A different rhetoric is needed, but it is one with which neither modern English politicians nor advocates of massive state subsidy for higher education are comfortable. The most eloquent section of Collini's book is its brief epilogue, "A Complex Inheritance", where our universities are described as "perhaps the single most important institutional medium for conserving, understanding, extending and handing on to subsequent generations the intellectual, scientific and artistic heritage of mankind . . . we are merely custodians for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance which we did not create — and which is not ours to destroy."

Where have we heard such language before? Not in the left-liberal tradition that is Collini's comfort zone, but rather in a famous passage of Edmund Burke concerning our "choice of inheritance":

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know, that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement.

Having spent most of his book explaining what in his view universities are not for, Collini ends with a Burkean image of the university as the holding-ground of a goodly heritage and the meeting-place of a community of minds, past, present and future. He even relies on a quintessentially Burkean rhetorical trick of repetition and variation: "which we did not create — and which is not ours to destroy".

My intellectual hero William Hazlitt was, like Collini, a man who always inclined to the liberal side of the question, but he believed that anyone who spoke of Burke with contempt had "a vulgar democratical mind". A sophisticated, yet still democratic, defence of the public value of the university might well be a Burkean one.

Here is a typical scene from the life of my university. It happened this morning. It is the final week of term, so the students come individually to discuss their progress with their tutor and the head of the college. A young woman tells us that she is struggling with a particular course on the advanced mathematics of computing — she went to a school where there was no tradition of going to university, so she has been playing catch-up since day one. The tutor swiftly replies: she should go to iTunes U and watch the Stanford lecture course, which will give her the clearest possible exposition of the subject. I then ask her how she is coping with the demands of university study. She replies that she is having the best time of her life, thanks to the friends she has made in college, the chance to sing in the choir and to play hockey (an opportunity she'd never had before, since her school had sold its sports field years ago). The community she has found has given her the strength to stretch her intellectual sinews and the will to master the science of quantum computing.