‘Things change but names remain the same’: Higher Education Historiography 1975–2000

Abstract

This is an analytical survey of the history of higher education – primarily but not exclusively in England – as written in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It examines the history of liberal education, of the rewriting of the history of Oxford and Cambridge, and of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century institutions. It addresses new methodologies and data, and the search for more comprehensive and less parochial and antiquarian approaches to the history of institutions. It examines how accounts of new sectors of higher education and national agencies relate to social hierarchies and developments. It includes discussion of the contribution of non‐historians to the history of higher education. It concludes that historical writing has firm roots in historians’ contemporary environment. Bibliographical sources are suggested, and the references themselves constitute a bibliography of the historiography of the period.

Notes

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