Perhaps every decade, even every year, of the twentieth century was in some important sense one of transformation for higher education, and a succession of writers described it in this or similar vocabularies of crisis, change or transition. The present study approaches some of these higher education transformations and their interpreters in England, with a time scale that begins with the opening of the twentieth century. This is not simply convenient arithmetic, since the new century demonstrated vital new developments, opportunities, directions and meanings. The particular phases and characteristics of these developments will be considered in the chapters below, but here it may help to set out briefly some of the unfolding changes in attitudes towards and ideas about the patterns of higher education that emerged.