University governance is a subject for insomniacs. It is uninteresting in itself, and irrelevant to the everyday lives of even academics and students. It appeals to New Labour because of a characteristic delusion that if you can establish the right system of accountability, efficiency will follow—to which one reply is: "Enron." There was nothing wrong with the corporate structure of Enron; it just happened to be run by crooks.
Universities aren't run by crooks; to the extent that there have been scandals in post-secondary education, they have occurred in colleges directly under the control of local government. So why has Oxford spent the past two years quarrelling about governance? For a very silly reason. In the course of the 2003 Lambert report on relations between universities and business, there were a couple of paragraphs—apparently inserted by the treasury rather than the author—asserting that Oxford and Cambridge needed to modernise their governance to prevent their collegiate structure holding up progress. Since the report also said that both Oxford and Cambridge were doing very well in co-operating with business, it wasn't clear what the problem was, other than the chancellor's prejudices against Oxbridge. If there was a problem caused by college sluggishness—as distinct from a shortage of time and money or the divided aims natural to institutions pursuing everything from astrophysics to Assyrology—no evidence was presented to back it up.
So, Oxford now has a white paper on governance, the central aim of which is to appease Gordon Brown; a lesser aim is to gratify the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce), since it is a major funder and doesn't like the fact that Oxbridge doesn't look like everyone else. For all that, the white paper is elegant. It has tried to square the circle, and it has come close to doing so. Non-Oxbridge universities have a familiar structure: a senate or its equivalent supervises internal operations and answers to a council, which—following the recommendations of the 1997 Dearing report—has a majority of lay members on it. Oxbridge has a parliament of academics—Congregation in Oxford, Regent House in Cambridge—which is sovereign. Oxford and Cambridge are self-owned and self-governing; the ex-polytechnics are owned by their councils; the pre-1992 institutions are chartered corporations or—as is the LSE—limited companies. In all cases, their councils are, legally, sovereign.
Sticking a council of the sort that Hefce finds comfortable atop a sovereign body such as Congregation invites the nasty question, "Who's the boss?" The new white paper unequivocally answers "Congregation," and quite right. Any other answer invites civil war. Nonetheless, what it aims to do is insert into the Oxford system a structure more like what you'd find elsewhere: a council of 15 with a majority of external members, including an outside chairman; an academic board of 35 with a substantial weighting of central administrators in its membership; and a nominations committee to provide Congregation with the names of those it will be invited to accept or reject as members of council.
Will it be approved in the autumn? It's hard to know. Its precursors were heavily defeated, and it's likely that these proposals will have a hard time too. Most heads of colleges are at least acquiescent, as they have been all along, but heads of college are unrepresentative of their own governing bodies and of the rank and file more generally. Much about it is less than squeaky-clean best practice: for instance, the vice-chancellor will be a member of the council that appraises him, and the academic board is an uneasy mixture of election and ex officio. Whether anyone other than the authors of textbooks on governance cares very much is another matter.
Still, the white paper's critics include some distinguished lawyers; and all of its critics have the authority that comes with many years of service as teachers and researchers, as distinct from whatever authority attaches to former civil servants, businesspeople and academic managers. It's a safe bet that there'll be a fierce debate, some interesting amendments and a tight vote. Crucially, however, the whole affair will be a frightful waste of time. Aside from the action of the council of University College London in pressuring the then provost, Chris Llewellyn Smith, to resign a few years back—which led to the half-baked proposal for a merger of UCL and Imperial—no council has made the least difference to the operations of an English university in the past two decades. It is not that they do any harm. It's just that they mostly don't do anything except tick the boxes. Both the critics and the supporters of the Oxford white paper are doomed to disappointment.
