This paper begins by observing the huge changes which have taken place in higher education in the UK and elsewhere over the last twenty years as universities have absorbed education and training functions previously lodged in other institutions and with these practices, sites of practice and practitioners of considerable diversity. It observes too how the very stuff of higher education practice, the knowledge and forms of excellence around which it revolves have themselves become increasingly diverse. These observations are the starting point for first some discussion of the notion of practice and, more especially of MacIntyre's normative notion of practice as embodying goods internal to the activity and having as a central goal the extension of human powers to achieve excellence. The paper asks whether all forms of contemporary higher education practice can satisfy this requirement. It then goes on to ask whether the diversity of practice which was itself created out of (among other things) a desire to make higher education more accessible and inclusive ie out of considerations to do with equity, does in fact honour or betray that principle. Has wider participation been achieved at the cost of a diversity of practice within which there is a new hierarchy of value? And how could such an evaluation be made?