Oxford University could reject state funding and go private within 15 years to escape increasing government pressure to recruit more students from poorer backgrounds, the head of one of the university's leading colleges said yesterday.
Speaking days after elite universities protested at the introduction of higher targets for state school entrants, Michael Beloff, president of Trinity College, Oxford, and a friend of Tony Blair, issued the warning as he challenged the Department for Education and Skills to "take its tanks off Oxford's lawns". The university was poised to launch a fundraising drive which could see it build up the cash needed to free it from government funding for teaching within 15 to 20 years, Mr Beloff told a conference in St Andrews, Scotland. It could then charge higher fees than the planned £3,000 maximum, and provide bursaries for poorer students.
The college president's intervention came on the day Dr John Hood was installed as the new vice chancellor of Oxford University. Dr Hood, former vice chancellor of Auckland University, warned in his inaugural oration that Oxford would have to raise more funds if it was to remain a "world class" university.
Mr Beloff's call for the government to use "the carrot, not the stick" in encouraging universities to widen the range of pupils they admit comes a week after the higher education statistics agency provoked fury among the top research-led institutions when it published new targets for state school admissions. Oxford and other leading members of the Russell Group of leading universities, which already fall well below existing targets, found the benchmark had been set even higher thanks to a change in the way the pool of potential candidates is defined.
Oxford's failure to hit its targets - its intake of state school pupils was 55% in 2002-3 against a benchmark of 77% - was not evidence of "institutional classism" by admissions tutors but of a desire to maintain demanding academic entry criteria, Mr Beloff told the annual meeting of the Head Masters and Head Mistresses Conference. "To alter those standards in pursuit of social or political rather than educational objectives would be a betrayal of the university's role," he said. "Raw intelligence is not enough for an Oxford course. It has to be developed to a particular point."
If universities were forced to select unsuitable students - potentially to avoid being financially penalised by funding bodies - they would end up either having to fail them or lower the pass mark for courses, he warned. The government's "arbitrary" 50% overall target for entry to university by 2010 added to the problem, he claimed, warning of the "danger of dumbed-down degrees coinciding with graduate glut". The result, he forecast, was "a scary vision of students from bog standard comprehensives proceeding to take Mickey Mouse degrees".
Highlighting a view widely shared among research-led institutions who believe they are being unfairly required to compensate for failings lower down the educational ladder, Mr Beloff said: "It is not for universities to be coerced into relieving the government of its own responsibility for ensuring an improvement of standards in the maintained sector, and indeed of diminution of social inequalities at the pre-school stage." Universities were "educational institutions, not laboratories for social engineering".
Mr Beloff said he foresaw Oxford becoming independent of government within 15 to 20 years in terms of undergraduate teaching, though the university does not want to give up public funding for research. "The bargain would be that we would look after our own students and have to raise money through fees and for bursaries for those who couldn't afford it". Government, he suggested, would be "duly grateful". Privately, Downing Street is said to be open to the idea of top universities going it alone.