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The special resolution read as follows:
That this House
(a) endorse the development of the School of Management Studies, to be renamed the Said Business School in the event of a benefaction from Mr Said being forthcoming, through the construction of a new building on the Oxford station forecourt site on the broad terms and conditions set out in the explanatory note to this resolution and in the decree published with this resolution;
(b) agree, subject to the acquisition by the University of the freehold of the site, to allocate a site of up to 2.4 acres for the construction of a building for the school if planning consent for the building is given; and
(c) endorse the terms of the decree set out [in Gazette, 29 May 1997] which Council will make if the resolution is approved.
¶ Because of the need to publish the report as soon as possible, in order to enable the postal vote to be held before the Long Vacation, speakers have not been given the usual opportunity to correct mistranscriptions or minor errors, etc. in the record of their remarks. The special resolution was carried on a division [For, 342; against, 55]. As fifty members of Congregation then demanded a postal vote, however, the approval of the special resolution was not confirmed.
Ballot papers for the postal vote will be sent to members of Congregation immediately after the publication of this Supplement and must be returned to the Registrar not later than 4 p.m. on Friday, 4 July, the date fixed by Mr Vice-Chancellor for holding the vote.
The study of business and management is now a part of the University. Is it logical to suppose that it is proper to study the practice of business in past centuries or even in the 1960s and yet not proper to study it in the contemporary world? Is it logical to suppose that it is proper to contribute to the formation of doctors, lawyers, clergymen, engineers, chemists, civil servants, and others who bring benefits to the world in which we live, and yet that it is not proper to contribute to the formation of those who engage on the great business of production and exchange in the world in which we live? Is it logical to suppose that we wish to communicate the values and accumulated knowledge that are ours to some of those who shape the condition and progress of our society, but not to others? Would such distinctions properly respect the essence of our purpose?
The question before you today, therefore, is not whether there should be a Management School. It exists already. The question is whether it will flourish and grow with necessary speed into a school of great international reputation. It is Council's view that Mr Said's generous proposed benefaction will allow that to happen. It is therefore also Council's view that this proposed establishment of a Said Business School represents a most significant opportunity for the realisation of a substantial item of agreed university policy.
There is of course a history to this proposal. We are all aware that an earlier version was rejected by Congregation in November 1996. The proposal now before you has been modified in crucial and substantial respects. Council would wish me to make three preliminary points. First, many criticisms of Council were offered at that time. Council believes that a reading of this new text will easily reveal that it has listened, that it has taken account of what was said in Congregation, and that it has produced the necessary modifications through discussion with Mr Said. The new proposal has been debated and refined by the appropriate committees; it has been examined and re-examined on several occasions by both the General Board and Council. Both Council and the General Board support it.
Second, Council wishes to express its warm gratitude to Mr Said for his continuing commitment to the project of a Business School in Oxford in the months following last November's vote. Council wishes to emphasise also his responsiveness to the University's need to modify significant parts the agreement.
Third, it may be that in the course of this debate questions will be raised about the meaning of parts of the decree and explanatory note or about Mr Said's intentions. Council believes that Congregation should see the changes brought to the texts by agreement with Mr Said as a powerful indicator of a beneficent intention and future practice in regard of the Business School and the University.
Let me now turn to the text of the explanatory note and the decree. You will have read the text; you will be familiar with the issues which have been widely commented upon last November and subsequently. So, I will concentrate here most especially upon the parts that are new, upon the revisions introduced in light of the objections raised in Congregation in November.
First, the site. The proposal is to build the new Business School on the present car-park in front of the railway station. Let me emphasise that this site was not available when the original proposal was drawn up. As the explanatory note states, the site is a most favourable location for the construction of a visible, high-prestige building at a principal point of entry to the university area. In sum, whereas the Mansfield Road site was seen by many in Congregation to involve the removal of an amenity and the disavowal of a promise, this site must be seen as offering the rehabilitation of a post-industrial eyesore.
