This exciting book provides readers with a critical historical and sociological analysis of public engagement as an aspect of academic practice and university mission, predominantly as it occurs in the United Kingdom. It charts and contrasts the origins and evolution of public engagement in higher education in the context of earlier ideas/ideals of the role and mission of the university as a public institution and the academic as a public intellectual, to more contemporary and arguably narrower, more instrumentalist rationalization of the university mobilized in the service of a global knowledge economy and stakeholder society. Watermeyer and Lewis consider the status of public engagement with higher education as a prominent higher education concern and its interface with other higher education agendas responsible for respectively altering and recasting, to various degrees, the landscape of higher education and the identities, practice and careers of academics. It is concerned with questions of how top-down higher education policy higher education policy interventions and initiative challenge (re)affirm or change the values and behaviours of academics and predominantly those belong to the academic 'rank and file'. It is also concerned with how public engagement with higher education as a policy intervention has impacted, and continues to impact upon the organisational, political and cultural dynamics of universities and the potential disconnect between higher education policy and its aspirations, and academic ideology and practice.