The governance of Oxford University is plumbing new depths – and this doesn’t mean dons or deans, but the university’s 2,000-strong central bureaucracy based in Wellington Square.
Everyone thinks of Oxford in terms of colleges but there is a whole other layer of university administration that has been steadily encroaching on the parts of the university which are responsible for teaching and research – the colleges and the academic faculties and departments.
The latest grim example of the trend is a new consultation document from the bureaucrats called the Strategic Plan 2025-2030. The draft copy I have seen runs to a dozen pages and at the moment is only available to current staff members of Oxford University. Notwithstanding the title, the fundamental element of consultation is lacking: there isn’t yet any official means of responding to it.
The nature of the thing is evident in its 70 ‘Measures of Success by 2030’. These are designed primarily for the benefit of the administration. So when it talks about ‘Supporting Academic Divisions to generate sustainable surpluses in order to contribute to the funding of strategic investments’, the reader probably wouldn’t realise that these ‘Academic Divisions’, four of them, are part of the central bureaucracy, didn’t even exist until the 21st century and are designed precisely to exclude faculties and departments from central policy-making.
Everyone thinks of Oxford in terms of colleges but there is a whole other layer of university administration that has been steadily encroaching on the parts of the university which are responsible for teaching and research
The 70 ‘measures’ are spread across 29 ‘Objectives’. Each is in turn categorised as belonging either to one of four ‘Impact areas’ – these being ‘Education and Learning’; ‘Research and Discovery’; ‘Impact through Innovation’; and ‘Leadership through Partnership’ – or else to one of four ‘Enablers’: ‘People’, ‘Physical Estate’, ‘Digital Estate’ and ‘Financial Sustainability’. Seldom in the field of human study can there have been so much vacuous claptrap packed into a short document of such little assistance to the institution at large.
The bureaucrats have done their best to camouflage this by including a full-page preface or ‘introduction’ which is signed by the current Vice-Chancellor, Professor Irene Tracey. The possibility cannot be excluded, alas, that she drafted some of this herself. One hopes not – merely signing it is bad enough, for at least two reasons. The first is that the Strategic Plan contains barely the slightest hint that the university has any present shortcomings or misdirections which the plan should seek to cure. Everything is just perfect, and what we want is more of the same. In reality the past quarter-century has featured at least two blatant negatives – or three if the nature of governance in the university is included.
One is the collapse of academic standards, first and foremost in undergraduate degrees, with some 40 per cent of finalists nowadays receiving firsts and virtually everybody else a 2.1. Candidates complain if they are given insufficient advance notice of examination questions. In taught postgraduate courses standards are patchy. And the trickier question of doctoral standards is something that plainly needs investigating. After all, professorial titles and miscellaneous recognitions of distinction have all been drastically cheapened.
The second negative is the waste of real estate and misguided new buildings over the last few years, above all in the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter. Without going through the whole catalogue, there’s the still incomplete Schwartzman Centre for the Humanities. In patent contrast to the applied sciences (including medicine, which in any event receives two-thirds of the University’s entire research income), the humanities and (most) social Sciences do not need purpose-built premises.
The goal of the central bureaucracy in nonetheless filling space with such premises is to do away with any need to cooperate with colleges, or to acknowledge them as anything more than halls of residence and leisure centres. To be sure, the role of colleges in student admissions at all levels is far less important than it once was.
Ignoring the obvious is not, however, the Strategic Plan’s only weakness. It also contains evasions of logic which proper academic standards would not tolerate. In the words of the introduction, ‘The bedrock beneath all of our plans is our ongoing commitment to the pursuit of excellence, enabled by equality, diversity and inclusion.’ Really?
It is, in fact, a prolonged demonstration of failure to acknowledge differences, dilemmas and limitations and it sums up everything that is wrong with Oxford under bureaucratic management. Its concluding utterance is that, if successful, ‘amongst many things, we will have… engaged with tens of thousands of people across Oxford and the region through sporting and cultural opportunities to change the narrative of Town and Gown and demystify the Collegiate University.’ There’s another way of putting it. The bureaucrats are undermining the institution they are meant to serve.
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