The paper considers the relation between society, science and institutionally-embodied higher education reform in nineteenth-century Ireland. Institutional reform is measured in terms of governance, curriculum, access and teaching practice. Superiorisation, subversion and fusion are identified as characteristics of reformed institutions. Mobile professional elites are viewed as agents of institutional reform. The institutions examined are Trinity College, Mechanics Institutes, the Museum of Irish Industry, Royal College of Science, Queen's Colleges, Catholic University, Royal University, and the National University of Ireland. Historians of education have frequently tended to write commemorative histories of individual institutions. This writer's interest resides less in the institutions per se than in tracing their popular roots and assessing their often strained inter-relationships which qualified their progress and which was conditioned by government's imperative to manage consensus in the changing milieu within which they operated. As such the paper contributes to much-needed research into the university as 'a societal phenomenon'.