Open and unencumbered dialogue is the original position of the modern university-ideal, encompassing both its administrative and educational functions, outstripping even its important reliance upon research in laboratories or solitary writing and contemplative inquiry. This is an idea first intimated in Plato's "Symposium" and later made central to Schleiermacher's draft of a plan for the University of Berlin. Recent inquiries into the many myths of the modern university have lessened the claims on behalf of illustrious figures, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, for having founded the modern university--a superhuman feat he would himself have disavowed; but the autonomous ideal of Humboldt's colleague, Friedrich Schleiermacher, in which special emphasis is given to "authentic dialogue," "seminars" and "conversatoria" and which he modeled after the unofficial, salon-culture of Berlin, where colloquial spaces were hosted at regular intervals in the houses of leading Jewish women for the sole purpose of sustaining cross-cultural dialogue, appears to have been an underappreciated influence. The paper argues that the notion of the university as a free space of open discussion, devoted to testing truth-claims and hazarding new ideas, is perennially relevant, and potentially transversal for knowledge, inquiry, and reigning systems of social arrangement. It remains the soul of the university, much in the way salon-culture remains the soul of the coffee-house. (Contains 29 footnotes.)