The question of just what the university is for, and what its aims are or should be, is growing more rather than less important. Nevertheless there are dangers in submitting these aims to discussion: particularly the danger that, under the sway of instrumental reason, the dominant form of thinking in the west, some of the most widely- canvassed aims have a strange way of turning into each other. The aim that the university should contribute to national development has a special and unique status, since the modern idea of the university came into being partly as an institution that instantiates culture, and especially the culture of the nation-state. This idea however readily turns into the claim that higher education should serve the needs of the national economy. There is a case for pragmatism about the different demands that contemporary societies make of their systems of higher education, as long as it is accompanied by continual vigilance in the face of the absurdities and perversions that politicians, bureaucrats and of course academics themselves perpetrate against the ideal of the university. Our best understanding of the university is in fact often arrived at in contradistinction from and resistance to these absurdities.