I am fully sympathetic with the struggle of universities but perhaps they shouldn't be spared the need to be more responsive to the political and economic climate.

Hermann Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" describes a world in which the academy is entirely sheltered from the real world and develops a culture of dependence, detachment and indifference. Do we want that world?

If we throw money at universities to keep doing what they've always done, we'll create institutions that exist only for their own sake and without any real purpose or value outside of a hedonistic pursuit of knowledge.

We should fund universities to serve the people, like the free university places in Scotland. We should fund research and innovation. We should fund the moral and cultural development of citizens and those invested in the future of the country.

But we should be careful we don't accidentally create a system that can't survive in a competitive and changing world.