What (Who?) is a University? What does it mean to say this, that the faculty of a university are the university, and therefore not employees of it? John Henry Newman suggested an answer to this question in The Idea of a University. On his understanding, the institutional structure of the modern university, and its oversight by administrators, politicians, and Boards of Trustees, are inessential to what it is. They are mere trappings around its fundamental core, the guild of scholars dedicated to the activity of universal learning.
