Abstract
This article examines the collective monograph The Modern University. Ideal and Reality, on the basis of which it asks to what extent the classical idea of the university, as it was elaborated in the work of German classical authors, can be taken as a standard for contemporary university education.
It argues for the conclusion that the traditional dualisms on which the idea of the university is grounded - above all the dualisms of unity and plurality, of freedom and service, but also of the educated elite and the mass - must be properly scrutinised, and that the model of this scrutiny is to be found in the works of Schleiermacher and Hegel.