Under the English context, the term “pedagogy of higher education” (Kietlinska 1972) can be rendered as “teaching methods of higher education” in Chinese, whose literal meaning is totally different from our understanding of “higher education” as an independent discipline. In fact, in Western countries, many scholars use “research of higher education” or “higher education studies” (Brennan and Teichler 2008) to replace “higher education” in Chinese for they tend to “regard higher education research as a multidisciplinary field” (Wang 2017). Therefore, it can be said that “higher education” is a very local concept with Chinese characteristics, although it also takes higher education phenomena and problems as its research object like the Western “research of higher education,” and there have been theoretical debates on its identity as “a research field or an independent discipline” in recent years. However, in general, the Chinese academic circles and the official mainstream still define “higher education” as a discipline, that is, a sub-discipline affiliated with the first-level discipline of education. This chapter adopts a paradigm of historical and comparative research, taking literature review and textual analysis as tools to examine the process of quasi-institutionalization to institutionalization of higher education research in China from a disciplinary perspective.