The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Mosr Revd Rowan Williams, gave the sermon for Oxford University Commemoration Day on Sunday at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin.

'It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter' (Prov. 25.2)

When we commemorate our more remote benefactors, it is relatively easy to romanticise the early university, and to contrast it with apocalyptically gloomy visions of its modern successor - the latter apparently poised on the edge of barbarism, driven by the pressures of assessment, fundraising and arguments over fees. The university of the golden age of benefaction was surely different a haven for disinterested scholarship, the unworldly fingering over of classical texts and arcane philosophical questions, patient of eccentricity, the object of a benevolence that asked no questions about research output, access, competitive profile and industrial investment. Tempting to lament all this, and to set out on an elegy for lost educational values...

More here: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/040620.html