That's my first thought.

My second thought is this. The arts and humanities not only introduce us to foreign worlds, they teach us to treat them well. They teach us to read strange and intractable texts with patience and care; to meet alien ideas and practices with humility, docility, and charity; to draw alongside foreign worlds before we set about — as we must — judging them. They train us in the practice of honest dialogue, which respects the "Other" as a potential prophet, one who might yet speak a new word about what's true and good and beautiful.

A commitment to the truth, humility, a readiness to be taught, patience, carefulness, charity: all of these moral virtues that inform the intellectual discipline into which the arts and humanities induct their students; all of these moral virtues of which public discourse, whether in the media or in Parliament or in Congress, displays no obvious surplus. All of these moral virtues, without which this country and others may get to become a "knowledge economy", but won't get to become a "wisdom society". 

And public decisions that, being unwise, are careless with the truth, arrogant, unteachable, impatient and uncharitable, will be bad decisions — and bad decisions cause needless damage to real institutions and real individuals.

What I'm saying, then, is that in addition to providing talented individuals with the opportunity to grow their gifts and find a social role to exercise them; in addition to producing qualified applicants for positions in legal practice and in public administration; in addition to training the labour-force to man a high-tech, service-oriented economy; and in addition to generating new scientific knowledge with technological or commercial applications, universities exist to form individuals and citizens in certain virtues — virtues that are not just intellectual, but are also social and political.

Historically, Oxbridge — with its medieval heritage of small college communities and their chapels, and with its tutorial system — has recognised that education is properly not just about the communication of information or ideas by lecture, nor just about technical apprenticeship, but about the morally formative influence of tutor on student. 

It has recognised that this relationship does have a certain pastoral quality to it, that this need not be paternalistic, and that it can develop into equal friendship — as in my experience it not infrequently does. This was certainly the ideal and the practice of John Henry Newman, of whom it was reported by Ian Ker in John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 1988) that when he was a Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College in the late 1820s, "He cultivated relations [with students], not only of intimacy, but of friendship, and almost of equality." And when he came to found his Catholic University in Dublin, Newman was adamant that its tutors would represent "that union of intellectual and moral influence, the separation of which is the evil of the age".