A college community—faculty, and their disciples, the students—is a cohesive group, sharing to remarkable degree a common cultural life, similar educational backgrounds, and even fairly similar political views. If this community were to govern the college exclusively (as was true at Oxford and Cambridge for several centuries), the college sooner or later would become “academic” in some undesirable senses—precious, narrow, removed from unpleasant realities, and downright lazy. The trustees are men of affairs, and bring to the college decisions an element of the virility and realism of the non-college world.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 117