Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Degrees of bureaucracy

As academic staff suffer and ever more power is granted to donors, one slice of university staff seem to be doing very well

It took Oxford 40 years to catch up with Cambridge in appointing a woman vice-chancellor, but Louise Richardson — ex-St Andrews, Irish, Catholic, terrorism expert — is to take over from the chemist Andrew Hamilton. He is leaving early to head New York University for an eye-watering £950,000 a year. His successor will inherit a more modest but still whopping £442,000 a year. That’s what happens when a university is run like a biggish corporation — the head is paid like a chief executive. (A professor gets around £65,000 a year: once, Louise Richardson would have been on something similar.)

Chief of the problems Richardson has to get to grips with, once the ceremonial is done, is the extent to which the real business of the university — teaching and research — is being subordinated to its bureaucracy.

Remember the lesser-known bit of Parkinson’s Law — that bureaucracy expands in inverse proportion to its usefulness? The number of Navy bureaucrats rose after the first world war, Parkinson noted, just as the number of warships went down. That’s more or less how Oxford University is looking now — actually, how it’s looked for some time.

The university’s central administrative staff is now almost three times what it was 15 years ago. There was no similar increase in full-time academic staff, the people who teach students or do research, who belong to the faculties and colleges (Oxford, like Cambridge, is made up of colleges, with academics divided between subject faculties; the university itself is a sort of covering carapace and a funnel for funding). In other words, a university that used, in its medieval way, to be a model of self-governance, run by a Congregation of dons — one member, one vote — is increasingly being run by the equivalent of the civil service.

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