The changing role of the academic journal: The coverage of higher education in 'History of Education' as a case study, 1972 - 2011

This article briefly reviews the coverage of higher education in the pages of this journal since its inception. It reflects on the changing role of the academic journal during this period, on some of the related changes which have taken place in academia itself as well as changing fashions in the study of history of education. Its central arguments are that the ways in which the history of universities and higher education have been treated in History of Education are, at one and the same time, both a reflection of these developments and a commentary on them. It concludes with a call for new and wider approaches to the study of higher education which go well beyond the narrow institutional and national accounts which have dominated recent writing to reflect contemporary globalisation and the swiftly changing world in which we live now.