University education in the 21st century, in a great number of countries, is subject to an increasingly large number of intense challenges. It is expensive for an expanding student body that views it as a necessary step on the career ladder. It can be viewed as a costly luxury by governments and taxpayers alike: forced to dress itself up vital to the economy. It is expected to demonstrate the value of its research activities in terms of their useful ‘impact’ on society. Overall, the contemporary pressures on the university seem to express a view of it as a means, an instrument, to an end: a demand that a university be for something. Should we consider first just what a university is?

In the Academy itself there is less and less agreement about what a university should be. This may reflect the increasing specialisation, some would say fragmentation, of disciplines and departments despite pious lip-service paid to the virtue of interdisciplinarity. Many countries have definitely seen huge quantitative changes (ever growing number of students) as well as qualitative ones that have certainly transformed what universities are today. In Greece there is also the issue of “university asylum” despite its repeal last year: alleged incidents of widespread lawlessness on campuses home to youth wings of political parties; with political activists blocking attempts at reform. At the same time, many argue that the traditional Greek academic model, with the high authority of the professor and the pursuit of knowledge as intrinsically worthwhile, is worth preserving.

Some say the golden age of the university has always been in the past, this is just another crisis we will resolve. Others say this is the golden age of the university: it was high time the ivory tower was broken into and sleepy professors forced to wake up to the demands of the real world. Some argue that they should be the solution to today’s economic crisis: teaching Tourism Studies for all they are worth. Some want them to be privatised. All work, one way or another, in universities that don’t seem to live up to the name of a ‘university’, at least in a traditional sense.

So, if we still hold to the ideal of a universal education for all, then do we have to determine again what that education should consist of and how it should be delivered? The evolution of the university from Plato’s Academy to massive ‘multiversities’, the lack of clarity about the very value of higher education, suggests that now might be the time to address that question.