Globalisation is dramatically changing the landscape of higher education and research. China is one of those countries that might force other countries to revise and modify university policy. As researchers have pointed out, processes of divergence (with the specialized university as an ultimate goal), and convergence (with the normalized university as an ultimate goal) affect universities. Still, independent of centrifugal forces like mass education in one direction, and elite-excellence research in an opposite direction, universities must hold together. The Bologna process also demands convergence and divergence at the same time. Similar courses that will be exchangeable across national borders are paralleled with distinctive courses that will attract new students in competition with all other European universities. Universities must be both similar and unique. In contemporary literature on higher education other issues are also brought forward. The meaning of "academic freedom", the relation between higher education & research and the State, civil society and private sector are subjects for analysis as are the changed economic conditions for higher education. Graduate studies - both in Europe and Sweden - contain tensions due to the transition processes our universities undergo. Another way to describe the tensions is that while Aristotle, scholastics, the guilds, and Humbolt are still alive, universities have also experienced the web, neo- liberalism and globalisation. All those features are part of graduate education. In Sweden, anachronistic demands dominate the graduate study-course curriculum. On the one hand, medieval ideals and procedures rule and regulate the studies and the public defence of the dissertation. On the other hand, all contemporary claims for efficiency, haste and accountability we know from under-graduate studies, also more and more steer graduate studies. In accordance, the self-understanding of graduate students reflects both the old-fashioned ideals of exclusivity and Bildung, and, at the same time, today's demand for a smooth, individual passage through the education factory. Taken together these processes of change are well worth exploring in more detail. However, the area is vast so, as part of a Swedish contribution to the field, we propose a closer study of graduate education. Our aim is to better understand the mechanisms that are now operating in the educational practice of higher education in Sweden, and by that hopefully be better equipped to understand similar tensions elsewhere in European universities. We like to pursue questions like: How are the tensions described above played out in the organisation of, and every-day activities at universities, i.e. graduate education? What is the substance of converging and diverging processes in the practice of graduate education? How do "old" and "new" ideologies and practices come together in the minds and actions of those engaged in graduate education?