This project explores the diffusion of a key university institution, the doctorate, and how this has affected the formation of higher education in Sweden. New doctoral degrees have impacted activities within the institutions for professional training that acquired them, and new activities eventually have had repercussions on the doctorate and the old universities. This primary theme serves as a prism through which more general issues and trends are reflected, as the transforming expansion of the system of higher education. I will elaborate an interpretative framework that fuses five perspectives: a systems perspective on higher education; neo-institutionalist perspectives on elements that make up the system; a sociology of professions perspective on actors; marginalist perspectives on the boundary work of forming knowledge domains; a history of concepts perspective on verbal contestations. Via these perspectives, I will analyze a mass of archival and other sources, with the aim of presenting a major monograph that gives a novel and synthesizing account of higher education in Sweden. By combining science studies and the history of education, I will give a corrective to the largely university-centered historiography of research and education. The project will also provide new knowledge on issues of academic, professional and political interest, and thus contribute to reflective discussions about a sector perceived to be of profound importance to our modern knowledge society.