Introduction

Most of the universities which figure in this section were creations of the recent past and are still in rapid development. Some of them were certainlyestablished without much regard to their relations to other sectors of a national system of higher education: such relationships are still in the course of being worked out or are waiting to be worked out at some future time. The choice for a new university of a rural site, even if it is not far from a city of some size, offers challenges to it (cf. Orleans—la Source, Konstanz, Sapporo, Simon Fraser, Warwick). It cannot be said of most of the new universities created in England in the 1960s that their physical position made it easy for them to be part of a 'higher education neighbourhood unit’. That consideration at the time hardly entered into the reckoning.