Is Oxford about to get rid of its Vice-Chancellor?
Charlie Boss looks ahead to a crunch vote by the university’s main legislative body on 14 November which could force Dr John Hood to resign over his plans for modernisation Forget Tony Blair’s problems for a moment — Sir Paul McCartney’s too — and concentrate instead on those of a rather more cerebral national figure: the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, Dr John Hood. Word from the university is that his days in office are numbered.
Dr Hood, a polished 54-year-old New Zealander, has been a controversial figure ever since his appointment in October 2004. That’s hardly surprising. He was, after all, the first vice-chancellor to be headhunted from outside the university’s academic body in its 900-year history. Not only that, but hostility to his election was compounded by the appointment — apparently on Hood’s recommendation — of Julie Maxton, a fellow Kiwi and former colleague, to Oxford’s second most senior position of Registrar.
Congregation, a somewhat motley 3,000strong parliament of dons, has objected to Hood’s plans to reform the university’s governance, published in February last year in his green paper on Academic Strategy. Hood proposed introducing a newly structured ruling council at the top of Oxford’s hierarchy, consisting of a majority of executives brought in from outside the university. The green paper was voted down in May this year by Congregation. It has since been revised and is now to go before Congregation on 14 November as a white paper. If that is also rejected, Hood would seem to have little alternative but to resign.
It’s not all been wailing and whingeing, however. Hood’s popular predecessor Sir Colin Lucas, vice-chancellor of Oxford from 1997 to 2004, has come out in support of Hood’s radical plans. And Hood must have been doing something right: Oxford was placed third in the Times Higher/QS World University Rankings for 2006. But, as Hood acknowledged in his inaugural address, Oxford had achieved its recent success ‘despite persistent and serious fiscal constraints’; and in the university rankings Harvard once again pipped Oxford and Cambridge (second) to the post.
And that’s really the point. One reason Harvard beat Oxford and Cambridge is that it is hugely wealthy. There is a vast financial schism between the American universities and their British counterparts. Harvard’s endowment of just under £14 billion dwarfs the annual funding for all British universities.
When Hood became vice-chancellor, he took responsibility for devising a solution to the widening fiscal and academic gap between Oxford and its Ivy League rivals. To that end he has conducted a worldwide search for the most experienced names in university financing, and last October he appointed Jon Dellandrea in the new role of Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Development and External Affairs). Dellandrea, a Canadian formerly with the University of Toronto, is credited with having raised more than a billion dollars through fundraising during one campaign in 2003.
Without sound financing in place at Britain’s top institutions, American universities threaten to dominate not only those scientific fields where one would expect research levels to correspond directly with investment, but across the board. Recently a big stir was created when Salman Rushdie sold his archive to Emory University in Georgia, an establishment that already possesses the complete manuscripts of the former poet laureate Ted Hughes. Reform and financial incentives of the sort envisaged by Hood are essential to attract modern writers, in all disciplines, to archive their works in Oxford and not abroad.
The Vice-Chancellor has a head for figures. A Rhodes Scholar at Worcester College, he has spent most of his life in industry, where he achieved considerable success with corporations ranging from Fletcher Challenge to the New Zealand Sports Foundation. When in 1999 he was appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Auckland, his critics felt that his industrial background would not be suitable in academia. Yet his application of corporatestyle governance on the university worked. Peter Gluckman, director of Auckland’s Liggins Institute, has credited Hood with saving the University of Auckland from being ‘a place which had its head up its ivory-tower behind’.
It was for precisely this reason that Oxford poached him. The university has too frequently rested on its laurels, believing tradition and history to be a substitute for ambition and profitability. Even so, Hood’s attempts at reforming the university’s governance have met with a surprising level of hostility. Virtually every one of his proposals during his two-year tenure has been systematically ridiculed and then rejected.
The chief problem here is that the body asked to approve Hood’s reforms, Congregation, is the very body that stands to lose out by them. Had Congregation passed Hood’s green paper, power would have passed from the dons’ hands to a council consisting largely of business executives. The dons would also have had to face regular appraisals of their performance by ‘line-managers’. Perhaps it is no wonder that they threw out the proposals (though, as it happens, only by 200 votes on a turnout of 500).
Congregation have spoken of Hood ‘pulling down the history of 800 years’ but this is surely emotionally charged talk, and also short-sighted. It is true that appraisal might lead dons towards ‘rebalancing’ their work load, forgoing teaching time in favour of more profitable research projects. It is equally true that students are right to think that their student loans will be stretched even further as a result of increased tuition and top-up fees. But these are short-term pitfalls. In the longer term, a failure to take responsibility for improving the university’s financial situation can only lead to disaster. Hood’s manoeuvring of Oxford towards a greater emphasis on research and higher student debts is the price of preserving a position among the world’s top universities.
With Oxford facing budget deficits of an estimated £200 million, confronting the issue of long-term financing cannot be postponed indefinitely. It may seem ludicrous that Hood is forced to appeal to the university’s employees in order to structure a fiscal plan for its future. Nevertheless Hood is in the hands of Congregation, and if the dons decide to reject his plans again, he will be faced with a choice of offering his resignation or continuing in an untenable position. Professor Averil Cameron, Warden of Keble College and a Hood supporter, may be right to suggest a ‘whiff of conspiracy’ within Oxford’s academic community. As long as Oxford’s decision-making process takes place in the cloisters and not in the boardroom, spectators can anticipate with glee another eye-catching fall from grace. The only question on this occasion is whether it would be Hood’s demise we were watching, or Oxford’s.
Charlie Boss has just graduated from Oxford and is this year’s winner of the university’s Clive Taylor Prize for sports journalism.
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