Furthermore, it was objected that the previous proposal effectively transferred ownership of university land to the Said Foundation and required the University eventually to repurchase it in certain circumstances. In the decree before you, on the contrary, the land remains in the ownership of the University. In the event that the building ceases to be used as a business school, then the University and the foundation can agree an alternative use. This is what one hopes that reasonable people would do. If for any reason they cannot agree, then the University may acquire the building minus whatever proportion represents funding derived from other sources. But the University is not obliged to do so; it may, if it chooses, wait until the expiry of the lease and may agree a rent during that time.
Finally, the University will commit itself to the purchase of only about two-and-a-half acres of the station site. The remaining approximately one-and-a-half acres will be acquired by the foundation for eventual expansion needs of the Business School. In effect, the foundation will hold this property as land bank for the University at no present cost to the University, since it has right of first refusal in the case that no expansion occurs.
The explanatory note makes plain that there are costs associated with this initiative. Council must be clear with Congregation about this. These costs derive in part from the introduction of VAT on new university building since Congregation last debated this matter, in part from the diversion of one-tenth of the proposed benefaction to acquire the ancillary site, and in part from fees and consequential costs. This sum may well be reduced by abatements, but Council would not wish to offer that as certainty to Congregation. However, Council is confident - and when I say confident, I do not mean that Council is not confident -Council is confident that the sum will be reached through fund raising. Council offers as evidence the fact that another benefactor is giving very positive consideration to a gift that would cover a significant part of the funding gap, provided that this House gives unstinted support to this resolution and provided also that the building does not outrage his sense of what is architecturally admissible. Finally, Council does not believe that this initiative will distort the fund-raising effort of the University. On the contrary, there is good reason to think that this project will attract donors who would not support any other project in the University. Let me turn now to issues of governance. It was over these that many members of Congregation expressed concern in November. Council would wish, first of all, to draw your attention to clause 2 of the proposed decree. As the explanatory note states, it is Mr Said who desired the insertion of this clause and its location at the head of the decree. He did so precisely in order to clarify his intentions and those of his trustees:
`Notwithstanding any provisions of this decree the academic direction and day-to-day management of the School shall be entirely and exclusively the responsibility of the University.'
That is explicit; that is clear. Any ordinary reading of that clause would lead one to conclude that the foundation thus explicitly divests itself of any power to intervene in the academic business of the Business School that might happen to be implied elsewhere in the decree.
Second, concern was expressed in November over the composition of the body of Trustees of the Business School. At that time, the benefactor and his nominees outnumbered those of the University by six to four. This was seen by some members of Congregation to be a basis for limiting the academic freedom of the Business School and, thus, of the University. The composition of the body of Trustees in this present proposed decree is different. The Vice-Chancellor and the university representatives number four; the benefactor and his representatives equally number four. The balance is made up of two eminent persons from business or finance. Their independence derives from the source of their appointment: the one by the President of the CBI and the other by a similar figure to whom an approach is under way (by way of illustration, let me add in parentheses that the original intention had been to ask the Governor of the Bank of England but he, with a striking sense of timing, had shortly before declared his intention to refuse all such invitations in future).
Does this change make a crucial difference? Yes, it does. These persons are independent. The benefactor is drawing his trustees from among prominent persons of public service, finance, business, and academia. It is not reasonable to suppose that they are devoid of independence of judgement or ability to be persuaded by sound argument. But let us suppose that a clear difference of opinion did emerge between the two groups or else that some unforeseen successors did not possess their qualities. It is not reasonable to suppose that the two independent trustees must necessarily also share the opinion contrary to that of the University or must necessarily be as inferior in quality as the hypothetical successors. The university representatives would have to convince by sound argument only one of these independent trustees in order to prevent any curtailment of academic freedom.
