Oxford Congregation to Vote on No Confidence Motion in UK Minister of State (Universities and Science). (May 18, 2011)

3,700 Oxford University academics make up the Congregation. Next month on June 7 it will vote on whether or not it has "no confidence" in the  the Conservative MP David Willetts, Minister of State (Universities and Science).

English Novelist Robert Harris has said of Mr Willetts: "He is symbolic of a type of Tory that has come to prominence over the past twenty years - young, brainy, earnest, pious, confident: in a word, insufferable."

Were the Congregation to approve the motion of no confidence in Mr Willetts it would be a first, not only for Oxford but for any university, and Oxford's vice-chancellor, Andrew Hamilton, would be required to write to the government to formally inform them of the vote.

Karma Nabulsi, an Oxford academic who writes regularly for the Guardian described the government's higher education policies as "incoherent and incompetent". In her view: "It is our duty at Oxford to take a stand because other universities don't have the structures that we do to articulate such things."

Perhaps the trigger for the Congregation to bring on the no-confidence motion was an interview of Mr Willetts by the Guardian earlier this month in which "he suggested that universities could increase the number of British students by, in effect, letting wealthy students "buy" a place, by charging them the full annual fees of up to £28,000 a year for the most expensive courses – payable up front – and which would not be entitled to taxpayer support. He later retreated and insisted that there was "no question" of wealthy students being able to buy a university place."

To Dr Nabulsi: "This is the kind of absurd outcome that comes when you try to introduce market principles into a common good such as education."