Does the university need to justify itself? To whom?

In light of government cuts in education funding across the nation, here's an article Stanley Fish wrote for the the Chronicle of Higher Education a little while back.

In brief, he claims that academics have put themselves in a weak rhetorical position by constantly groveling before an ignorant public and hostile politicans. When academics attempt to "justify" their work to these groups, they are inevitably forced into a) dumbing down their research to the point of making it seem obvious, or b) expressing their work in the language of a market economics by whose standards it will inevitably fail.

His response is to fight back.