ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to review the history of the ‘modern’ university, concentrating on a few salient characteristics in order to provide a working baseline for changes now underway and likely to continue, with the inevitable ambiguities and surprises. The past is not an irrefutable guide to the future, but it always provides a starting point or measure. A perspective is needed because present rates of change are breathtaking (and contradictory) compared to the adjustments and innovations of the nineteenth century, when the university-and higher education systems-as we under-stand them took shape. The totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century demonstrated the speed with which central governments could transform, indeed destroy, institutions built up slowly over the centuries, although Napoleon at the end of the eighteenth century was the first to demonstrate this aspect of tyranny.