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This book is dedicated to the problems faced by universities. The author frequently refers to those events from the past that resulted in universities becoming institutions of public benefit. This benefit is of course understood in various ways, but in ways always involving the institutions´ function of serving. What is debatable is whom and what they were and are meant to serve, and how they can and how they should fulfil these functions. Although such questions are global in character, the answers to them can be both global and local, meaning that they may relate to both the most general tasks of universities and to those that might be or are to some degree only performed by institutions of a particular type.

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Zbigniew Drozdowicz is the head of the Chair of Religious and Comparative Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan

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