Barbarzyńcy u bram.
Barbarians at the Gates

Opening for Universities for Working Classes and Creating Modern Societies

Summary/Abstract: Although universities are institutions of social change that are largely responsible for the persistence of society and culture, they are embedd ed in the local political, economic, and social context, and inextricably linked to global change. The article tracks the process of democratising access to universities and opening these elite institutions to people from the working class. I t uses examples of England of the late nineteenth century and the interwar USSR. It proposes a difficult comparison of these different contexts as cases of the construction of higher education institutions open to wider social groups and geared towards practical education. Both redbrick universities and post-revolutionary Soviet universities were to become egalitarian universities corresponding to the challenges of modernity.

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