On the role of universities in democracies

"The university's task is thus well defined, if not easy to carry out or even keep in mind. It is, in the first place, always to maintain the permanent questions front and center. This it does primarily by preserving--by keeping alive--the works of those who best addressed these questions. ...

The university as an institution must compensate for what individuals lack in a democracy and must encourage its members to participate in its spirit. As the repository of the regime's own highest faculty and principle, it must have a strong sense of its importance outside the system of equal individuality. it must be contemptuous of public opinion because it has within it the source of autonomy--the quest for and even discovery of the truth according to nature. it must concentrate on philosophy, theology, the literary classics, and on those scientists like Newton, Descartes, and Leibnitz who have the most comprehensive scientific vision and a sense of the relation of what they do to the order of the whole of things. These must help preserve what is most likely to be neglected in a democracy."

--Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, pp.252-4

As the great Sir Winston Churchill once said in the House of Commons in 1950 in a debate on university reform,

"The first duty of a university is to teach wisdom, not a trade; character, not technicalities."

I wonder how that would have been applied to our esteemed National University of Singapore.