In 1963, in the UK, a government-appointed Committee on Higher Education (chaired by Lord Robbins) produced its Report, Higher Education. A generation later, a corresponding exercise was undertaken in the UK, through a National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, chaired by Sir Ron Dearing. Its Report, Higher Education in the Learning Society, was published in 1997. The two reports share many features, addressing largely similar matters, having overlapping concerns and placing their analyses in an international context. Access, participation, curricula, teaching, standards and academic freedom are just some of the issues that both reports tackle. However, in their envisaged positioning of higher education, their discourse and their vision, discontinuities can be detected between the two reports. The Robbins Report can be understood as an internal report of an academic community, assured of itself and of higher education as an existing social and educational good. Its audience was the wider society and the polity: it was a document arguing for an expansion of the sector on its own terms. The Dearing Report, in contrast, can be understood as an external document of the wider society and the polity. It attempted to draw together the interests of multiple stakeholders and, with higher education as its major audience, sought to reposition higher education such that it became a force for continuing economic regeneration. Robbins is the internal voice of a rural village, that of higher education itself. Dearing is an external set of voices telling a story especially of an emerging urban village of the global economy.