RADICAL proposals to "privatise" Oxford University by relinquishing its state funding and charging students up to £8,000 a year have been drawn up by a group of senior dons led by the Master of Pembroke College.
In a move attacked by other academics as a "counsel of despair", the 10-strong group says the university should be prepared to become independent as the best way to preserve its ancient college and tutorial system. Under the proposals, which are being taken seriously by Oxford's vice-chancellor, Dr Peter North, the university would leave the state-funded sector - it received more than £70 million last year - and operate more like a fee-paying school.
Although some money might still come from Government grants, colleges would feel free to charge large fees to undergraduates whose parents are wealthy and subsidise poorer students through bursaries. In an open letter to Dr North, who is heading a fundamental review of the university's management structure, the group says Oxford could model itself on American Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale.
Dr Robert Stevens, the Master of Pembroke, who has spent much of his academic life in America, said the Oxbridge college system cost far more than the Government provided. Colleges without large endowments were struggling. "Politicians panic when they hear the 'p' word because Oxford has been a welfare state for the middle and upper classes and they would be very reluctant to give it up," he said. "They have already paid for their children's education at private schools and they would want to know why they have to pay more for university. That's the reason it is very hard to do anything."
Dr Stevens's intervention comes at a time when higher education funding is under intense scrutiny. Politicans admit that the policy of providing free university teaching for all cannot be sustained, and the Government has appointed Sir Ron Dearing to review the situation. A number of the universities, which have been part of an integrated system since the Fifties, are already Contemplating charging "top-up" fees, and some feel that "going it alone" would free them from suffocating Government constraints.
For others, however, it raises the prospect of colleges favouring wealthy foreign students and sponsorship from firms such as Toyota and McDonalds. One compared it to the plot of Grantchester Grind, the recent comic novel by Tom Sharpe, in which the fictional Porterhouse College is sold to a sinister American media mogul. Lord Renfrew, the Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and a Tory peer, said: "It a sounds like a policy of despair. If the future of Oxbridge still looks bleak after the Dearing review, then it could be the time for such radical proposals. But I think it is silly to abandon the ship before the torpedoes have hit."
The Department for Education said universities were autonomous so could decide their own policies. "If the university wants to become a private institution it would just need to inform ministers and surrender funding," said a spokesman.
Click for the next item in the 1997 Oxbridge funding row.