It was in the mid seventeenth century that Cardinal John Henry Newman (1858), in his foundational text ‘‘The Idea of a University,’’ first clearly articulated the purpose of the University as being about the pursuit of learning. The emphasis was specifically on learning associated with a liberal education based on the tenet that knowledge is valuable in its own right. Nevertheless, this original invocation of the University has been contested longer than is commonly recognized. It was Michael Oakeshott (1950/1989) who most openly predicted the demise of the so-called ‘‘Enlightenment’’ university and the threat to scholarship posed by ‘‘the emerging corporate mission of industrialscale research’’ (Rolfe, 2012, p. 733). Since the 1980s, debates around the corporatization of public institutions have intensified in response to what has been termed the ‘‘McDonaldization’’ of higher education. This concept, developed most fully by the sociologist George Ritzer (1993), is a now familiar backdrop to most scholarly debates around the standardisation and cost effectiveness of knowledge production, and indeed the purpose of research within the McVersity. The market-oriented approach to knowledge development, the new knowledge economy, and the increasing rhetoric around the economic significance of knowledge produced through research and university education raises interesting challenges around the fusing of commerce with science, and indeed the role of academics in developing and producing knowledge that is of direct benefit to society and to public life. The shift from the ideals associated with Newman’s vision of the University to those of the ‘‘entrepreneurial university’’ has been widely characterized as a move from an era of mode one knowledge production (knowledge that is disciplined-based and instigated by the researcher) to one in which mode two knowledge production (problem-based, interdisciplinary, mixed methods) prevails. While descriptors such as mode one and mode two knowledge production constitute ideal types that gloss over (as discussed above) a great deal of complexity regarding historic and contemporary processes of knowledge production, the point that mode two knowledge production has significantly gained in status since the ascendancy of neoliberalism is a legitimate one. At face value, mode two knowledge production has much in its favor. The story which is told, and which resonates with electorates, is that research conducted in universities