On 14 September 1989, the Taoiseach, Charles J. Haughey unveiled a stout granite stone at the entrance to what had been up to then the National Institute for Higher Education, Limerick. The front face of the stone bears the institution's new name: 'University of Limerick' and - in significantly smaller lettering - 'Ollscoil Luimnigh'. On the reverse side, however, carved into the stone in celtic lettering, there is a curious legend: And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun. The appropriation of Mr Yeats's lines as a motto, of sorts, for the erstwhile 'Technological University' seems, at first sight, a curious blend of whimsy and incongruity: this is hardly an institution where studious youth is encouraged to dabble in dreams, 'to walk among long dappled grass' or pluck . . . anything. The spectacle of an institution dismissive of the place of the arts - as anything other than quaint heraldry - invoking Yeats's benediction for its vision of relevance and salvation-through-technology is richly ironic. It is worth locating more precisely the exact nature of this paradox. For the opposition on which it rests - between the 'relevant', narrowly defined, and the implicitly 'irrelevant' - conveniently marks the cordinates in a debate that must be joined. For from this dialectic will emerge a definition of what universities are and what they do to take us into the twenty-first century...