Queen's University Belfast is Northern Ireland's oldest university. It was established in 1845 and has held an important place in the social and political life in the province in training many of Northern Ireland's doctors, engineers, politicians, and so on, but also in providing employment, its community activities, and its involvement with the arts. L. A. Clarkson's book is a quasi-official history of the university since World War II. It was commissioned to complement a more “popular” history written by Brian Walker and Alf McCreary in 1995 by providing a more rigorous academic analysis of the development of the university, but Clarkson was given the intellectual freedom to write a balanced monograph. This has without doubt been achieved, but the impression is that there was scope to be slightly more critical on certain issues.

The overall narrative is one of immense change both within and without the university system and an exploration of the constant tensions among education, administration, and research. Indeed, considering the current pressures on academics in these respects, it is refreshing to be reminded that they are nothing new; the only difference would appear to be that for most of the period under consideration, academics seemed to have more control over them. The changes within the university system are shown most starkly in the numbers of students attending university and the number of academics teaching them. Student numbers increased almost tenfold over the fifty-five years of the study, while academic numbers increased nearly eightfold.

Clarkson's book is impressive in several respects. First, he has had access to important university sources, such as minutes of committee meetings, financial reports, internal policy papers, and other documents held in the university archives. This enables him to demonstrate the tensions and debates within the university. One of the most striking examples is the hostility within Queen's toward the New University of Ulster. This is initially surprising but becomes less so on reflection as Clarkson demonstrates the vested interests involved (37–40). Second, his collection and presentation of data is impressive and gives a clear overview of the development of the university since the Second World War. From the amount of research money received by the university to the gender composition of the nonacademic workforce, Clarkson's data are comprehensive and revealing. The book is strong when discussing the impact of changes in the higher education system in the United Kingdom on Queen’s, and there is a sense here that Clarkson's insider knowledge in this regard is telling. He is also to be commending for avoiding skewing the book toward the latter part of his time period, which could be tempting given the relative stability of the years 1945–65 and the turbulence of the succeeding years.

The book is organized thematically rather than chronologically, and this allows a thorough exploration of issues surrounding students, teachers, buildings, administrators, finances, and scholarship and helps Clarkson to appreciate the different relationships that affect how a university operates. Here, he is vindicated that this thematic approach was the best way of organizing the book. Clarkson is correct that a history that embeds the university in its social and economic environment is a more effective and credible history than alternative methods of analysis.

In saying this, the one area that does not seem effectively dealt with is the divisions within Northern Ireland. Indeed, Clarkson's treatment of these and the university's position in relation to them is exceptionally short. For instance, in the (brief) discussion on the underemployment of Catholics in the workforce, the public controversy over these figures is described as “uncomfortable” (186). The major issue in relation to the employment figures was the overrepresentation of Protestants in the nonacademic categories, since a high proportion of academic staff received their education from outside Northern Ireland. Between 70 and 75 percentof nonacademic staff were Protestants, and, while Clarkson proffers some alternative explanations, his ultimate judgment is decidedly hedged: “There remained the possibility that Queen's had discriminated, directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally when making appointments. Discrimination was a practice deeply engrained in Ulster society … and Queen's was part of that society” (186).

In addition, there is no extended treatment of the relationship between the Troubles and the university. While it is refreshing to focus on other issues, which are frequently overlooked in other studies on Northern Ireland, the Troubles form the context for nearly half of Clarkson's time frame and were the major issue in Northern Irish society. The seventeen pages at the end of the book and the scattered statistics (such as the drop-in student numbers coming to Queen's from the rest of the United Kingdom) do not adequately address the issues. For example, considering how important students were to the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the pivotal position that Peoples’ Democracy occupied within that movement, it surely merits more than four lines (177).

Overall, the book is strongest when it is addressing educational issues and charting the changes within the university system and the expansion of third-level education in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom as a whole. It is not as strong on tackling the thorny issue of the relationship between a university and a divided society. Nevertheless, this is a useful book and fulfills its remit of a being a proper social history of the university admirably. It contains plenty of useful statistical data carefully mined from official sources to which Clarkson has had privileged access.