While the history of British higher education is not an unexplored field, this article offers a new perspective by focusing on the development of institutional self-representations. Based on the analysis of 133 undergraduate prospectuses of English and Welsh higher education institutions, the article investigates how higher education and the…

Historians have observed that the period 1860-1890 was educationally progressive. This paper identifies the renaissance with the creation of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland in the aftermath of Church Disestablishment. Disestablishment legislation facilitated the inclusion of the laity in Synod. The paper argues that the lay-clerical…

Following the end of the 1956 Revolution, a significant number of university students fled Hungary and the human capital flooding into Austria drew the attention of universities worldwide. The cold war and its influence on international student organisations and on the domestic conceptualisation of refugees in the USA contextualise this case study…

This paper discusses the development of economic higher education in Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1953, ie before the emergence of new economic universities with the same name: University of Economics (Vysoká škola ekonomická) in Prague and Bratislava. Its aim is to determine possible similarities and differences in economic education between the…

How did the undergraduate college rapidly position itself as the gateway to middle-class US employment between 1880 and 1920? This article attempts to explain one part of that process. Drawing on Weberian organisational theory, transnational intellectual history and case studies of three institutions, it identifies hierarchy as a defining aspect…

Several European countries were unable to match student numbers with labour market demand during the nineteenth century. The causes of this mismatch may be found in the organisation of higher education and the funding of students. Drawing on a variety of sources, this paper compares financial support available to Reformed and Catholic theology…

This article explores the importance of higher education to international women's organisations such as the International Federation of University Women, the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and asks how studying abroad contributed to the…

The increasing prevalence of so-called cognitive-enhancing drugs is well documented in American higher education. There has been little historical analysis, however, specifically exploring the role of postsecondary institutions in this evolving drug narrative. This paper traces substance use and research trends in American higher education over…

This paper examines the role of William Graham Brooke as advocate of women's higher education and access to university. His work as advocate is considered against the religious, political, social and economic backdrop of late nineteenth century Ireland. A barrister, as Clerk in the Lord Chancellor's office, he was centrally involved in the…

Population censuses record considerable volumes of personal information, which when aggregated and tabulated provide significant insights into national societies. South African censuses have recorded levels of educational attainment since their inception in the mid-nineteenth century, initially measuring literacy and later the level of education…

This article seeks to compare the characteristics of the academic profession as described historically by Perkin in 1969 against the definitions of a profession derived from the published views of sociologists and others. It then measures the position of the academic community today against these definitions: a common range of professional tasks…

This article brings together six talented women historians in twentieth-century England whose scholarly productions helped shape modern historical practice but who are little known in the canonical accounts of history-writing in the period. The author is looking to map and describe historical communities from a grounded and qualitative perspective…

Using the case of the Hong Kong Polytechnic (HKP), this paper examines academic drift in colonial settings. The HKP, like polytechnics in the UK, was supposedly a service sector institution. Under the binary system in the UK, schools in the service division were governed by the state educational bureaucracy, while the universities--the autonomous…

This article considers the effects on universities of Gutenberg's invention of printing. It considers four major effects: the gradual displacement of Latin as the language of scholarship with vernacular languages, the expansion and eventual opening of libraries, major changes to curriculum, and major changes to pedagogy including lectures.…

Historians have often recognised important links between the processes of university and civil service reform in mid-nineteenth-century England. Yet such connections are usually seen as forming part of a wider project of modernising reform with any conservative or counter-revolutionary aims largely discounted. However, as this article suggests,…