Stefan Collini wryly points out in his polemic What are Universities For? (Penguin, £9.99) that "it should soon be possible to write a coherent sentence about higher education entirely in acronyms." Efficiency savings are a necessary part of the modernisation of a system where there was once a great deal of slack but, as Collini's book amply demonstrates, the language of business-speak and management consultancy has deformed the policy debate about the function of the university.

A disappointment of Collini's study is its failure to ask where, when and why this phenomenon arose. The new and highly instrumentalised way of thinking about universities is not the preserve of any one political faction. Both the Dearing Report of 1997 and the Browne Report of 2010 were set up on cross-party lines, and you would be hard placed to put a cigarette paper between the language used of the universities by Peter Mandelson and that of his successor as minister with ultimate responsibility for them, Vince Cable.

Politicians of all stripes appear to be unanimous in assuming that the function of the university is to serve the economic growth of the nation. This is why universities are within the remit of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, not that of the Department for Education. This is also why for the last 20 years an econometric model has been applied to university finances, by way of such phenomena as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), now reincarnated as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), in which scholarly "outputs" are graded like hotels or restaurants, and research funding distributed accordingly. Ominously, the intention of Les Ebdon, the new director of Offa, is to find a way of linking performance to financial penalties in the contentious area of "widening participation". In every dimension — from research to recruitment — the modern university must be seen, and measured, in relation to something else, whether business innovation or social mobility. The world of the RAE and the REF, of KIS and Offa and "knowledge transfer" and the vice-chancellor as CEO is, in the manner of its expression, about as far as you can get from Cardinal Newman's "idea of a university":

A university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life.

How have we got from that noble aspiration to this randomly chosen but wholly representative modern university mission statement?