This article will chart the history of the university in Britain as a site of border control. It will then describe the future of the university via narrative and dystopian sci-fi. Before numerous independence declarations, the borders of Britain's Empire were vast and fluid. The British Nationality Act of 1948 afforded hundreds of millions of subjects the right to live and work in the UK without a visa. Subsequent immigration acts (1968 and 1972) restricted access and eliminated the distinction between Commonwealth and non-Commonwealth citizens. The "studia generalia" of twelfth-century Europe was characterized by nomadic scholars who would travel extensively to form ad hoc communities around scholars and locations. Thus the Eurocentric tradition of university education is mobile across borders. The "international student" is a modern phenomenon. There is a history of state spying, recruitment and surveillance in universities. But the co-option of the university as a disciplinary apparatus of state border control occurred after mass migration. The university has morphed into a soft border. Thomas Docherty, in "For the University: Democracy and the Future of the Institution" (2011), suggests that the Conservative Government under Thatcher created a culture of mistrust in the academy in order to justify spending cuts and increase government control. The soft border has advanced into our classrooms; academics enact border control by taking attendance registers linked to T4 visa enforcement. The surveillance of student's speech, writing and thought is prescribed by "Prevent" legislation. The article will conclude by looking at futurist narrative accounts of the university as a disciplinary agent of state control, such as Roberto Bolaño's "2666," in which the university and the police force are unified. The article will outline the historical specificity of the British case, but the theoretical and literary analysis will involve comparative work, particularly in Britain's former settler colonies.