The Creation of a University System

This book traces the development of British higher education from a small and highly diversified group of universities in the mid 1940s to the structured university system catering for mass higher education in the mid 1990s. It illustrates the main forces for change, and the inhibitions to progress through the critical writings of leading scholars and university figures, both British and American.

These writings are drawn from the Universities Quarterly/Higher Education Quarterly which is celebrating its Fiftieth Anniversary as the oldest higher education journal in the world. The articles, selected across the whole fifty years of the Quarterly, are introduced by a synoptic chapter by the Editor, which sets them in their historical context and describes the policy issues which lie behind them. The proposal for the Robbins Committee on Higher Education was made in the Quarterly and its then Editor moved the successful motion to establish the Committee in the House of Lords. This book describes the development of the size, shape and structure of the British university system over fifty years and as such represents an essential contribution to the Dearing Review of the future of higher education over the next twenty.