At what points does the body of Trustees touch the Business School in a manner that might alarm Congregation? The most sensitive point may well be the right to approve the appointment of the Director, which you will find in clause 13 of the proposed decree. Council does not enter into the path laid out in the proposed decree in the expectation that the benefactor and his Trustees have the intention to interfere in a manner which the University would deem unwelcome or improper. As I have said, Council believes that the benefactor and his Trustees have given ample and tangible evidence of their intentions over the last few months. None the less, for the sake of argument, let us suppose that there is an irreconcilable difference between the University's representatives and the benefactor and his Trustees. The Director will, of course, be an established academic: presumably a professor either from within the school or recruited to it. That appointment is entirely for the University: the decree gives the foundation no hand in that, although Congregation has allowed benefactors or their representatives to sit on electoral boards. Therefore, there is no question here of the appointment of an academically unsuitable person. In the second place, Council would wish me draw your attention once again to clause 2. However, were reference to clause 2 not able to resolve a difference of view between the two sets of Trustees, the University's representatives would expect to convince the independent Trustees of the soundness of their arguments, and by the soundness of their arguments. Indeed, if they could not do so, one might think that would be reason to pause and consider the soundness of the arguments. But let us suppose that the case is sound yet it does not convince. At that point, there is nothing in the decree that obliges the University to appoint a Director. It could quite properly appoint an Acting Director from among the established staff until such time as harmony reappeared in the foundation.
However, this is an extreme scenario. Council would not propose to Congregation a relationship that it saw to be essentially adversarial. None the less, Council believes that this does show that even in the extreme the academic freedom of the University is not at risk in this proposal, that the University's hands are not tied. On the contrary, Council believes that establishment of the Said Business School by this decree would bring close to achievement a major objective of agreed university policy without threat to the integrity of the University's freedom.
Mr Vice-Chancellor, I beg to move the resolution.
As I judged the debate when I went home on 5 November, there were two main issues. There was the issue of the site, on which the Master of Balliol has already spoken. I think it is marvellous in a way that what was previously a very controversial site, about which many of us felt misgivings, should have been transformed into a site which is so obviously of benefit not only to the University but also to the City of Oxford. It makes a marvellous new western entry into the university town. There have been fears expressed to me, and I am sure to others, about what will happen to the LMS site, the old station that was there. Many of us in our childhood remember it actually being quite an active station, but it is now a Grade II listed building which is scarcely adorned by the tyres and other things surrounding it. People have been anxious about the fate of this building, and I think it is important to know that those fears have been recognised: something will be done about the LMS station, whether it is kept in place (which seems to be very unlikely) or whether it is moved elsewhere, where it can perhaps be better seen, in fact certainly be better seen, than it is today. The University is already in touch with English Heritage and with the Oxford planning authorities about that.
So that was the first question, the question of the site, and I believe that that problem has been triumphantly resolved. There is then the question of control, over which the Master of Balliol has said a lot of very sensible things. I think it very important that clause 2 should be fully read and understood. I just add in addition that the benefactor will have one representative out of nineteen or twenty on the Committee for the School, which already has outside representation, and he will have one representative out of the twenty-eight on the Council for the School. There have also been fears that in a more polarised and commercial society, rich benefactors may come to control universities or exercise some malign, self-interested influence upon them. This cannot be so in the present case. I think the University's lawyers have done an excellent job. Academic freedom, as you have heard, is nowhere at risk; the tail cannot wag the dog.
Those were the two principal objections, but I also thought there was a point that needed more clearly to be spelt out, and that is about the academic work of the school. This is clearly of prime importance, and I think that we need to underline its interdisciplinary character. That is of course one of the reasons why the school should be in central Oxford. The school is not about teaching people how to make money; it is rather about the study of the character and functioning of the engines of modern society. As the Master of Balliol said, if historians study the same thing in the thirteenth century, it seems strange that they should not be able to study it in the present or indeed in the century which now awaits us. It therefore covers and is linked with questions of law, environment, economics, psychology, and sociology, and probably other things as well. I think that above all it must have the ability to understand and respond to change, because the Business School, like this and any other university, is in many respects at the cutting edge of the way in which we regard modern society and the modern economy, the way in which we are teaching about it, and the way in which we want people to go forth from this University equipped to cope with those particular problems.
