News & Views item - December 2006

 

 

Oxford Law Fellow Blasts White Paper on University Governance. (December 21, 2006)

    Nicholas Bamforth is a Fellow in Law at the Queen's College, Oxford. In an incisive opinion piece for the December 20 Guardian he says Oxford's refusal to board the "managerialism" bandwagon was an important result for all universities.

 

A highly placed Australian academic administrator who has been closely following the ructions between Oxford's Vice-Chancellor, John Hood, and the university's dons told TFW, "The debate at Oxford should be of interest to the whole community interested in the evolving role of Australian higher education. Unfortunately the focus is mostly on the minutiae as most recently evidenced by the rolling review, announced this week by Minister of Education Julie Bishop, of Brendan Nelson's  Higher Education Support Act."

 

Below are some excerpts from Mr Bamforth's article:

Oxford Fellow in Law Nicholas Bamforth

Oxford's decisive rejection of the governance white paper is important for the whole higher education sector. Contrary to caricature, it is not a victory of old-style conservatism, nor a rejection of reform. Instead, Oxford academics voted against a package that seemed likely to bring about the type of short-term managerialism that has sadly come to dominate - and undermine - so many UK universities in the past 15 years.

 

Oxford has some administrative problems which are best solved by a series of administrative solutions. Some of the council sub-committees could do with improvement, the relationship between council and the academic divisions needs to be clarified, and there ought to be greater openness. These administrative changes, in combination, will allow for more robust scrutiny of proposals, in turn producing more effective decision-making.

 

...the grand constitutional re-write that was proposed, effectively handing radically greater power to the university executive, was simply not the answer. Academics in Oxford favour change where it looks likely to produce positive results. Although the Governance Working Party's plans were modified over time, the final white paper proposals were rejected because they looked like the wrong type of change.

 

The post-1992 "new" [UK] universities are run on a strictly managerial, hierarchical basis, with the vice-chancellor as chief executive and a decision-making structure overloaded with bureaucrats. The academics who do the research and teaching - the real business of any university - are heavily managed, with no real say in their institution's academic direction.

 

...the older, chartered universities... have also moved to the corporate governance model...  it was exactly this approach that [the Oxford dons] feared, and wished to avoid.

 

To produce top-quality research and deliver excellent teaching, imagination, originality and long-term planning are needed. The corporate governance model, by contrast, has tended to encourage the management of academic activity to fit short-term financial goals.

 

[There have been] the introduction or abandonment of courses... [or] closure of departments - in response to immediate financial objectives imposed by managers, with little thought seemingly given to the educational importance of the courses or departments involved.

 

Perhaps the key point is that our recent debate [at Oxford] was conducted as a mutually respectful exchange. People only argued as vigorously as they did because we all care, passionately, about our university.

 

On a broader basis, the rejection of the white paper will hopefully send a signal that the rather crude corporate governance model is the wrong one for universities. We have been immensely fortunate in Oxford that our constitution has given us the chance to vote against it.