ome have said that to be a university, it is essential that an institution must engage in research. Not so. While it is very important that many do, it is not essential that all do. And as historian and former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne Alan Gilbert has pointed out, such a restrictive essence would exclude many of the world’s oldest and greatest universities, which for most of their history did not engage in research at all.

Some have seen the essence as involving advanced teaching. Again, not so. There have been universities whose primary concern has been to hoard and store knowledge, with no commitment to transferring it beyond leaving it as a legacy for an abstract posterity. Nor is there any physical essence to a university. While for many the paradigm is a rolling landscape discretely dotted with buildings of charm and dignity, there are many great universities with no manicured lawns, operating entirely from clusters of offices in buildings designed for other purposes.

For something not to have an essence is not at all extraordinary. As the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century Ludwig Wittgenstein argued, many of our concepts gain their application through the recognition of what he