ABSTRACT
The history of higher education in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been a continuous debate over the question what higher education is good for and what its objectives are. The institution of higher education was thus supposed to exercise power by socialising the student into a cultural norm. Though this enculturation was often believed necessary in order to ensure that the 'new students' could succeed, it was also a means to reproduce the values that legitimised the very authority of the institution of higher education and the academics. In contrast to the 'liberal' idea, in which power lay with the academic, the discipline, and the institution as these represented knowledge and culture, the social conception of higher education emphasised that power derived from the people whom higher education should serve. Within relatively short time, Britain, and in particular England, has seen a radical transformation of its higher education system.
