As Valentine Cunningham stands shivering in the harsh winds blowing through academia, what exactly fires his resolve to stick to his calling?

When thousands of higher education teachers take to the streets, accompanied by their support staff, the cleaners, caterers, librarians, computer people and porters, you can be sure something is up. We are docile people who do not rouse easily, professionally scrupulous men and women, high-principled moralists, in fact, who can only be got to down tools on days when there are no final exams or PhD vivas to be wrecked and who take care when they do strike that essential course work is not really interfered with. But if you prick us long enough even we will bleed. And universities are, to be sure, wounded and bleeding, and if nothing is done to staunch the flow they will surely haemorrhage to death.

This country's university system is clearly in a bad way. Underfunded, trimmed too far, cut even to the bone, its good teachers lured into early retirements, its libraries short of books, its students waiting in line for their two hours' read of a text, its seminar rooms crammed and shoddy, its teaching and research degradingly dependent on the short-term-contract researcher and the temporary lecturer, its financial planning of the begging-bowl kind, its student:staff ratios worsening, its new teachers denied tenure, all of its teachers bullied and hectored by politicians and generally messed about on a daily basis by government quangos whose function is to make your flesh creep, keep you jittery, and have you filling in silly and insulting forms the livelong day. "Stand and Deliver Your Mission Statement: Now Or Else." "What gave you (a) most (b) any (c) least pleasure last year?" And of course our paymasters do not want to hear that it was the pay-slip that irked most. But it is our wages that are added, month by month, to the roster of injuries. One and a half per cent after years of salary erosion: it is enough to make a dog laugh. It is what has made the worm finally turn.

Even in Oxford, lovely cushioned Oxford - with our supplementary housing allowances and assorted financial extras, our free meals at common tables (bless those monks, I say, for setting down an ideal of scholarly commensality), with our regular sabbaticals, our multitudinous library system, our schemes for liberating tutors from certain teaching hours and the salary top-ups to induce distinguished overseas scholars to apply for our posts - even in Oxford the pressures are great. New appointees find it hard to afford accommodation anywhere near the university. I cannot be alone in finding it tough to keep children at university, or to raise the wind for the couple of thousand quid or so I seem to need to spend every year on books and similar scholarly kit. And if conditions are palpably worsening at Oxford, and the ill wind is felt even if you are on an Oxford stipend, how much greater the pressures in less ameliorated places.

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It has long been unamusing to contemplate the salaries larger than those of their teachers that are paid to lawyers, medics, civil servants, industrial researchers, managers, and all the rest not long after graduation. And it is getting noticeably more difficult to recruit good lawyers and medics, economists and scientists to teach in universities at the going rates, even at the topped-up rates of the most prestigious institutions. Why should anyone be a masochist, financially speaking?

We in Britain have not yet, it must be said, quite reached the third-world necessities of, say, Romania, where every university lecturer I know has either to have some private income or do two whole jobs because the university wage is so slight. But we are getting there. A kind of moonlighting has even been quite traditional for university staff. Many of us have grown used to beefing up our salaries with consultancies, overseas earnings, sabbatical salaries, outside contract work, A-level examining, summer schools, reviewing, broadcasting, and all that.

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I do such things myself, and one excuse is that I have managed to get my so-called research to feed as much off the kind of reading I have done for evening classes and summer schools and reviews and such like as it does off the subjects of my regular undergraduate and graduate teaching. And I have no doubt my scientific and economic and legal colleagues find similar intimate contacts between their outside and inside activities. Like some of mine, some of their books make money. But supplementary earnings should be supplementary, not, as I increasingly find them, a sine qua non of financial swimming.

In terms of basic university wages, we are certainly getting closer, I perceive, to what we might dub the Church of England scheme for institutional survival, the situation normal in Turkey, where it has long been assumed that a university system will rely on subsidy by the earnings of its staff's partners. There serious breadwinning is not being done by the professor of literature but by her husband the industrialist; just as it is not the vicar who keeps the family afloat but his wife the doctor or teacher. And, I fear, Britain and her universities are next.

In fact, we are visibly sliding back to an accepted medieval frame of thought and practice in which the university teacher is to be a poor scholar, almost a mendicant, a poor parson character of the sort Chaucer so admired. "Passing rich", it might be, as Goldsmith describes his schoolmaster, but in the treasure of heaven not the pelf of earth. We are, for that matter, drifting back to the recent bad old days of comparatively sorry university salaries in the middle years of this century, when in Oxford, for instance, they used to arrange for people to examine in finals for a few years before retirement so the extra fees would set them up with a little pot of cash for the even bleaker years ahead. Then as now, of course, people would look with envy, not only at the great public respect the German professoriate got from its civil service status, but at the hefty pension arrangements that went with it.

So it is Lucky Jim, my old pupil in Whitehall or at the Bar, how I envy him, is it? And Lucky Jurgen and Gustav and Manfred, my German colleagues, how I envy them? Well, in fact, not absolutely. Or only up to a point, Lord Copper.

