All rights reservedGaita, Raimond2025-10-1620122022-01-210025-629310.3316/informit.594586355054172https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14802/4674In the early 1980s Don Gunner, a philosopher at the University of Melbourne, told me that the task of the university is to civilise the city. At the time he said this, many academics still believed that the concept of a university entitled them to say that no institution could rightly call itself a university if it did not have a department of philosophy, or classics, or physics. They thought this to be a conceptual truth - one evident after thoughtful, historically educated reflection on the concept of a university.universities and collegeshumanistic educationintellectual lifeJournal article2-s2.0-84858409964Controlled201042558