John kay has missed the point. Oxford University is just that-a university. It happens to be one of the half-dozen or so great universities in this country, but that matters much less than the simple fact that its purposes are those of all universities worthy of the name: to pursue the truth and to teach the young. These purposes can be carried out only by skilled and dedicated professionals, with the autonomy which is crucial to professionalism. This means that the culture, values and internal governance systems of a university are bound to differ radically from those of a company operating in the market-place or of an agency of the state. Universities are not-at least should not be-hierarchical. They are quintessentially stakeholder institutions, in which negotiation, compromise and consensus-building between all those who have a stake in the outcome are of the essence. Kay, who has done more than anyone else I can think of to popularise and explain the notion of stakeholding, should surely be aware of that.
His complaint against Oxford amounts to this: that too much care is taken to ensure that relevant stakeholders have a voice in decisions, with the result that, as he puts it in a giveaway passage, "people outside Oxford, used to normal management pro-cesses," are uncomprehending and frustrated. Perhaps if he had given them a summary of the brilliant seminar presentation on stakeholding which I once heard him deliver to my research centre at Sheffield they would have been less uncomprehending. They would have learned that what they think of as normal management pro-cesses are not always applicable; that the world of Coopers & Lybrand is not the only world; that the model of top-down, personalised, macho leadership which haunts Kay's article like a will-o'-the-wisp can lead to disaster if it is imposed on institutions whose purposes are unsuited to it.
Of course, stakeholding has a price. Stakeholder institutions can be slow-moving. Their managers have to listen and consult; they have to have the humility to admit their mistakes; sometimes they have to appear to lead from behind rather than from the front. That can be disagreeable to overblown egos, and it can also take time. But in a complex, pluralistic partnership of gifted people-and that is what a university is-time spent embedding change in the culture is time well spent.
David Marquand
Mansfield College, Oxford
I found myself nodding my head vigorously at virtually every sentence of John Kay's piece on Oxford. I myself have only experienced the university as a postgraduate student. The supporters of the current system (in particular the collegiate structure) sing its praises as the guarantor of academic freedom and creator of close communities within a large institution. I have seen instead the fractured lines of reporting, the duplication of resources, the issues which slip between the cracks and become nobody's responsibility, and the miniature administrative fiefdoms where requests are granted or denied on the basis of personal relationships, without reference to a central policy and with no avenue of appeal at all.
The central resource of any university is its people, staff and students, and (somehow) Oxford still manages to attract the highest calibre candidates. The shame is that these people produce world-class work in spite of, rather than because of, the broader institution. As decreasing funds require better management, and as other institutions close the gap, one wonders how much longer talent will prevail.
I also observe that the English students I know are only mildly concerned by these things, while international students complain vociferously but in vain. Whether this is because the international students pay higher fees, have points of comparison from their home universities, or are less inhibited than their English counterparts, I do not know. But it underlines Kay's point that the passion for urgent reform is generally in inverse proportion to the time spent in Oxford.
Elizabeth Stone
University College, Oxford
We at the Said Business School do not recognise the institutional circumstances described by John Kay in his critique of Oxford. I came here from the LSE five years ago and found the decision processes complex, but manageable and capable of rapid change.
Since Kay's departure, considerable progress has been made on all the difficulties outlined in his article. Salaries became less of a problem once it was realised that the issue was one of flexibility across the university as a whole, rather than just the business school. A new governance structure for the school is about to be implemented.
Since Kay's departure, the MBA Programme has expanded by over 60 per cent. Of the current 97 students, 10 hold Rhodes Scholarships, and together the students have one of the highest Graduate Management Ad-missions Test (GMAT) scores in Europe. A state-of-the-art building is nearing completion, and the faculty has just been enhanced by appointments of international stature.
Anthony G Hopwood
Director, Said Business School
With reference to John Kay's article on Oxford University's bureaucracy, I would make the following observations. Good business schools are all very similar, teaching similar case studies in a similar way. They are distinguished mainly by the calibre of the students and the quality of the contacts they make during their studies. The GMAT score level of the Oxford students is, I understand, one of the highest in western Europe and, the interest, intellect and stimulation value of the various people they meet in the Oxford environment are second to none. This will be the main advantage that Oxford has over other business schools. Bureaucracy will perhaps be a frustration, but will certainly prepare them for business management in the real world.
RA Johnson
London SW15
John kay turns a usefully harsh and penetrating spotlight on the governance of Oxford University, illustrating that its greatest strength (academic freedom flourishing within a loose structure which leaves the academic lunatics in charge of "the collegiate university" asylum) is also potentially its greatest weakness.
