Fatal impact theory 

As schools are for education, so universities are for higher education. In a civilised society, children should leave school literate, numerate and with some knowledge of science, history and culture. But society also needs an elite educated to a higher level. Universities are for the preparation of the next generation of doctors, United Nations interpreters, lawyers, structural engineers, archaeologists, nuclear-weapon designers, literary critics, astronomers, economists and so forth.

That’s the short answer. The long answer would require a great deal more than is found in Stefan Collini’s brisk and very witty book. It would need to range far and wide both historically and geographically, to tell us about the centrality of theology in the medieval university, the political imperative behind the humanist revolution in 16th-century Cambridge, the emergence of the PhD in 19th-century Germany, the relative prestige of the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure, the mixed ecology of the American system in which a first-class undergraduate education can be obtained at a ‘college’ as opposed to a ‘university’, and much more.

Collini touches briefly upon some of these things, but his book is by its own confession essayistic, polemical and opportunist rather than magisterial, balanced and long-cogitated. In an ideal world the Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge (for it is he) would have ten years —or come to that, an entirely scholarly lifetime — to survey a subject such as this.

But the paymasters of the 21st-century professor are the bean-counters in the government’s suggestively named Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (assuming that Michael Gove has not wrested the universities back to the Department of Education before this review reaches print). The quango charged with the distribution of funding periodically conducts a competition, originally called the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and now renamed the Research Excellence Framework (REF), in which sample ‘outputs’ from every professor and lecturer in the land are graded on a scale from zero to four stars, and the money dished out accordingly.