What is the purpose of the university in a globalized and internationalized world? How do we talk about higher education? How is language used in higher education? An instrumentalist and technical language - of impacts outcomes, and targets - has come to pervade political and educational discourse. Apparently more reliable than ordinary language, this technical discourse seems to promise a new objectivity in which everything that we need to know can be calculated and measured. Suzy Harris argues that the kind of language we use is critical to the kind of education we have, and that the instrumentalist language dominant today is deeply damaging. She challenges these ways of thinking and argues that we need to find a different kind of language in order to think well about the purpose of higher education.