ABSTRACT
The success of university management in restructuring universities as McBusinesses is premised on a seeming contradiction. As universities have been McDonaldized they have spontaneously embraced therapy culture and have become therapeutic universities. The therapeutic ethos became readily accepted because it was not contradictory, as many thought, but complementary to the ruthless McDonaldization of universities. McDonaldization is the global force which is affecting all of society in a way not previously explained in the narratives of Post-Fordism and bureaucratization. In Britain the New Labour Government aimed at getting 50 per cent of young people into university. Predictability in higher education involves the re-construction of degree programmes so that they contain credit-bearing discrete modules with telephone directories full of learning objectives, learning outcomes, marking criteria and level criteria. In 1964 the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) was set up to ensure that degree courses validated by polytechnics and a variety of colleges were of a standard equivalent to those of universities.
