The paper is a reflection on the pasts and futures of quality assurance in higher education. It poses questions about the correlation between the geographical and political spread of quality assurance on the one hand and the resulting educational benefits on the other; about the divergences between critics and practitioners on the likely impacts of quality assurance; about centres and peripheries in quality assurance and the power of "good practice" templates from the former over the latter; and about the possibilities for connecting quality assurance to broader social purposes beyond economic and consumerist notions of accountability. It concludes by raising the possibility that current versions of quality assurance may well cede ground to more metricated evaluation instruments as the economic and reputational "wars" in higher education intensify and the added dangers that this would pose to any quality assurance interest in strengthening reflexity in the academic project. (Contains 3 notes.)