I think, Mr Vice-Chancellor, that it is very important that this debate should focus on the essentials. In Oxford, scrutiny of texts can sometimes be an art form, but I rather doubt if this Congregation is the place for it. At stake is an important component of the future University, that is to say our University. Consultation will of course continue. It is not just a one-off affair before the present documents were put to Congregation. Many problems can be dealt with when the machinery is actually agreed and can be set in place. As everyone who has had to run anything knows very well, the arrangements that are laid down need to be handled with discretion and flexibility when it comes to making things work. And of course we want to give the Business School the same quality and above all the creativeness which have made Oxford what it is.
Members of Congregation, there is no third chance. We are lucky to have had a second chance. Let us decide this afternoon once and for all.
Mr Vice-Chancellor, I beg leave to second the resolution.
Since the Warden of Green College has put a little bit of autobiography into his speech, I hope you will forgive me explaining how it came about that I of all people, a medieval historian, thought he could see a hole in the dyke wall. It goes back to last 5 November, or rather to late July when we first heard about the Business School project. I said everything I had to say in Congregation on 5 November. The first thing that I saw was that it seemed to me somehow all a surprise; the site and everything seemed a surprise. I just asked a few questions and found out quite a lot about the new Business School; and it seemed to me that it was wrong, as I said in that Congregation. Eventually, everybody (rather to my surprise) agreed with me; I did not know if they would.
But in the course of that inquiry a few things emerged also about the school's constitution. Like most people, I hate small print, but a few obvious things stood out: the fact that the benefactor's money, £20 million, was not being given to the University at all, as the newspapers said, but to a foundation, of whose ten Trustees the University appointed a minority, and to which the University was committed to pay pound for pound. I was also a bit worried that high, City-type salaries at the school might upset the precarious balance that universities achieve anyway in this field. So I threw some of these things in to my speech, too; and, to my surprise, other members of Congregation stood up from the floor and said more under this last heading, the constitution, with much more knowledge than I. And more than one member of Congregation has told me since that it was this, the constitutional question, that decided his vote that day.
So then we heard that the Business School team had gone away and looked for another site, that a long trawl was made to find a site acceptable to Mr Said, and that eventually a choice had been made for this one near the station. I confess I was relieved. A decent building on the LMS site seemed not at all a bad idea and from many points of view a positively good one.
But there had been people uneasy about the constitution before, so I took a look at it; and here again was favourably impressed. There was clause 2, which has been quoted by the Master of Balliol, standing right at the front of the decree. That was the main thing. They have done good work, I thought. The rest did not matter too much but I read through it, with its complicated clauses about leasings-back and repurchases, and I read, too, the long explanatory note, and noticed especially the arrangement about salaries where an attempt had clearly been made to square a circle. My first reaction, while I did not understand much of the document, was that Congregation had had its say and won important concessions, and the hard-working Hebdomadal Council had looked after the University's proper concerns very well.
Or seemed to have done. Because I still wondered, I consulted a lawyer. In all I have consulted altogether four lawyers: three professors from our own colleges and one, a longstanding friend, a City lawyer who had acted for years for another major British university in defending its academic autonomy against government, and who offered to look over the decree and the related documents. I suddenly realised why we pay lawyers such a lot of money. All four saw what I had only vaguely suspected. They saw broadly the same things if with different degrees of emphasis, and all were critical. The gist was that the decree was badly drafted, both `full stop' and from the particular point of view of the University, while considerable skill was conceded to the lawyers acting for the benefactor. (I hasten to say at this point that if I speak of bad drafting, throughout my speech I do not want to criticise anybody because I would probably have done it much worse myself. I think there have been big pressures which I shall come to explain later.) It was this remark that catapulted me from my chair. Echoing an idea expressed in the November Congregation, I thought, `Here we are, preparing to teach the whole world how to do business and we cannot, apparently, even draft a decent school statute.' Not a promising start.
