The end of history? The British university experience, 1981–1992

Abstract

The article identifies a crisis of contraction in university history in Britain in the first half of the 1980s, caused by changing trends in government policy and in student demand. By the early 1990s both forms of pressure had eased, and the discipline was experiencing an underfunded expansion that called into question established patterns of research and teaching. Consideration is given to the transition of the later 1980s and to the question of how far the quality of output from history at the universities depends on the quantity of resources channelled into it.