Description:
This thought-provoking book addresses the persistent anxieties surrounding the purpose and direction of higher education, offering a nuanced historical perspective on its transformation. Using Cold War Britain as a lens, the book challenges the prevailing narrative that marketisation was an external imposition.
Review Quotes:
"An excellent history of university expansion in the UK in the early post-war period. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual influences on those who led these changes and what it meant for university staff and students."
Huw Morris, IoE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UK
"Universities and the Purpose of Higher Education represents an ambitious reinterpretation of the value systems which underpinned British higher education in the post-Robbins period. It makes a significant contribution to the historiography of higher education and to our understanding of how liberal democratic values have been overtaken by an illiberal economic and market-based philosophy."
Michael Shattock, author of Making Policy in British Higher Education 1945-2011 and The Governance of British Higher Education (with Aniko Horvath)