That is all preliminary, said to help you evaluate what comes now. If you have brought your Gazettes with you, you may wish to refer to the clauses as I mention them, but I shall repeat the relevant clauses anyway for the sake of the others. If I speak critically, let me repeat that this is not a matter of personalities, any more than of subjects. It is a question of structures. If Mr Said were a lecturer in medieval history and it were the Murray Business School Foundation, the arguments would be identical. Nor would it matter if the discipline taught in the school were not management studies, but French literature, chemistry, or Islamic studies.
To instill a sense of awe at what we are about to do, let me ask you to look at clause 18. It says what we are about to do is irrevocable, without permission from another body. At a hasty glance our text seems to say the opposite. The explanatory note on this point says it is recognised `that the University must be in a position to amend its own legislation ... and it is envisaged that this will be achieved through the operation of clause 18 of the decree'. Yet what clause 18 actually does is to put a veto on our power to revise our own decree. It reads:
`This decree may be modified and/or replaced in whole or in part by further decrees or statutes provided that the Trustees of the Said Business School Foundation shall first have approved the modification or replacement.'
This mismatch between the apparent promises of the explanatory note and the substance of the relevant clause is not untypical. Clause 18 puts a veto on our legislative power. If this does not constitute an erosion of the University's authority I hope someone will show me what does.
But now let us get to the core of the document, the matter of academic autonomy. I repeat clause 2:
`Notwithstanding any provisions of this decree the academic direction and day-to-day management of the School shall be entirely and exclusively the responsibility of the University.'
This is the clause that (I suspect) made us all feel so comfortable, however little of the rest we understood. Well, I have to tell you on unanimous legal advice that it should not. Even if we did no more than reread the clause itself we might sense danger: `Why should there be any provision contrary to this clause?' and `Which would a court uphold, if there were?'
In the context of our decree this clause is in fact `pure window-dressing' (to use the expression of my City lawyer who has advised universities). Why was it put in? We may speculate. For lovers of academic freedom, anyway, its effect is the opposite of what they intended because it lulls the reader into false security. It is like those lovely clouds we see below us from an aeroplane, which look so like cotton wool that if you jumped out they would support you. They would not. Nor does clause 2.
Let me illustrate this by one of many possible examples. Suppose you were a Lecturer in Management Studies and applied, say, for a readership in the school. You are lucky and are summoned for interview. But what is your surprise when you open the door and see, sitting in front of you, as chairman of the interviewing panel, the benefactor. `But, but ...' you would stutter. No buts about it. Our University Statutes - which I did not ask you to bring because it would not fit in your pocket - say (on p. 302) that the policy and supervision of the School of Management Studies, including recommendations to the University's General Board for appointments to the school's own readerships, are in the hands of a body called the School Committee. This committee (we read in another clause of the Statutes) has between sixteen and nineteen members, one of whom - if you now look at the proposed new decree you have in your hand, clause 16 - is appointed by the benefactor. He can appoint himself.
But this would never happen, you will say. But it certainly could happen, and law is concerned with possibilities. You may be wondering at this point how the provision I have described can coexist in the same decree as clause 2 with its `Notwithstanding ... [etc.]'. Are the two provisions not contradictory? Formalistically not, for what has happened here is that the benefactor has become part of the University by the mere act of sitting on the School Committee, which he has power to do, so `the University' still has exclusive responsibility for the school's `hands-on' academic management. Down through those cotton-wool clouds we go. (That is true, as you heard from the Warden of Green College, of a lot of other committee members, but I am taking one example.)
You may think this detail, that the benefactor can appoint one member of the School Committee, and possibly himself, is a small item and should be overlooked, not least in the light of the character of the present benefactor, who can clearly be trusted not to behave in the way I have described. (I think I should add that every word of praise that I hear for the kindness and consideration of Mr Said puts me more on my guard against the nature of this decree, because not everybody is necessarily kind and understanding. I will mention one other feature of the decree in a moment which will, I think, bring that more to our attention.) But a point like this is in the end not small. It is like one dislodged brick in a big building or in the sea wall I mentioned before. It cannot but get bigger as the weather and the waves beat. Law in practice inevitably evolves by precedent, and this, in the context it is set in, is unprecedented. Next time it would not be.
