Society and the university.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: I so much agreed with what Rodney Nillsen (November 2004) had to say about universities that it was a nasty shock to come across his misuse of Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "there is no such thing as society". Such misuse had long been my litmus paper for indicating the stupidity of a writer, but here was an intelligent contributor falling for it. Out goes litmus!

Let me correct Nillsen: the point of the remark was to exclude what one might call the "reified" belief that a thing called "society" was an independent causal operator in social affairs. As the Baroness went on to add: "there's only you and me". The basic academic point is that it is always important to be clear about the meaning of an utterance.

I used to take the old Andersonian view that the essence of universities was the activity of criticism, but this idea was so comprehensively misused in the 1960s that it became positively dangerous. For my money, the best short statement about ...