This thought‑provoking book addresses the persistent anxieties surrounding the purpose and direction of higher education, offering a nuanced historical perspective on its transformation. Using Cold War Britain as a lens, this book challenges the prevailing narrative that marketisation was an external imposition, revealing instead how the dynamic priorities of social democratic higher education inadvertently paved the way for their own supersession.

Drawing on novel archival insights, it explores experimental initiatives by university leaders and employers and reveals how post‑war public investment in universities was justified through a dual logic: empowering young people to pursue their individual self‑interest while cultivating the ethical application of specialist knowledge in service of liberal capitalism. It goes on to show how the novel accountability frameworks they constructed, intended to maximise freedom, contained unstable tensions – tensions that remain in today’s neoliberal system. Packed full of research, case studies, and policy implications, this book interrogates the successes and failures of innovative teaching and learning practices, as well as the evolving relationship between universities and industry. Throughout, the author offers critical insights into how liberal education might be reimagined to sustain universities in their service to the common good.

When diverse students come together at the internationalised university as a result of an internationalisation strategy, the opportunities for intercultural learning, cross-cultural connections, and the promotion of world peace are endless. Informed by extensive research on student experience and identity, this book provides the expertise to develop a more linguistically just and equitable internationalised university.

Drawing on empirical evidence, global research, and personal experience, the book argues that language can no longer be ignored at the internationalised university. Instead, plurilingualism should be celebrated, with plurilingual approaches employed, and a language policy established to ensure language rights are upheld and languages are maintained. It offers a framework for conceptualising the role of language in the student experience at the internationalised university, as well as suggestions for how to manage language matters in different areas of the student experience, such as in social spaces, the classroom, and academic work and groupwork.

Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from sociology, education, and human geography to investigate the space, community, and culture at an International Branch Campus, this fascinating book provides empirical evidence to understand the implications for students’ future socio-spatial mobilities.

Drawing on ethnographic data from a British International Branch Campus in China this book offers a timely discussion about transnational higher education. It illustrates the mobility of the educational space, where mobilities and materiality converge and are mediated by transnational imaginations. Students are portrayed as ‘imaginative travellers’, who may not have been physically abroad but are imaginatively mobilised by transnational material, social and cultural flows on campus. This book demonstrates how imaginative mobility cultivates students’ cosmopolitan orientations and competence, while acknowledging how structural constraints weave unevenness into the imaginative flows that arise and respond to the socio-spatial inequalities in global education landscapes. This study also offers empirical insights into China’s approach to transnational education that informs both research and policy.