Against a backdrop of acute global terrorist actions and international counter-terrorist initiatives, and newly marked involvement of UK universities in counter-terrorism with the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, this article reviews a wide multidisciplinary literature to provide a structural analysis of terrorism and counter-terrorism policy and research in UK universities over a 20-year timeframe (1997-2017), identifying three phases in terrorism and counter-terrorism legislative and related policy contexts: temporary; permanent and normative permanence. These three periods correlate with a vast expansion of academic terrorism research which is multidisciplinary, rapidly diversifying and expanding in direct correlation to the intensification of terroristic action. Mindful of a complex context of intensified global terrorism, the article identifies shifting patterns in the aims and manifest impacts of terrorism and counter-terrorism policy and research in UK universities. This article concludes by proposing a working analytic-structural framework for framing the disciplinary-epistemological, institutional and operational impacts on UK higher education of terrorism and counter-terrorism policy and research, including a critical and little explored relationship between universities and security and intelligence agencies.