The combination of previously unassociated terms in a metaphor can helpfully illustrate particular characteristics of a person, phenomenon or practice. However, it can also obfuscate because the focus on some elements may come at the expense of others. The metaphor of the landscape is somewhat ubiquitous in academic literature, and this paper is specifically interested in the ‘higher education landscape’, which is widely used in scholarly – as well as media and policy – writing. By applying thematic analysis to a sample of publications which invoke the term, this paper comprises what Haslanger calls a descriptive and ameliorative approach to investigate both how and why this metaphor is used. By considering these publications cumulatively, the authors can identify that the higher education landscape enables scholars to simultaneously acknowledge higher education’s temporal, social and political positioning, its state of what can feel like permanent and wide-ranging flux, and its diverse cast of interrelated actors. In this way, it serves as a useful and evocative container metaphor for higher education’s activities and constituents and the interrelationships and tensions between them. At the same time, its somewhat indiscriminate and indeterminate use can conflate and mask the detail and nature of these dynamics, and it is possible to discern in its application a collective sense of nervousness and uncertainty about higher education more generally.