So all is well with Oxford? Those inside have a different perspective from those outside, who need only admire the results without considering how they were produced - or nearly not produced. Anyone who has been involved at a high level in Oxford's governance for the past five or six years will have registered two problems of increasing severity. In the first place, the university council has been overburdened and its membership has not contained the range and depth of expertise necessary to discharge the responsibilities laid upon it by statute.
Second, the conjunction of the university and its component colleges - at its best, one of the great and distinctive strengths of Oxford - creates a stubborn difficulty when it comes to academic decision-taking. As things stand, a proposal for academic change has to move up two parallel ladders of committees: a university ladder and a college ladder. Should either of those ladders suddenly become a snake as a result of unexpected opposition, the whole proposal has to begin all over again. So Oxford's present governance has a double deficit: an expertise deficit and a co-ordination deficit.
The white paper on governance, on which the university votes tomorrow, tackles this double deficit. First, it addresses the co-ordination deficit by proposing the establishment of an academic board, on which the colleges and university would be equally represented, to which all matters of academic substance would be delegated and of which the membership would be made up solely of academics. This places matters of academic judgment where they belong: in the hands of academics. But it also brings colleges and university together in a body given the explicit task of setting and pursuing the academic strategy of the collegiate university as a whole. Those outside Oxford might well rub their eyes in disbelief that, hitherto, no such body has existed.
The white paper addresses the expertise deficit by trimming the responsibilities of council and by adjusting its membership. Because academic matters would have been handed to the academic board, the new council would take responsibility for the remainder of council's current load: that is, it would be responsible for the management of endowment, determination of overall expenditure, management of risk, management of estates and external relations. Given these redefined responsibilities, it is appropriate for the external or "lay" membership of council to be increased substantially. In the first five years, its membership would comprise seven internal members, seven external or lay members (those not on the payroll of the university or any of the colleges) and Lord Patten, the chancellor, as chairman. This reconfigured council would, from an internal perspective, be well adapted to discharge its new responsibilities; and, from an external perspective, it would bring Oxford's governance close to the expectations of the Privy Council and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, government bodies.
It is no secret that the white paper's proposals have not been universally welcomed. How might one characterise the criticisms? The mildest word one could use is "overdrawn". A set of proposals that leaves untouched the sovereignty of Congregation, Oxford's "parliament of dons" (teaching staff members), has been misdescribed by its opponents as doing away with Oxford's tradition of self-government. A document that removes the vice-chancellor from the chairmanship of council, and that would impose on him for the first time a precisely described delegation of powers, has been misdescribed as a recipe for what is sniffily dismissed as "managerialism". A document that recognises the proper interest a democratically elected government has in a university that receives large amounts of public money, but which squares the circle of meeting those legitimate external expectations and serving the internal needs of the university, has been misdescribed as surrendering to improper external pressure.
In fact, the white paper puts forward measured, reasonable proposals, refined by lengthy consultation, that preserve the essence of Oxford's self-government, reinforce the university's counsels with additional experience and wisdom and adjust its internal arrangements to cope with the challenges that lie ahead, and on which, as in the past, Oxford will surely thrive.
The writer, professor of English, was a member of the working party that drew up the white paper.
The reforms are not a case of surrendering control to outsiders - that is something of a red herring since the composition of a supervisory board can clearly be settled on the basis of experience and merit. Rather it is a case of surrendering control to a secretive internal administrative clique that advocates an inappropriate and out-of-date management model that is subject to growing criticism in the US. It is breathtakingly naive to think that a distant supervisory board and a superannuated version of a dons' parliament would constrain the actions of a determined, hard-nosed senior management team. But why is the model inappropiate and out of date?
The model that appeals to politicians and outsiders is one where students are customers, dons are costs that deliver educational products and the shareholders are external parties such as the government. In this model the chief executive officer and his team take decisions to ensure that the customers are happy with products they receive at a cost sufficiently low to generate returns that keep external parties happy. The supposed benefits are that responsibility is centred on the CEO, the senior team is controlled by rewards and decisions can be made quickly and unambiguously. The fundamental problem is that this is the wrong model of governance for a university. You could just as well argue, for instance, that the dons are customers, students are costs and benefactors are the owners. The model is not appropriate because the university is not a job-training centre, nor an applied research lab working for the government. The university is much more like a federation of interlocking intellectual partnerships of skilled professionals.
Worse still, the particular business variant underlying the new governance proposals is well past its sell-by date. The engineers' paradigm behind the centralised proposals applies the ideas of Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor to learning as though the university were a machine bureaucracy where dons are substitutable employees in an integrated academic factory. It is ironic that today's cutting-edge businesses are moving in the opposite direction. The importance of knowledge workers in creating defensible value-added is taking businesses away from large, centrally administered monoliths towards small, self-organising entrepreneurial cells, flexibly connected and practically self-determining - just look at the campus models of companies such as 3M, Google and Apple.
Putting recent big project fiascos aside, senior management team dominance would erode the three distinctive competences of the university that have made it a world leader. First, undergraduate tutorial teaching would suffer as greater emphasis was placed on research. Second, the university's pre-eminent position in humanities would be undermined by financial policy as the university expanded science in order to get more money from the government. Third, the university's role in shaping the values and principles of the next generation of British and European leaders would be overshadowed by the increasing preponderance of technical graduates and overseas students. But if these consequences are so obvious, why is the senior management team doing this?
Some say the team is implementing the Higher Education Funding Council for England's agenda in Oxford. Supposedly if Oxford does not do this, it will get clobbered with a big stick. But is this the case? Is the funding council really worried that the university is not doing a good job when it ranks in the top 10 on a third of the money of its main competitors?
In fact, Hefce does not require the one-size-fits-all polytechnic template to be applied to Oxford. Nor does it have a clear, long-term plan for the development of national academic advantage on a subject-by-subject, institution-by-institution basis. Current policies are an amalgam of initiatives, pragmatic thinking and historic baggage. So where does this leave us?
First, we need a federated structure that shares executive power responsibly between centres of competence and influence. If the university cannot come up with a suitable design, it should commission international analysis by one of the strategy houses. Second, the vice-chancellor's team should be reoriented to promote and defend the university's interests rather than acting as the agent of supposed irresistible outside influences.
The writer is tutorial fellow in management and finance bursar, at Exeter College.