Shortly afterwards, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had published a report on higher education in Ireland. Given the nature of the OECD, and given that it compiled its report at the request of the Irish government, its recommendations failed to surprise: universities should serve a national economic strategy; they should work harder at the commercial exploitation of scientific and technological research; and they should train students in the intellectual and social skills necessary to meet the needs and opportunities of the labour market. 

In this context, I devoted my October sermon to reflecting on the purpose of universities. And when I came to deliver it, I might have been expected — as a member of the faculty of arts and humanities, as an ethicist and as a clergyman — to wax lyrical in complaint against government materialism and philistinism. But I resolved not to live down to my stereotype. I decided to distance myself from any whiff of ivory-tower snobbery. After all, Ireland had only very recently emerged out of decades of relative and humiliating poverty, and the Irish knew better than many Westerners that, whether or not poverty is good for the soul, it is really not a lot of fun. Without the wealth that economic success brings, lots of good and worthwhile things simply can't get done.

So, no, I didn't think then — and I don't think now — that it's inappropriate that government should ask universities to serve economic goals and to prepare their students for the labour market: that is, for the non-academic work that the vast majority of them will spend most of the rest of their lives doing. I do think that economic responsiveness belongs to universities' public responsibility.

We shouldn't idealise or overmoralise universities. Right from their medieval beginnings, they have served private purposes and practical public purposes as well as the sheer amor scientiae. For example, the founding of the University of Bologna, which lays dubious claim to be the longest continually operating in the world, was led by market-demand. It began with ambitious students appointing professors and monitoring their performance by threatening fines, against which the hapless professors had to put down a deposit. The notion that university education should be consumer-led is not a new one.

Moreover, prominent among the original, classic university disciplines was, of course, law, in which both private individuals and public institutions had strong interests. Then, as now, individuals wanted to build careers: as Peter of Blois, the 12th-century poet, former law student and future royal courtier, put it: "There are two things that drive men hard to the study of jurisprudence; these are the pursuit of offices and the vain passion for fame." Well, no doubt personal ambition can be distorted by a lust for status and for the limelight. But there's nothing wrong as such with individuals wanting to find a social role in which to exercise their talents — and that natural, grassroots desire was undoubtedly one of the inspirations behind the founding of the earliest universities.