Until comparatively recently, universities were remarkably unstudied institutions. Now quite the opposite is true. Indeed, there has been what can only be described as an outpouring of books on higher education during the last 13 years, with publications on the key issues of the moment relating to philosophy, policy and context, planning and management and teaching and learning. At the same time, single monolithic histories of universities - disdained as "celebratory" and "carefully unobjectionable history" - have gone out of fashion. This volume attempts a micro rather than a macro view. It is not intended top be an analysis of government treatment of universities in the 1980s and early 1990s - though this is obviously considered - but seeks to give some idea of how one institution, a large civic university, responded to all the new policies and demands of a hostile government and to a changing environment over that period. The reactions of management, from the Vice-Chancellor downwards, are matched with those of academic and support staff, to give an idea of what the experience was like at the individual level. To date, this approach - a case study of a university at a time of great challenge and change - does not appear to have been used for any other institution. Only Walford's study of Aston University comes near it. This is not, therefore, a celebratory history; it does not attempt to chronicle every department and every important event. It is however, by now actually a history, so great have been further changes since 1991 when the account ends. Obviously, the closeness of events dictates that some matters must wait for full treatment for the next historian of the University, but the narrative has been written as critically possible for a study of the recent past. Although a historical study of a single institution, this book will nevertheless be of great interest to those concerned with the momentous changes wrought to the higher education system of Britain since the early 1980s and to those who experienced such changes in other institutions.