Thomas Kelly's centenary history of Liverpool University, For Advancement of Learning, was published in 1981. When hardback copies of this volume went out of print in 1988 the Officers of the University decided to commission a sequel to 1991.

In the early 1970s a writer could remark that the university had ‘been a remarkably unstudied institution until recently’ – but no longer. 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. The Open University Press/Society of Research into Higher Education imprint has been particularly prolific in this field, publishing scores of texts 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 to be an analysis of government treatment of universities in the 1980s and early 1990s – though this is obviously mentioned – 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.