The School Harry joined in 1966 was rather different from the one he had encountered in the mid-1950s. Up to the 1963–4 academic year, the School's policy had been to cap undergraduate numbers while allowing graduate numbers to drift slowly upwards. In 1963–4, in response to the October 1963 Robbins Report on higher education, which was accepted immediately by the Macmillan government, the School proposed to increase its undergraduate numbers by 20 percent by 1967 (with half of this increase to occur in 1964–5), while letting graduate numbers increase as before. The overall effect of the 1963–4 plans would be to increase regular full-time student numbers from the 2,450 of October 1963 to about 3,000 in October 1967.

Greater student numbers meant an expanded faculty. Between 1963 and 1967 staff numbers rose more rapidly than student numbers with the result that the student–staff ratio improved from 11.1:1 to 9.7:1 (Kidd 1969, 4; Dahrendorf 1995, 429). In absolute terms, staff numbers were three-quarters larger than they had been when Harry lectured at LSE in 1955–6.

The expansion at the School was a reflection of the expansion in the university system as a whole, which had grown by 40 percent in the six years before the Robbins Report and would grow another 50 percent in the succeeding four years. The expansion was accompanied by the founding of new universities – East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Lancaster, Stirling, Sussex, Warwick, and York – and the conversion of some former colleges to universities – Bath, Bradford, Brunel, City, Loughborough, Salford, Strathclyde, and Surrey.