There are other points in the decree where the same consideration applies, but the one to which I especially direct your attention is about the appointment of the school's Director, the head of the whole institution. The University of Oxford has a fairly standard machinery for making appointments to academic posts, including high ones like this. An appointing committee is set up, representing the University as a whole. It is headed, say, by the Vice-Chancellor, and draws from the faculty or faculties with the relevant expertise and within which the appointment lies. The power of nominating to the committee rests within the University except with medical professorships where the professor is also a hospital doctor, and then the local Health Authority nominates one or sometimes two members of the appointing committee. A donor who has funded a post not uncommonly has his views represented on the appointing committee by one member nominated by the University `after consultation with' that donor. That happens, for instance, with the Rupert Murdoch Professorship of Language and Communication and the BP Professorship of Information Engineering. To read through the University Statutes on this subject is to sense a happy harmony between the parties involved. The University decides, but giving heed to parties with a proper interest.
When we come to the Director of the Business School there is a deeply unsettling difference. I would say, in answer to the Warden of Green College, that although the study of the minutiae of texts is a specialisation in the University, it is also a specialisation of the Chancery Court, where those who do the examination are paid very much higher salaries than most of us who do it. And the Chancery Court is where this sort of thing might end up. May I ask those of you with Gazettes to look at clause 13 of the decree? The second half of it reads:
`The appointment of the Director shall be made by Council, on the recommendation of the General Board, after consultation with the Peter Moores Foundation [which pays the Director's salary] and with the approval of the Said Business School Foundation...'
The clause adds, `such approval not to be unreasonably withheld', whatever that might mean to a court if a dispute should arise, and however much it might cost to prove it one way or the other. In a word, the foundation has not just the nomination of one member of the committee, or the right to be consulted about one member. It has an absolute veto on the appointment itself. It is worth turning to the explanatory note on this clause. It says: `Council and the General Board have endorsed these arrangements [i.e. those I have just quoted] and are confident that they will work satisfactorily.' With respect to the Master of Balliol, I have got to say that when I saw that, I thought, `Why do they say they are confident that it will work satisfactorily, if they really are confident?' They should not be confident, because for the first time since we became a University in the modern sense, independent of Church and State, the University has allowed a private body outside itself to veto an appointment. This arrangement is unprecedented, and by endorsing it you will be releasing a new and uncontrollable element in university law, one which can only have the effect of eroding the corporate identity which allows our research and teaching to function. And remember, once you pass it, you cannot revoke it without permission from another body.
There are many other provisions in the decree that invite comment, like those complicated parts about money and buildings. Others may wish to comment on these property clauses and their financial implications. My own wish is to concentrate on the fundamentals of the university constitution.
I will end with one more fundamental. The benefactor's place on the foundation belongs to the benefactor `or his successor in title' (clause 3). Now `successor in title' is in England a Common Law expression normally used in respect of property, and implies that the attached rights can be passed by inheritance, gift, or sale, and this to an individual, a partnership, or a corporation. So the benefactor's place on the foundation could be sold to, say, a big American corporation. Now the question arises whether this also applies to the other rights given to the benefactor in the document. I can only say that I have taken one or two opinions here and there is a considerable opinion to say that the clauses would not make sense if any other construction were put on that first mention, and if this did not apply throughout the document. That would mean that the young lecturer going for his job interview in, say, seventy years' time, could, by the present decree, be interviewed by the representative of a big overseas corporation that had bought the right. This may or may not be likely but it is certainly possible; law is concerned with possibilities; and this law is meant to last a long time.
And you are being asked to pass this decree irrevocably as far as your own authority is concerned. The decree has embedded in it principles never before accepted by this University. Although I have kept myself in `purdah' for some ten days to study this decree, I cannot wholly escape news from the rest of the world, and understand that our Hebdomadal Council fought nobly to have these offending principles removed, up to the last hours before the Gazette went to press. But the benefactor would not agree.
