This annual compilation offers six articles on the history of higher education. In the first article, "The Historical Matrix of American Higher Education," Roger L. Geiger provides an overview of the history of American higher education. Following it, E. D. Duryea, Jurgen Herbst, and W. Bruce Leslie comment on his hypothesis which identifies eight "generations" in higher education from 1637 to World War II. The next paper is by Geraldine Joncich Clifford and is titled "No Shade in the Golden State: School and University in Nineteenth-Century California." It analyzes the complex relationship between the University of California and its environment, including demographic, economic, and political forces. In "Conflict and Community in Soviet Institutes of Higher Education, 1921-1928," Peter Konecny examines the relationship between the communist party, state educational apparatus, and local leaders of higher education in Leningrad during the years of the New Economic Policy. Next, Jurgen Herbst in "Translatio Studii: The Transfer of Learning from the Old World to the New" looks at the history of higher education in North America, prior to the American Revolution. Carol Everly Floyd, in "Centralization and Decentralization of State Decision Making for Public Universities, Illinois 1960-1990," considers the forces that dictated the complex "balance of power" and "system of systems" approaches to the governance of public higher education in Illinois. The last article, "The Not-So-Old-Time College" by Roger L. Williams, is a review essay discussing two books--"Wesleyan University, 1831-1910" by David Potts and "Gentlemen and Scholars" by W. Bruce Leslie. (Individual papers contain references.) (DB)