I was born in the United Kingdom (UK), studied at Exeter, Cambridge and Essex universities and lectured at Essex before moving to the Netherlands in 1975 where I was involved with the universities of Amsterdam, Utrecht and then Nyenrode (1977– 93) and later as a guest lecturer with several other Dutch – and Belgian – universities. I have visited many universities in the UK and North America for diverse purposes and taught a semester at the State University of New York at Albany. After early retirement I became attached as Visiting Professor – currently Senior Visiting Fellow – to the London School of Economics and also for a period at King’s College London. These were honorary positions but you could take part in the academic community and do some occasional teaching. In general I was fortunate to work, or be involved with, sound universities and with supportive colleagues as well as with a high measure of freedom to pursue my own interests and publications. In recent decades, however, there have been some deleterious developments in higher education in the UK – and to an extent also in the United States (US) and the Netherlands – which have had a negative impact on the structure and culture of academia (Fleming, 2021). I am fully aware of that but here I draw on the ideal typical version of the university as a backcloth to some serious deviance within it and as a model to be striven for by all who are concerned about the future of higher education (Brink, 2018).

My work has largely been focused on three societies – the US, the UK and the Netherlands – which vary in many ways including socially, politically, educationally and regarding criminal justice. However, most social scientists are primarily focused on their own society and in the US academia and publishing are, with some exceptions, rather parochial. Then British comparative work in my areas is primarily in former colonial and English-speaking societies although that is changing with the increasing number of students and staff from a wider range of cultures. There has been, however, a lack of attention to other foreign criminal justice and educational systems and to the diversity of structure, culture and practice in other societies.