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In his review, Gordon Johnson endorses the claim made in Gordon Graham's book The Institution of Intellectual Values: Realism and Idealism in Higher Education (Books, December 9) that "there has been no sustained exposition of what a university is for" since John Henry Newman's in 1854.

This claim ignores not only such luminaries as J¨¹rgen Habermas and F. R. Leavis but also Ron Barnett's sustained engagement with the liberal humanist ideal of the Western university in a series of books published in the past decade.

Patrick Ainley
Greenwich University