Given my background in philosophy, I suppose it's inevitable that I try to conceive the university as a materialization of the Socrates found in Plato's story about joint inquiry and free conversation.
But Plato himself abandoned Socrates' quest to talk to people in the public agora. In founding the Academy, Plato withdrew to a privileged, protected location.
The Academy then talked to itself, and on occasion sent out experts to act as consultants to local governments.
Today those consultants talk more to the corporations. Though if Plato had had his way, governments themselves would have been something like the corporate feudalism we may end up with.