Theatres and universities should stop flirting and take the plunge. Paul Allen sees no impediments to union.

Like Beatrice and Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, theatres and universities have eyed each other across their crowded communities for years; all their friends think they should get together, and they constantly tease and flirt and seek each other out in a sometimes waspish way, but each values a bachelor commitment to the freedom to be oneself too much to plunge into a full relationship.

Now the Arts Council of England's drama white paper has urged at least a new liaison. It will work only if each party can establish clearly where they have common interests and where they have none.

What theatres have learned not to assume is that having a large student population in town is likely to pay off at the box office. In an age dominated by marketing, the local theatre naturally makes sure its literature is included in fresher packs at the start of each new year. Such evidence as there is, however, suggests that students are no more likely to go to the theatre than anyone else; that if they do it more likely to be for Ben Elton's Popcorn or Irving Welsh's Trainspotting than for Shakespeare; and that they will only go for cut-price tickets.

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What universities have learned not to assume is that having a repertory theatre within walking distance of the campus (perhaps with the professor of English literature or drama on the board) will mean there can at last be a production of that Polish Expressionist author who was a visiting lecturer the year before last. In fact there is such "realistic" acceptance of these two points that it may be well worth challenging them again, or at least exploring the exceptions. More of that later. The collaboration urged by the Arts Council is in the field of training.

Chairing a discussion with a roomful of theatre managers recently I asked the question: "How many of you had higher education in a field that now seems useful to you?" Well under half the 100 or so people in the room put their hands up. This may be no more or less than average in a profession for which some of the relevant skills are intuitive, perceptive and imaginative.

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It was also abundantly clear that many of the managers were suspicious of such training as exists and of the people who do it. There is a feeling in theatre management that anybody who really knows how to do it will not simply be trying to teach it.

More important than these somewhat macho initial responses was the anger felt at the lack of training and the realisation that in this country we still have no real career structure for arts managers, nor are we producing the equivalents of the influential German theatre and opera intendants, men and women with artistic sensibility and training combined with a full education in the skills of arts management.

Let us get two points out of the way. Nobody is suggesting that such training does not exist in universities. City University in London is one that teaches arts administration and policy. Nor do we expect universities to abandon the principles of broad education in favour of turning out suited clones who can make our troubled theatres function.

But I do believe a civilised society should produce better-educated theatre workers of all kinds in greater numbers. I find it extraordinary that our oldest universities, which over the last century have produced (from the pick of the intake) some of our most gifted actors, designers, writers, directors and managers, should have so little formal connection with practising professional theatre and therefore have sent out these luminaries with so little understanding of the practical needs of the art form. Is that one reason why so many theatres are floundering now?

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The old-style links between theatres and universities are waning. With the exception of Warwick Arts Centre, few universities are able to subsidise theatres as an essential part of campus life any more. From Oxford to Manchester, universities cut back on paying for buildings which only tangentially serve their interests.

But in Leeds something of the same sort of excitement is in the air as when John Neville was at Nottingham in the 1960s. West Yorkshire Playhouse's artistic director, Jude Kelly, has been instrumental in setting up an MA in performing arts, administered by the University of Leeds. It also gives students access to Opera North and the Henry Moore Institute.

Jude Kelly argues forcibly for the theatre's role in generating social cohesion and in fostering the creativity and imagination through which a culture recreates itself, not least economically. How much of the hi-tech industry has been driven forward by musicians, she asks. And after years in which arts organisations have been told to be more businesslike, the Leeds Business School is also pointing out the importance to business executives of interdependence, intuition and creativity.

This, it seems to me, is not only about a better-educated theatre profession but a better-educated society. Amid the clamour for lessons in "citizenship" it is worth remembering that from the Greeks onwards theatre has offered lessons in civilisation, the practice of humanity. Theatre, it is true, acts principally on the psyche whereas academe works at the mind. But universities which have long seen the virtue in marrying mind and sporting body could usefully work at a similar marriage for mind and spirit. Beatrice and Benedict married in the end.

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Paul Allen is visiting professor of drama at the University of Sheffield.