Transformations to Higher Education

Abstract

This chapter highlights three distinct periods of transformation in the function and foundation of universities across the last 200 years. First, it focuses on the last decades of the nineteenth century when the modern university came into existence; second, on the years after the Second World War when a new relationship with the state was fashioned; and, third, on the 1990s when deregulation and internationalization reshaped higher education systems. It pays particular attention to universities in the English-speaking world and especially to the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia. Although there are many other periods of change and many other geographic and linguistic contexts worthy of attention, thinking about these three moments in the context of the English-speaking world casts into relief the contours of the early twenty-first century when the so-called “American model” of a teaching and research institution is both hugely influential across the globe and also in the process of being challenged and refashioned.