Higher education: a short history of change

Don Aitkin

Change' is one of the great buzzwords of the very late 20th century, and nowhere more so than in higher education. We talk about 'change' in this context as though it were something new, but it will be the message of this paper that change is an essential characteristic of the modern university. Whenever we talk about change, however, the meaning of the word changes. In 2000, the final year of the century and the millennium, the word meant 'financial contraction', or 'the threat of Internet providers' or something else disturbing. It has meant in the past growth and expansion, changes in structure, the enrolment of different kinds of students, the expansion of postgraduate work, the funding of research, and so on. It may be true that there is more talk of change today than there was in the 1960s, for example, but I'm not yet persuaded; what I am sure of is that today's changes are on the whole worrying, while those of the past were less so. Growth provides more opportunities for everyone than does contraction.

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