The Landscape of Higher Education Research 1965-2015 Equality of Opportunity: The first fifty years

Colleagues it is a pleasure to speak with you today. Fifty years. Much happened in 1965. Lyndon Johnson proclaimed the Great Society in his State of the Union address in January. Martin Luther King marched in Selma, and then Montgomery. Malcolm X was assassinated. The first American ground troops arrived in Vietnam. The first Students for a Democratic Society demonstration against the war drew 25,000 people in Washington. Bob Dylan released Bringing it All Back Home in March and then Highway 61 Revisited in August. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was the first person to walk in space. Japan and South Korea signed an overdue treaty. Sony and Cher released I Got You Babe, which went to number one all over the world, but Singapore became independent from Malaysia. There was war between India and Pakistan. Suharto crushed the Communist Party in Indonesia with the loss of a million lives. The white government in Rhodesia declared unilateral independence, and the British oil platform Sea Gem collapsed into the North Sea, but Julie Andrews won the Academy Award for the lead in Mary Poppins. In 1965 the Social Science Research Council, later the ESRC, was formed. And SRHE also began, five years after the Master Plan in California in the United States, and two years after the Robbins Report, amid a great expansion of higher education in Britain. Fifty years. Today I will not attempt to cover the whole field of research into higher education in our time, but to reflect on the main idea that was shaping higher education when SRHE was founded, an idea that still determines expectations about higher education, and continues to provide the discursive framework for much of our research—the utopian idea of society ordered as an educational meritocracy. I will discuss the two faces of the 1960s meritocratic ideal: higher education as human capital, as economic progress, and higher education as equality of opportunity, as social justice. These are the founding myths of modern higher education systems. They have proven to be resilient myths, and have travelled all over the world. In their different ways, each