A retiring US university president in the 1960s was asked how he had managed to remain so universally popular. He is said to have replied, "I make a point of never discussing sports with alumni, sex with students, or parking with faculty."

How well would this serve here and now? With all due respect to our hockey team, I don't think our alumni pay much attention. And we have learned not to talk about sex with anyone. As for parking spaces, in London there is nothing to discuss, although I suspect that elsewhere parking rights remain a key condition of service. And it is a field ripe for devious managerial games. It must be hard to interest the union in the fact that one has been reassigned from the front quad to the top of the multistorey.

A university president needs to be able to tiptoe through minefields. What about those in other roles? We advertised a job in which the post-holder would sooner or later have to take on the role of head of department. A referee wrote of a candidate, "If given a task, he would do it cheerfully and efficiently. But he is not the type to spot a significant omission." That's what you have to do as a university manager: listen out for the dog that didn't bark.

Missing dogs and parking spaces aside, what is it that makes a career in a university a success or failure? Appraisal and promotion these days focus on several factors. The most obvious, one might think, is teaching. Peculiarly, though, until fairly recently it hasn't played much of a role at all, and even now features less prominently than research. Research quality is relatively easy to calibrate. Every field has its top journals, publishers and honours. Citation counts can show how influential someone's work has become.

But how can a promotion committee judge whether someone's teaching is of a high standard? We can tell whether it is popular, we can tell whether it is "innovative". But it is harder to tell whether it is any good.

In addition to teaching and research, a well-rounded academic today is required to fill in a number of other boxes on the web form. One is what in the US is typically called "service", a term dripping with connotations of drudgery and duty, somewhere between "domestic service" and "voluntary service".

In the UK it is generally called "administration", a term that puts me in mind of a moustachioed middle manager in the East India Company, with ledger, wing collar and quill pen, issuing muddled instructions that are out of date even before they are dispatched to the colonies. Being head of department, admissions tutor, or chair of the exam board are all examples, and everyone must take their turn – albeit to varying degrees of effectiveness.

The final category is a recent innovation, by which I mean that it has crept in over the last 20 years. It goes by various names: knowledge transfer, knowledge exchange, public engagement or impact. Specialists will shudder at my ignorance in lumping all of these together. To transfer knowledge is to take your research and apply it outside an academic context. Knowledge exchange is a less imperialistic version of the same thing, recognising that one might actually learn something oneself in the process. Public engagement can be roughly the same thing yet again, but perhaps with other people's research rather than your own. As for "impact", it seems to be whatever the research councils have decided it is this month.

This final category, however, reflects a quiet revolution in the way in which universities conceive of themselves and their contribution. Not so long ago, if you were a school governor, or edited a community newsletter, you kept quiet about it. Either it was regarded as entirely your own affair or, even worse, a distraction from the real business of research and teaching. Now it is public engagement. We seek it out, promote you for it, and crow about it on the university's website. Cynics might think that it is the invention of web pages, and the need to fill them with something, that has made the difference. Or that it is encouraged only because universities are continually under pressure to demonstrate their "relevance". But whatever the explanation, it is encouraging that a successful university career is now somewhat closer to a successful life than it once was.

• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London and dean of arts and humanities