IT WAS a scene that could have been captured at any time in the past 50 years. Admittedly, we were allowed to take off our dinner jackets and gowns — it was a swelteringly hot night — but otherwise the gathering of some 200 70-year-olds in the hall of Christ Church represented a reassuring symbol of continuity.
Here, via the ritual of a college gaudy, was a magic almost equal to that of the hall’s most celebrated recent visitor, Harry Potter.
As the candelabra gleamed and our wine glasses were constantly recharged, it was all too easy to believe that this aspect of Oxford life would last for ever. But will it? Not to put too fine a point on it, the University of Oxford, if not exactly in crisis, is at least in a state of ferment. Ever since the arrival last year of a new broom in the shape of a full-time, professional Vice-Chancellor from New Zealand, radical change — or as its proponents like to call it, “modernisation” — has been in the air.
John Hood, 52, former head of Auckland University (and before that a business mogul), has managed to ruffle a fair range of feathers. He has treated the university very much as a new CEO would a public company — going for reform in all directions and not sparing what he believes to be deadwood when he finds it.
He can count on powerful allies, not least in the Blair Government, but he has also made influential enemies — one of whom (Alan Ryan, the Warden of New College) not so long ago accused him of wanting to reduce the whole university into a state of submission. So far there has been only one direct clash between the new-style academic tycoon and his more traditionalist critics. It took place over a proposal for a new and more rigorous form of mandatory academic appraisal for dons and researchers, and it was an engagement that the new Vice-Chancellor lost.
Like all reformers, Hood believes in firing on all cylinders. Central to his vision of the university’s future is also a wholesale restructuring of the way in which Oxford is run. If it is to remain a “world-class university” — a plausible alternative, say, to Harvard or Stanford — it must, he believes, conduct its own affairs with greater efficiency. (He has been helped in this mission by what are conceded to have been terrible mistakes in the human supervision of Osiris, the university’s troubled computer system.)
What his critics, though, allege he actually wants, though, is the transfer of control of the university to an external body, a board of trustees upon which there will always be at least a majority of individuals not employed by the university. A Green Paper outlining the structural changes, entitled ominously Oxford’s Governance Structure, was due to have been put before Congregation (the university’s sovereign parliament) this month; but, in the light of the defeat over career assessments, this particular piece of confrontation has apparently been put off until November.
However, the Green Paper, with its title echoing one of Harold Wilson’s worst books, The Governance of Britain, has already been published, and the Vice-Chancellor’s thinking is, therefore, open for all to see. No one would deny that Oxford’s present system of self-regulation is a bit of a mess. It is hard, nevertheless, to see how the new proposals, consisting of a large and unwieldy academic council to run alongside the all-powerful board of trustees, are going to improve matters. The crucial problem remains the relationship between the unitary university and the 39 separate colleges; the Green Paper does not appear to have any specific proposals to deal with that.
For the moment, the future of Oxford looks, at best, messy: there is too much rancour and suspicion in the atmosphere and that applies to both sides. Initially, John Hood enjoyed a broad swath of goodwill; the tragedy is that he has managed to dissipate that in a matter of months.
Yet unless Oxford can come up with its own solutions to what essentially are internal problems, it will have to brace itself for having answers imposed upon it from outside.
When Tony Blair came to office in 1997, there was pressure upon him to go for root-and-branch reform of both our ancient universities — and, in particular, of the added state funding they receive for the maintenance of the tutorial system. Largely thanks to the efforts of the then Chancellor of Oxford, Roy Jenkins, the direst penalties did not then fall on either Oxford or Cambridge, and a stay of execution was conceded. Under a different Prime Minister — and one, moreover, who raised all the fuss about the Laura Spence case — neither Oxford or Cambridge should count on being afforded such a deliverance again.
Reality check
AS CHANCELLOR of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, is (ex-officio) Master of the Royal Mint, but he has not, I gather, made himself popular with the Deputy Master, who does all the work, or with the dedicated ranks of Britain’s numismatists.
His offence? Turning down a design submitted to him for a new 50p coin planned for next year to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Victoria Cross.
The winning entry, by sculptor Clive Duncan, depicted a British soldier carrying a wounded comrade to safety with both of them being framed in the hairline sights of an enemy sniper. The Chancellor apparently wanted something more robust, nearer to the exploits of John Wayne or Alan Ladd in the Hollywood movies. I understand his feelings — but, alas, that is not what real war is actually like.
IF DAVID WILLETTS really has got 20 fellow Tory MPs ready to sign his nomination papers, then his hat must be taken to be firmly in the ring. Far and away the brightest of the potential runners for the Tory leadership, he has tended until now to impress journalists rather more than politicians.
But it may be worth remembering that Michael Heseltine always had a high opinion of him, even supporting him when he got himself into a spot of bother as a junior whip before the 1997 election. “It will all blow over,” the party deputy leader told him, “and do your career no harm at all.” Even those who criticise Willetts for being the victim of a charisma bypass must agree that that prediction has been vindicated.
ONE of the principal contentions in the biography that I have just produced of Cardinal Basil Hume is that he made the Roman Catholic Church part of the cultural mainstream of British life.
I am beginning to have second thoughts about that. Not only has the book been ignored by what might be called “the anti-clerical press” (not a mention in The Observer, the New Statesman, or either of the Independents) but also in the bookshops it has been relegated to the “religion”, “theology”, or even (God save us) the “mind, body and spirit” sections. Maybe the monk-cardinal saw that development coming. In his old age he used frequently to mourn “the marginalisation of the Church”. Substitute the word “compartmentalisation” — and I’d say he got it exactly right.
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