Much has been written about higher education but very little about the organisations of the state which increasingly determine its destiny. Employing the theory of educational change developed in the authors' previous work, this book analyses the contribution each part of the state structure has made to the present condition of higher education. Beginning with the political parties and parliamentary committees, it shows how there has been a steady decline in support for the traditional values of autonomous university education and a growing belief in the accountability of higher education to the needs of the economy. It then proceeds to show how this ideological change was fostered by the DES and used to justify the development of bureaucratic mechanisms of management and control.

Authored by Salter, Dr Brian; Salter, Brian; Tapper, Ted

NATFHE Journal - "an exhaustively researched and elegantly written, non-partisan account of the history of the relationship between the state and higher education which will doubtless become seminal in the field."
Journal of Educational Administration and History- "This is a substantial study of the way in which the central government has steadily built up a system of close control over all major - and many minor - aspects of the affairs of individual universities...It is the most extensive work in this field since the publication in 1939 of R.D. Berdahl"s classic, British Universities and the State.