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Given the enormous increase in demand for higher education in the last two generations, the hugely-intensified need for intellectual skills, credentials and qualifications, and research (as the R in R and D), governments as well as societies in many parts of the world are concerned with “reforming” their “higher education” systems, reforms in which universities are being conceived of as only one part of a continuum of post-secondary educational provisioners.Traditional systems of university governance, which include the techniques of bottom- up “accreditation” in North America, and the top-down Government “recognition” in much of Europe, are being challenged by what is called “Quality Assessment”. Introduced under Thatcher and Blair in the UK, it is being spread to Europe through the Bologna Process and an EU Commission-supported network of national agencies (NARIC/ENIC ). It has advocates within Ontario in Canada, and the US Federal Government’s recent Spellings Commission, very critical of US higher education, drew upon it to challenge the current “accreditation” system. What values lie behind each of the three systems? How different from each other are they in actuality? What concrete issues have brought QA to the fore in each place?In Bologna-Europe, quality assurance (not capitalized) was seen as crucial for engendering and sustaining the “trust” necessary to underpin vastly expanded student and researcher mobility, that is study or work in another country, which would be recognized and counted toward one’s degree in one's home country. This is still true and important.But QA (capitalized) can be and is also a “management tool”. Research questions on this aspect are: To whom does QA give influence, and how? For example, the strategic “bargain” on the European scene is “university autonomy” in exchange for “accountability” (to publics, to students, to governments). But who exactly is using QA to accomplish precisely what changes? From where do their goals/objectives emanate? What is the role of associations of universities? of disciplinary bodies? of “educationists”? Are there differences in the way “academic freedom” is conceptualized? What are the implications of newly professionalized management, using the QA tool, for universities conceived of as a professoriate, as a “community of scholars” exercising “collegial “ governance, at least for the fundamental academic questions? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]