The management reforms now underway, and dismissed by Kay as "of little consequence," do indeed run the risk of simply rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Replacing well-meaning gentlemen-amateur dons as part-time committee-hacks with "professional" former dons as full-time university politicos ensconced in an elegant bunker on St Giles risks changing the labels but leaving untouched the "can't do" culture, which Kay alleges is the defining problem of Oxford "management."
As Ted Tapper and I explore in Oxford and the Decline of the Collegiate Tradition, Oxford over the next decades will indeed slip into Kay's predicted mediocrity not only if inertia triumphs, as Kay fears, but also if it throws out the collegiate baby with the managerialist bath-water. We are, however, more optimistic than Kay, in that we predict that Oxford may yet find for itself a robust vision for the 21st century as the "the collegiate university." This must combine the liberal arts college, emphasising the intensive tutorial teaching of 11,000 high-achieving undergraduates, with the university departments caring for 5,000 graduates and maintaining Oxford as a global research player (exemplified by reports of Oxford's innovative public/private funding of its ?60m new chemistry building).
It is too simplistic to diagnose Oxford's management malaise as being the result of the blocking power of Congregation. The problem is not constitutional but cultural: a paucity of talent and imagination within Oxford's committee hierarchy. Progress at present is slow because the university "centre" does not yet have any rational, accurate and transparent management accounting model for even beginning to understand where its ?250m of expenditure each year goes and where its financial black holes lurk.
Oxford and its colleges will get there, but not without tears as the two parts of "the collegiate university" hammer out a new shape for the institution. But, if this generation of academic politicians fails, we will indeed deserve the indictment of the next, when Volume IX of the History of the University of Oxford emerges in 2030 with the title Managed into Mediocrity, 1990-2025 (Oxford-Pearson Publishing, 375 ECU).
David Palfreyman
Bursar, New College
John kay has joined that small but stalwart group which has tried to develop management education in Oxford. Most have eventually left in high dudgeon. Kay did it sooner than the rest. But in the process he may not have had time to appreciate the depth of his Oxford experience.
Norman Leyland, economics fellow of Brasenose College, founded the Oxford Centre for Management Studies in the 1960s. He had a unique vision of applying the Oxford tutorial system and collegiate culture to senior management education. He found a benefactor and built a residential building on an eight-acre greenfield site, three miles south of the city centre. His subsequent experiences led him to leave for a post in the City of London.
I became director of the centre in 1971. The tortuous university decision making, the lack of clear lines of authority, the reliance on precedent, which Kay describes, were even worse then. Alan Bullock, Master of St Catherine's College and vice-chancellor, became a friendly mentor when the Management Centre, to get a grant from the UGC, had to be embraced by the university. I told him of my unease about promoting the centre's courses by reflecting the university aura. "Bob," he said, "it's the myth of Oxford: we all do it all the time."
In 1979 I was fired; not by the academics but by the businessmen on our management council. I wanted to focus on top management development. They wanted the stress on middle management training. My price was a five year professorial fellowship with a commitment to 18 hours' teaching a year. This experience of the management council taught me that governance was about power. My subsequent research at Nuffield College led to the first book to adopt the then new phrase "corporate governance."
Uwe Kitzinger, my successor, decided on a different strategy. "Oxford is a collegiate university," he argued. "Tricker's attempt to create a faculty of management which is not dominated by the faculty of economics, will never work. We have to turn the Management Centre into a college." He achieved this with a benefaction from John Templeton. The governance power swung from the council to the college fellows. Yet a few years later a disillusioned Kitzinger also left.
For 40 years this institution has been providing excellent short executive courses-you don't survive in that international market unless you do. Then the proposal for an Oxford University business school resurfaced. Templeton was now a college. But the university needed a business school. Cambridge had one. So do most other universities of international standing. Recognition in the business world is essential to the modern university.
So Oxford now has two institutions devoted to management education. Each is tiny in international terms. Neither has a substantial reputation. Both lack a critical mass of good staff. Both are dependent on Oxford's name. Neither has a substantial endowment. And both need income. Graduate student fees, at the numbers envisaged by Oxford, will not fund the necessary costs. So both school and college are about to compete for the lucrative post-experience course market.
But Oxford a lost cause? I doubt it. A tortuous governance process? True. An inefficient managerial structure? Yes. A need for reform in decision- making? Of course. But the myth of Oxford will continue to influence scholars, students and benefactors as it always has. Given the passage of years Kay may come to see, as I have, that the essential joy of Oxford is not that it works efficiently, but that it works at all.
Bob Tricker
Oxford
