The article identifies, comparatively, the crisis of the contemporary university as both government policies, in several countries, and the post-modern critique, notably Lyotard's, highlight the reconstruction of university systems around 'performativity' in an increasingly competitive international economic world. The comparative motif of the article is sustained less around concepts of 'mass' and 'elite' higher education systems than around the aggressive interventions in the definition of university knowledge by governmental insistence on a certain kind of 'product' from universities, and careful measures of their 'productivity'. The immediate consequences, as far as they are yet known, for university cultures are identified, especially the corrosive effects of the redefinition of 'quality control' and the displacement of academic leadership by a culture of 'management'. The final argument in the article is that the university in several systems of higher education is undergoing a process of 'attenuation' in its financial, pedagogic, personnel and research relationships.
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