But then, as now, there was also top-down inspiration. Popes and bishops needed educated pastors and they and kings needed educated administrators and lawyers capable of developing and embedding nationwide systems. It's a bit of a puzzle as to why a provincial market-town such as Oxford ever came to grow a university in the 12th century. But one answer is that by the 1180s Oxford had become a seat of the royal administration and of the ecclesiastical courts. Universities have played a public role from the beginning, and they have continued to do so. Since the 19th century, university professors in many European countries have been part of the civil service. And after 1848, students in Tsarist universities were kitted out in quasi-military uniform. 

So universities were never simply the child of an ivory-tower love of knowledge for knowledge's sake. They were always partly fuelled by practical concerns, whether the concerns of private individuals or of those with public responsibility. But practical concerns are not small and grubby or intellectually untaxing. Law is a very important social institution, which, theologians claim, mirrors the constitution of the cosmos and on its practice depend important human benefits such as social peace, the support of public and private virtue, and justice. The practice of medicine, of course, serves the good of physical health. And the practice of theology serves the good of spiritual and moral health. So there we have three of the four faculties of a typical medieval university — theology, law and medicine — each of them ordered to educate students in the principles of a practice designed to serve human well-being. (If you're wondering about the fourth faculty, arts, its concern was with developing the verbal, logical, mathematical — and later, general philosophical — understanding basic to studies in the other, higher faculties.) 

So our earliest universities were considerably fuelled by practical concerns for certain human and public goods. With the sole exception of medicine, however, they tended to fight shy of technical, or what they called "mechanical", concerns. So no medieval university sported a faculty of architecture or agriculture. Why? I assume that this reflects the infection of medieval Christendom by an Aristotelian disdain for the servile arts — the merely technical skills that slaves, rather than citizens, had to exercise. I say "infection" because Christianity's earthy Jewish matrix and its own socially humble origins should have immunised it against such class snobbery. Contrast Aristotle with this passage from the Wisdom literature of the Christian Scriptures: "[The workman and craftsman, the blacksmith and potter:] all these put their trust in their hands and each is skilled at his own craft. A town could not be built without them, there would be no settling, no travelling. But they are not required at the council, they do not hold high rank in the assembly. They do not sit on the judicial bench, and have no grasp of law. They are not remarkable for culture or sound judgment, and are not found among the inventors of maxims. But they maintain the fabric of the world..." [Ecclesiasticus 38.35-39a]. Except in the case of doctors, the medieval university seems to have forgotten this piece of biblical wisdom. And it was only in the post-Reformation, Lutheranised, modern period that the technical sciences began to find a proper home in higher education. So in the mid-19th century, the industrialised cities of northern England began to sprout university colleges with close links to local industries. For example, the University of Leeds was heavily oriented to the research and training needs of the textile industry until it was decimated in the 1980s. Even a university with an impeccable medieval pedigree such as Glasgow was pleased in 1889 to accept the endowment of a chair of shipbuilding (or "naval architecture", to give it its title). 

Universities have never been simply ivory towers. They've never simply sought knowledge for knowledge's sake. And they have no need to apologise for that. Indeed, I myself harbour doubts about the academic's typical defensive gambit of asserting the intrinsic value of knowledge. It's not that I doubt the intrinsic good of knowledge of the truth. After all, the notion of human beings losing sleep, missing meals, even risking their lives in pursuit of the truth, or in defence of it, is a perfectly familiar one. But some truths are surely rather less valuable than others. There is a truth about the number of times that the surname Biggar appears in the Birmingham telephone directory and not even I can muster a whole lot of interest in that. It is a truth, of course, but it hardly matters. I'm with Comrade Zhdanov on this: as from the artist, so from the academic, an account is needed of why what he does matters — and why it matters, why it speaks, beyond the realm of his own private fancy.