In 2009, The Chancellor of the California State University (CSU), Charles Reed, hired Sir Michael Barber (former Chief Advisor on Delivery to British PM Tony Blair) to work on a project with the presidents of CSU’s 23 campuses. The project aimed at ‘setting a goal for closing the achievement gap by increasing graduation rates in their institutions and for CSU as a system’. Barber’s concept of ‘Deliverology’, renamed, the “Graduation Initiative” has been implemented with significant consequences for professional practice. The close alignment of Barber’s ideas with recent pedagogic discourse in policy and practice at CSU are examined, in particular systemic commentaries on and elaborations of Barber’s ‘Deliverology’ as policy enacted within the economic and political contexts of higher education in California. Through Bernstein’s concepts of framing and recontextualization and Branham and Pearce’s notion of ‘contextual reconstruction’, this paper will make visible the rhetorical means by which the discourse of the CSU controls and recreates the meaning of higher education for those within and without the system. The value of this study lies in exposing the patterns of discourse as it reframes and recontextualizes higher education, thus reshaping its meaning, value and processes for the state of California.