This paper reviews two main historical approaches to creativity: the Romanticist approach, based on the culture of the irrational, and the Enlightenment approach, based on the culture of the objective. It defends a paradigm of creativity as a sum of rich semiotic systems that form the basis of distributed knowledge and learning, reviews historical ideas of the university, and identifies two conflicting mainstream models in regards to understanding of the university as a public good: the 'Public' University circa 1960-1980, and the 'post-historical' university. Based on practical experiences, and on previous works by Peters and Jandric, it develops the new model of 'the creative university as digital public university,' and argues that it provides a useful philosophical goal for directing present and future practices of the contemporary university.