First – two apologies. ‘Crisis’, which appears in the title of this chapter and subtitle of the book, is an overused word. Like ‘paradigm’, invariably linked to ‘shift’, it is rolled out far too often. So perhaps some kind of explanation is necessary.

As a long-standing admirer of the French historian Fernand Braudel, my instinct has always been to emphasise the longue durée, what endures or what changes slowly and deep inside history, at the expense of histoire evènèmentielle, the rush and bustle of politics and ideology that flares so brightly but is often quickly forgotten. But, carried to extremes, the Braudelian perspective perhaps leaves no room for crises, except perhaps fundamental crises, for example of sustenance – or, more topically, climate change. My use of ‘crisis’ in this book is in an intermediate sense, somewhere between restricting the word to describe these few and fundamental crises on the one hand, and on the other indulging the promiscuous overuse of the word to describe every fleeting shift of policy or ideology. In this book it is used to denote an accumulation of tensions, even contradictions, within systems and society rather than the ebb and flow of higher education policy on funding, markets, regulation, ‘steering’ and the like. The latter are discussed, often in some detail. But the primary focus is elsewhere on a modest, and modified, version of Braudel's longue durée.

The second apology is that this book is largely focused on the United Kingdom. This UK focus is only mitigated a little by the brief codas on other higher education systems that conclude some chapters, and also a separate chapter that looks at higher education in other countries. Even that is limited, because only the United States, the rest of Europe and East Asia are covered. The British have a reputation for insularity that is well deserved. My excuse is twofold – first, a frank admission that I know the UK best (for reasons I described in the Preface) and I have no pretensions to be a scholar of comparative higher education;