Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Can Oxford’s new Vice-Chancellor fix the university?

Her arrival could be a chance for Oxford to right itself after over two decades of misgovernance

(Photo: iStock)

There’s a new Vice-Chancellor taking over at Oxford later this year. She’s Irene Tracey, warden of Merton College, and an expert on pain. Rather brilliantly, she wrote a Ladybird book about it, as well as specialist research, so she’s good at communication. More importantly, she’s an Oxford person all through, with only a postgraduate stint at the Harvard Medical School as a break from the university and the town. That sets her apart from the present Vice-Chancellor, Louise Richardson, whose specialist subject was terrorism and who didn’t have much to do with Oxford before she arrived in 2016.

Irene Tracey is, in fact, a welcome return to the old sort of Vice-Chancellor; a distinguished academic and college head. It would be good if she were also the kind of Vice-Chancellor who doesn’t see herself as the chief executive of some global corporate brand and with a salary that’s not actually insane. Louise Richardson’s £459,000 annual package (the going rate) – not to mention the squillions of air miles that go with the travel on the job – is nuts for a role which confers prestige on the possessor and isn’t justified by the sums brought into the university for projects which, to put it kindly, do next to nothing for its core functions.

Her arrival could be a chance for Oxford to right itself after over two decades of misgovernance, for there’s corrosion at the heart of the place. There’s not even any mystery about the reason for it. The central administration of the university has been expanding at the expense of its academic functions: teaching – especially tutoring and examining undergraduates – and research. The university’s central bureaucracy now accounts for 2,000 people – a huge size compared to 20 years ago, and arguably about twice as many as it needs for useful purposes.

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