I shall finish with two remarks about gifts, and first about gifts and modern universities. Our difficulties this afternoon are partly the outcome of a problem no one, I believe, has recognised, and which affects all parties to our present debate. Last time round we were all comparing the benefactor's gift with past gifts to the University and saying how big it was. Quite right, except that it was not to the University. But we should have looked to the future. We turned that offer down and some people said no one would ever make a gift to Oxford again, but soon afterwards we heard of other gifts to this or that institution. And Bill Gates's gift to Cambridge is one that comes recently to mind. That has to be the trend, because money has been globalised. Electronics, and the dropping of exchange controls, have combined to send £20 million round the world in exchange dealings every few seconds, day and night, and the result for universities is twofold. On the one hand, like all public institutions from governments downwards, universities have to pinch and scrape. On the other, some individuals, doubtless meritorious, become astronomically rich. One person could now buy a university, like a Van Gogh. This only matters if you believe a university is not like a Van Gogh but a place for the formation of minds, and is there to serve the whole of a society not just one part or sector of it; and that, like a bodily organ - a heart, say, or a liver - it can only serve the whole if its own functions are kept distinct. If you do believe this, it is more important than ever, because of the pressures I have identified, to guard its autonomy.
My second reflection on gifts is quite abstract and akin to some of Professor Kay's own published reflections. A gift and a purchase are two quite different things. But the same is not true of a conditional gift. A conditional gift stands to purchase as genus to species. That is, a purchase is a kind of conditional gift. And this means that the moment a condition is attached to any gift, it begins to creep conceptually along the scale towards a purchase, with a buyer and a seller, a bargain, and a price. The present negotiation, with all its conditions attached, has (it seems to me) moved several steps along this scale, and in that degree we have to ask ourselves, is the University getting a fair bargain? I do not mean just in money, or even in quantifiable services like maintaining buildings; but in our identity as a university, with the principles that have made us what we are and in some degree made civilisation what it is.
A few days ago I was shown a German magazine with pictures of Oxford in it, and it referred to us, as if there was no need to argue the case, as `the world's most famous university'. A few months ago the government spent a lot of taxpayers' money proving we were the best university in the United Kingdom, which we knew anyway. That is us. It is an awesome thought, and more awesome if we recall that it is not we who made it so, though we may have contributed, but many generations of our predecessors, not least those who, in my own childhood, came here to take refuge from universities under external pressure and whose sacred rules were broken. We are what we are because our predecessors respected the rules we are being asked to break now, by relinquishing the authority of this University to another body with different aims and principles, and including that of an hereditary or transferable right in its make-up, including the membership of an academic committee on grounds other than impartial selection of the most suitable. The proposed school will be taking degrees of our University and sharing our resources, yet the University has been excluded from fundamental aspects of the school's governance. We are being asked to remove stones from the dyke wall that gives academic life its special identity and permits it to function. This is the last moment at which we have it in our power to insist that the offending principles be removed from the statute before we pass it. I hope we will use that power. Or are we, under the eyes of the world, going to give it away for ever and betray our inheritance?
My one clear memory of those discussions is the occasion, in each of those discussions, when the potential benefactors, the potential donors, made it clear that they not merely accepted but volunteered the position that they would have no right to be counted amongst the electors or selectors, that they had no voice or vote in the appointment of the beneficiary of their donation. And I remember a feeling of joy that this was a principle so widely understood and accepted that it could pass without discussion, and indeed on the basis of being volunteered by the donors. So I ask myself what this decree before you this afternoon says to such donors; and it appears to me that it says some donors have the right not only to be counted among the electors but to arrange that the University itself will have only a minority voice in approving the final selection for the directorship, which is a thoroughly academic as well managerial position. (The duties of the director include - I am quoting from clause 3 [i.e. of Ch. III, Sect. LIII, Statutes, 1995, p. 301] - `original work and teaching'.) And it says that some donors have a de facto veto, a de jure veto, over the change of the decree in any respect. Such change requires not simply the approval of the foundation, but the fourth-fifths majority approval of the foundation and thus the approval of the benefactor, his agents, and/or his and their successors in perpetuity, which will lend great force additionally to the presence of the benefactor or his or its agent as a member of the governing committee of the school.
