Historical Analysis of Higher Education

Across the spectrum of historical research, study of the history of education, and of higher education in particular, is under-represented compared with, say, political history or military history, or even with other branches of economic and social history. In the field of education, issues of policy, pedagogy, and management tend to dominate professional practice and published literature, a trend accelerated as an awareness of the history of [Page 762]education and higher education is increasingly seen as unimportant for training new teachers and lecturers.

A further difficulty in the literature on higher education, especially for research going back many decades, is the preponderance of vertical history, the study of the development of single institutions over long periods of time. Such work is often of interest but tends ...