… we must preserve the unworldly space in which university teachers are able to reveal to their students what it means, mostly deeply, to devote one’s life to an academic vocation—to live an answer to Callicles. They will then reveal to their students, who will go into the world to live many kinds of lives, a value in their education that nourishes them more deeply than the kind of liberal education that many people praise.

So philosopher Raimond Gaita argued the case for the unworldly university in his lecture ‘To Civilise the City?’¹ His deeply felt evocation of the purpose of a university proposed an institution that engages critically with the world, enriching students and their society. Pervading Professor Gaita’s lecture is a sense of loss; the life of the mind has been overwhelmed by ‘managerial newspeak’. The public duty of a university has surrendered to the pressures of the marketplace. The aspiration for an ‘unworldly space’, a community of scholars, is largely defunct.