THIS YEAR'S rankings of world universities reveal that Oxford is one of the three best in the world. The other two are Cambridge and Harvard.
It is obvious that Oxford and Cambridge are the best managed universities in the world when you consider that Harvard has endowments of $25 billion (many times more than Oxford or Cambridge's); that Princeton, Yale and Stanford also have vast endowments; and that US universities can charge huge fees which British universities are forbidden to do by law.
So it is a surprise that John Hood, Oxford's new Vice-Chancellor, wants to divest himself and his academics of the headaches of running the university and to transfer responsibilities instead to a council dominated by non-executive trustees drawn from outside the academic world. Whereas every other university is run by a council of non-executive trustees, Oxford and Cambridge are run by the academics themselves. They clearly know what they are doing. By analogy, BP and Virgin are run not by non-executive trustees drawn from outside the industry but, rather, by executives who know about the oil and transport businesses. The idea that institutions should be run by people who know about them is one that is widely accepted.
Last year Dr Hood tried to impose on the scholars of Oxford - the most self-driven group of people on the planet - performance-related pay and other anal corporate horrors, but the academics sensibly refused. Today they are being asked to vote to surrender their autonomy. On behalf of every scholar who loves academic freedom, for whom Oxford and Cambridge are lodestars, I ask them to "just say no".
Dr Hood says his new council will streamline decision-taking, yet he concedes that its decisions could be reversed by Congregation (the assembly of Oxford's 3,500 dons). Thus Dr Hood's grand plan is reduced to adding another layer of committees, and another cacophonous voice, to an administrative structure that is already elaborate. Oxford flourishes because, being self-ruling, its rulers prioritise its best interests. Ownership is key to good management, and Oxford should not give it away.
Terence Kealey is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham
Richard Holmes, Shah Alam, Malaysia
This argument is deeply flawed. It is anything but obvious that Oxford and Cambridge are well run; instead the evidence would seem to suggest that money alone doesn't guarantee scientific success. Both universities will always excel because they have a history and brand that will always attract the best scientific talent. The argument for introducing more professional management - and let's be clear, all businesses employ professional managers - is that academics are experts only in their field of study, and rarely do they make good managers.
Paul Morris, London, UK