For there is indeed more than just a kind of financial masochism involved in being a university teacher, certainly, I believe, in my own case as a teacher of literature and language. Because though this is to belong to a group increasingly deprived in money terms, to a bunch of poor persons along modernised poor parson lines, it is also to belong to a highly privileged group in non-material terms, a commonwealth akin to what Coleridge envisaged as a clerisy, whose activity is utterly vital to the well-being of the community. We are precisely the intellectuals upon whom the mental and indeed spiritual life of the community greatly depends. In our hands rests in massive part the life of the mind, the nation's image repertoire, the very Imaginaire of our culture. Without persons like me, the historians and philosophers, the art historians and critics, the geographers and sociologists and economists, all the varied gaggle of thinkers who people our faculties, the intellectual life of the nation ceases to be as rich as it is. In fact, it ceases to be.

Imagine the busy critical discourses of television and radio and the newspapers and journals, the world of books and film, of theatre, of art gallery and concert hall without the culture of the university, which pumps in the ideas and the personnel. Crucially, too, the university provides an essential haven or home for cultural workers. I know very well what life would be like for the likes of me outside of an English faculty.

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Out there, for the freelance critic, the man-of-letters, the writer, the private scholar, things can be nasty, brutish and a dire treadmill: G. K. Chesterton's table piled high with review copies to be got through by morning; Edward Thomas digging holes in the garden in which to bury the loathsome but necessary review copies; John Betjeman being ripped off by Sanders the bookseller in Oxford's High Street ("A fiver, John?") when he brings in his van load of review books for sale. The poet and critic Roy Fuller was quite horrified, when he retired from the Woolwich with the idea of lucrative returns from freelance writing, to discover just how many pieces you needed to turn out to make a decent stash. Which is why novelists and poets queue in droves for university creative writing posts and painters crave those artists' fellowships. If the wind blows harsh in the quad, it blows even harsher for cultural types in the street.

Not dissimilarly, it is hard to conceive of the needful progress of knowledge without the home for research which universities provide. Multi pertransibunt et multiplex erit scientia is the proud boast on the stairs of Oxford's Bodleian Library: many will pass through here and so knowledge will be multiplied. Universities are in the Wissenschaft business, and ill-rewarded though it might be, many of us still feel that this is a high project and calling that is worth the meagre candle.

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Of course, scientific inventions, medical cures, economical models, philosophical perceptions, historical data and literary knowledge are achieved outside of universities, in industrial labs, by people on their own in the British Museum or in their own garden shed. But the undoubted big scene for discovery is the university. So that what happens every day in schools and hospitals, in law courts and on tennis courts, in factories and gyms, up ladders, on bridges, in that aeroplane, and so on and on, would be inconceivably different without that old guy heading for the campus bookshop in the broken shoes, or that young one pedalling in his nasty anorak to the chemistry lab, that woman over there in her unfashionable haircut and old car, or that other person setting off once more for a holiday in some cheapo locale.

They have obviously put the calling of scientia before the attractions of cash, risking the sneers of the Thatcherite loadsamoney throng, the contempt of the worldly because they have waived our culture's invitation to put possession of the outward material signs of success before their vocation, the great task of searching out the nature of things.

Obviously the choices ought not to be polarised like this - pursue knowledge or pursue wealth - but so they are. And pompous though it undoubtedly sounds, because all invoking of the nobility of vocations risks pomposity, it is clear to me that it is not just the world that is the better for the choice our Wissenschaftler have made. It is, I cannot help thinking, and to quote Shakespeare's Antony, the nobleness of life to do thus. And even if most of us scientia people are not likely to add much more than the proverbial widow's mite to the sums of new human knowledge, there is the question of teaching. Teaching, it can be argued, is the summit of the academic calling. It is, granted, not unusual in some bits of my profession to deride the late F. R. Leavis and his idea of the English School as central to the university and so to the educated life and mind of the nation.

But something of that profound Leavisian vision - the idea that regular, vigorous, intense, thoughtful exposure to and engagement with the texts of the past and the present such as is to be found promoted in the literary seminar, is an induction into, an agent of, a necessary precursor to, a life of democratic responsibility and seriousness, of moral integrity, of civilised and human being - still fires, I suspect, most of my colleagues in English studies and, mutatis mutandis, my colleagues in other academic disciplines as well.

I certainly stand by the Leavisian missionariness. It is why I write and lecture and talk about books, with my pupils in my tutorials and seminars, to students at large in Oxford and elsewhere, as well as in the other areas and forums that being a university teacher of literature helps me to enter. It is a main reason why I went into university teaching in the first place. It is why, enthused with the allied case of R. H. Tawney and others like for him for an educated populace, I spent 20-odd years conducting evening classes in literature (for worse pay, by the way, than almost any other). If I thought something like what Leavis stood for were not more or less the case I would want to pack it all in right away. I am sorry - of course I am sorry - that the financial spoils are not greater. But as the good Lord said, life is more than meat, and the body than raiment. And, we academics might add, so are the cultivation of ideas, the promotion of knowledge, the preservation of tradition, and the effort to create an educated, cultured, historically sensitive, critically alert and morally scrupulous population.

Valentine Cunningham is a professor of English at Oxford, where he is fellow in modern English at Corpus Christi College. He is also a permanent visiting professor at the University of Konstantz, Germany.

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