim to explain what is happening to a complex institution. One such narrative is ‘the university is under attack from managers/ministers/ markets threatening my/your/all disciplines’. Another narrative is ‘Universities are ivory towers: there are too many of them and too many people go.’ That is why I have tried to convey what I have learnt from my university education over the past decade and assembled the evidence to explain why both of those narratives are wrong. Such is my respect for the values of academia that, even if one might suspect this is just a heavily disguised ministerial memoir, it is at least the first example which has been subject to academic peer review. The behaviour of our universities is influenced by their environment and the incentives they face. That environment is very unusual and took its modern form as a result of a series of haphazard decisions taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Competitive nationwide entry gives our universities exceptional power to decide who they admit. That in turn has driven an intense educational arms race in our secondary schools which in turn has led to very early subject specialization. The behaviour of schools is shaped by the competition to get into the ‘best’ universities. However, we have seen that there are different types of universities, each well adapted to a distinctive role.