ABSTRACT
Across the world, a more or less common policy framework has emerged for universities built around research, the global knowledge economy, access, excellence and societal impact. The large number of underpinning forces that are more or less global in character help to explain the near ubiquity of the ten-fold policy framework just listed. This framework has come to constitute a lingua franca of meetings and interactions within higher education policy circles, both nationally and internationally. Antagonism in the university is not to be denied, repudiated or neglected. As it is, variously the state, the corporate sector or, more nebulously, the global economy and neo-liberalism are conspiring to rob the university of its internal integrity. At the moment, policy-making is freezing universities imaginations; in the future, policy-making has the challenge of stimulating that institutional imagination. This policy myopia pretends to a unity that neither does nor should characterise the university in the twenty-first century.
