Whatever their relative importance or determining priority, globalisation and virtualisation may be seen as just two constructed dimensions of a raft of interrelated changes taking place in contemporary culture. Those changes are both impacting on and expressed in higher education systems and universities throughout the world. The ways in which, and the extent to which, they are so may be articulated and evaluated from various perspectives. An ethical perspective is used in this paper. This is done by firstly and briefly outlining constructs that are commonly used in describing the cultural context of change to which public universities are responding and the sorts of changes that are evidenced in the university sector in response to that context. A construction of ethics congruent with that context is then introduced and used to shed some light on the ethical impact of the changes noted. This work is essentially analytical, critical and speculative, in the tradition of contemporary social philosophy. It is grounded in scholarship of a like kind, particularly that which focuses on the ethics and epistemology of contemporary cultural change and its impact on and implications for the nature of post-compulsory education.