The Spectator’s Notes | 18 November 2006

The current row about how Oxford University should be governed illustrates two problems of our culture. The first is about how institutions work. The modernisers want organisations to work more purposefully, and they are right. But the traditionalists are suspicious of reforms which separate the people who know about the content of their institution from those who run it, and they are right too. Thus, it may well be true that hospitals should be more efficient, but they have not become more so now that doctors can be ordered around by non-medical managers. In the case of universities, their oligarchic and diffused form of authority (not to mention endemic pettiness — think of the Oxford fools who denied Mrs Thatcher her honorary degree) can be a terrible block on financial improvements. On the other hand, a board of control dominated by people who do not themselves share Oxford’s academic life will surely not be respected by those they seek to govern.