ABSTRACT
The purpose of Robbins' report was to design a modern system of higher education to fit a modern society the development of which could almost be taken for granted. In 1963 it was possible to look forward with both assurance and accuracy across the coming generation because the ground on which one stood seemed solid and the future direction of British society benign and predictable. The self-consciousness of modern society and its assessment of the possibilities of change are the invisible but powerful products of the intellectual values favoured within higher education. There is and should be no way in which higher education can compartmentalise its 'public' relationship with lay society from its 'private' mission in teaching and research. Both modern society and higher education are struggling in ways that are incestuously linked and with equally indifferent success to establish a meta-language that is more than technical and administrative and which can impose a moral structure on their exploding experiences.
