There has been much recent debate, both in the media and in academic journals, as to the meaning of the term university. This article explores the legal meaning of the term, and the historical contingencies which have surrounded various understandings of the term. It compares the structure of the Eleemosynary Corporation--the individual colleges in Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom, from which many of our conceptions of a "real" university arise--with the realities of the statutory university in the United Kingdom and Australia. It concludes that the term, although with a loaded legal and institutional meaning, is bereft of any inherent meaning conveying function, and that a debate on the role and independence of the university must be policy oriented but not reliant on the historical meaning of the word.