In trying to understand the current rapid and enormous expansion of higher education in the United Kingdom (as in many other places), it is valuable to reflect on what happened in the last period when universities were being transformed—the 1960s. This book tells the story of one of the new institutions that emerged then, Strathclyde University in Glasgow, which grew from the merger of the Royal College of Science and Technology and the Scottish College of Commerce. The students who passed through the UK universities of that decade became the intellectual, political, and cultural leaders: “the new students of the 1960s and early 1970s were the architects of our modern world, whether in the sciences and engineering, or in the humanities and social sciences” (178).

The story is told here mainly through oral history testimony, interviews with eight women and forty men who were staff or students in these institutions between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s. The work is a model of scholarship, elegantly written, with an impressive awareness of wider movements of culture, society, and politics. It is well-illustrated with photographs and other reproductions from the university's archives. So, apart from anything else, it is first of all a good read, reflecting well the enthusiasm and idiosyncrasies of its interlocutors.

Five themes emerge to run through the account, linking the already changing colleges of the 1950s to the new institution that is now one of the largest universities in Scotland. The first and clearest is the perpetual dialogue with the city of Glasgow that gave all three organizations their rationale. Glasgow University having moved west in 1870 to the thoroughly middle-class milieu in which it still stands, the Royal College and the College of Commerce became the educational focal points of the center and east of the city. This mattered not only because they were easily accessible, being near to the main railway stations, but also for symbolic reasons: the Royal College site, which became the Strathclyde University campus, is so integral to the city center that it helps to define its eastern gateway, all the more emphatic now that the factories that used to lie beyond it have vanished.

These two colleges offered part-time study and evening-class study, at a time when the older Scottish universities had abandoned their nineteenth-century commitment to such engagement. They also then offered opportunities for working-class people to attend university that were dwindling even in Glasgow University, itself rather more socially open than universities in the other cities of the country. The College of Commerce was particularly important for women, offering in the 1950s the only real chance in the city, outside training to be a school teacher, for them to engage in higher studies.

All higher learning is cosmopolitan intellectually. Horizons were stretched, not only because students encountered new ideas and new people—students from across the countries that were emerging from the end of the British Empire, and lecturers in touch with some of the most advanced academic thought, notably in engineering and in economics. The broadening was also more specifically Glaswegian, as the colleges and then the university became the site where the city's two main religious traditions met. Glasgow University, perhaps somewhat unfairly, had the reputation of being hostile or at least indifferent to the aspirations of Catholics, whereas the institutions in the city center were all-embracing.

At the same time though (the third theme), the colleges and the new university used these broad intellectual horizons to reflect on the city's technical, industrial, and social problems, as the old core of the workshop of the empire collapsed. Out of that came a commitment by many students in the 1960s to social reconstruction, and many of them became prominent members of the Scottish Labour movement and, through that, of the new Scottish Parliament at the end of the century: “the radical mission at Strathclyde [in the 1960s] was less to reform the University than to reform society” (218).

This social mission was not accidental, the fourth theme. Although Strathclyde was the first new university to be founded in Scotland since the sixteenth century, and the first not to share in the common curricular structure that had been built up from the middle of the nineteenth century, it sought new ways of achieving that old Scottish aspiration of engaging students with society, and with the several branches of learning. Courses on the social role of engineers were pioneering; social science as an applied discipline was taken for granted.

So the whole tradition that the university has built up is ambiguous, the fifth theme. It has been both cosmopolitan and local; specialist and generalist; and Glaswegian, Scottish, and British at the same time. But it has not been ambivalent. Unlike some of the older Scottish universities such as Edinburgh, this inhabiting of several worlds seems not to occasion much angst, partly perhaps because the city of Glasgow itself has (at least since the early nineteenth century) held these tensions in its heart: “Strathclyde staff came to recognize the distinctive west-of-Scotland ability to widen academic horizons yet remain oblivious to cultures beyond the backyard” (162).

If I have a mild criticism of the book, it would be that it perhaps does not step sufficiently beyond its testimonies. Despite warning the reader about generalizing too readily (78), it rarely questions the reliability of its witnesses. They do have a tendency to mythologize. Thus Glasgow University's own traditions of local embedding are forgotten (e.g., 49), the extent of overseas recruitment to Strathclyde and its predecessors is exaggerated because its fluctuations are not recorded (e.g., 40 and 104), and the capacity of university to transform lives is bound to appear strong among a group of volunteer interviewees who have benefited enormously from its life (e.g., 42 and 75). Perhaps the whole narrative could have benefited from some further voices representing the city's view of the university.

Nevertheless, these are really only quibbles and suggest only that the book should be read alongside histories of other universities and of the city as a whole. It is an invaluable, painstaking record and takes is worthy place among the several excellent histories of Scottish universities that have appeared in the past couple of decades.