The concept of a university has become defunct. Not even the highflying, elite institutions operate with a serious concept of it.

There is not much point in lamenting that, but there is a point in lamenting the demise of a common understanding about what it means to be educated, which in turn nourished that concept.

It was a common understanding about the importance of the humanities. You can’t say to many vice-chancellors, "If you get rid of the philosophy, or classics or history department, then your institution will cease to be a university."

And you can’t say to many students that if they want really to attend a university, they should become educated in some of the disciplines of the humanities.

Increasingly more students than not who go to university don’t get an education as distinct from relatively narrow, vocationally based training.

Socrates was right to believe that in order to be fully human one must live as clear-headedly and as lucidly as possible. You don’t have to be educated to do that. But if you are, it means understanding the history, the thought and the art that have made us who we are. Without that we won’t understand each other or ourselves.

Students should leave university with a capacity to think seriously and hard. That’s not easy. You can learn to become impressively clever and to think critically in a certain way, while caring almost nothing for whether what you think is true or false.

To be more than a high-flying dilettante you need more than intellectual skills. You must develop a certain kind of moral seriousness: you must try to overcome vanity, to have courage, to care more for truth than for status, and so on. That’s as obvious as the need to be kind and just if you are to be a good person and it’s just as hard.

Critical thinking can be taught. How and why really to care for the truth can’t be, not, at any rate, in the same way. For that you need example in your teachers and in the texts that you study. The examples won’t all come from the humanities, but only the humanities can give what you need to reflect on their significance.