ABSTRACT
According to Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson, students were a rather "contented lot" at the beginning of the twentieth century. While in earlier years, student activism had concentrated on areas outside of higher education, students now increasingly took issue with the nature and purpose of higher education. Brian Simon, who had been National Union of Students (NUS) president in 1939/40, began A Student's View of the Universities as an official project sponsored by and written on behalf of the NUS. Due to the outbreak of the war, the project was abandoned, and Simon published the book as a personal statement on the current situation and future development of higher education. One of the central issues of the 1940s and 1950s was the expansion of higher education and the supposedly rising number of students from a lower-middle and working-class background. This was also of concern to Simon.
