Carola Binney Carola Binney

How local government is threatening Oxford University’s competitiveness

The press love a bit of Oxbridge competition, but Oxford is embroiled in a far older and more ruthless rivalry: town vs. gown.

It was in a dispute between the university and city of Oxford that Cambridge University has its foundations. In 1209, according to Roger of Wendover’s chronicle, an Oxford liberal arts scholar accidentally killed a woman. The Mayor led a group of townspeople to the killer’s house, only to find that he had fled – instead, they seized the three innocent scholars with whom he rented the house and hanged them. Fearing future tyranny and terrified of their fellow citizens, an exodus of Oxonians left the dreaming spires for a provincial backwater on the river Cam. 

History repeated itself in 1355. A pub fight escalated into the two-day Battle of St. Scholastica’s Day, during which local citizens took to the academic community with bows and arrows; in penance, the Mayor and Bailiffs were subsequently forced to swear an annual oath to uphold the university’s privileges.

The oath didn’t prove entirely effective, and, 659 years on, tensions still run high. The city council is still the university’s enemy-in-chief, but the battle has moved from the pub to the planning permission office.

In 2005, Oxford University came up with a plan to build 200 staff homes on the site of a disused paper mill at Wolvercote. No threat of noisy students, but the plan was still abandoned after council-related difficulties pushed costs too high.

If new university-owned accommodation isn’t an option, the only alternative is to house students in commercial projects – but the council make this problematic too. The latest town-v-gown bust-up, for example, is over a commercial plan to build accommodation for 294 students on Merton College-owned land, just behind the deer park of my college, Magdalen.

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