It appears to me that the decree, with the best will in the world, presents us with an odious dilemma. Either Business Studies are something different, perhaps a mock academic subject, a sort of sham academic affair, and so the normal principles of academic independence and autonomy do not apply to Business Studies, which run in a kind of dim half-light on the margins of the University. That, I am confident, is not the basis on which we wish to explain our decree to other donors. The alternative is that this University does no longer uphold the principles and practices of academic autonomy in the way that they have been understood and were understood by the three sets of donors with whom I had my discussions, and that we will surrender those well-understood principles to any donor who pushes hard enough on something that we at that time regard as urgent enough. Is there some escape from this unsavoury pair of alternatives? Can we say, `Well, Business Studies are indeed genuinely academic, but also very practical'? No: the Master of Balliol recited to you a long list, and fully justified list, of subjects which are eminently practical as well as eminently academic, and there is no need for me to repeat that list, which began with medicine and law but proceeds for sure through big physics and biology and mathematics and almost every subject.
So that argument, that Business Studies is simply too practical to be left to normal academic principles, will not impress donors. Should we say that this donor is after all, when all is said and done, a very big donor, and that is what makes the difference? Well, this is not and will not be a uniquely large donation. Of greater interest, I venture to think, to potential donors will be that this is not the gift, the benefaction, of 100 per cent or even of 50 per cent of the project for which it is intended. It is a donation, generous I trust, of 45 per cent at its high-water mark. In a few decades it will be much less than 45 per cent because, astonishingly as I think, clause 12 of the decree provides that for the next 300 years the University will keep up this building, keep it insured, decorated, repaired, upgraded to meet changes in legislation, and so forth: for 300 years. So before long the benefactor's contribution will be a rather smaller fraction of the cost of the project. Yet he and his successors in perpetuity (we have no idea who will be his successors, or what they will be) retain undiminished their de facto veto and their weighty (weighted by those vetoes) voice and vote in our counsels.
And so I believe the dilemma remains. Either Business Studies are publicly branded today as inherently sub-academic, marginal, second-rate, or this University's concern for its own autonomy is to be sharply demoted to the second-rate. May I emphasise that the tail can wag the dog? The Master of Balliol has his himself emphasised that if everybody on the university side votes together and can persuade all the independent persons, then we can squeeze by, we can get through. Is that the way that we are in future to regard autonomy and independence, as something where we have a bare majority or minority plus the hope of persuading other non-academic persons?
Will we prejudice Management Studies if we say `no' to this decree this afternoon? I am confident myself that we will not. Already our authorities are confident that they can raise a sum equal to or greater than Mr Said's. We are legislating, as Mr Murray said, for a very long time, and as the flysheet has reminded us, we already have a school which few in the world can match. The necessary speed which the Master of Balliol referred to can be kept up. Do we signal to the world that we are in any way opposed to Management Studies, or that we treat donors capriciously? For my part I am confident that it will be well within the abilities of Council, the professional abilities of our colleagues in Management Studies and of others, to explain to all who are genuinely interested, and to the many potential donors both for Management Studies and for other subjects, that we reject this decree, and if need be this benefaction, because we are unwilling to change the basic principles of academic independence and responsibility, and unwilling to brand Management Studies a marginal, second-rate subject, and unwilling in the end to depend upon a donor who will not distinguish clearly between a business deal and a benefaction.
I beg to oppose the motion.
However, given the procedure which the opponents have chosen to follow, I am afraid that I have no alternative but to go through the objections raised, one by one, and to demonstrate that they are entirely without foundation. I will try and be brief. But I must apologise that, since the opponents have provided no advance warning of their concerns, my responses will be less considered and coherent than they might otherwise have been.
The image which the opponents would like to convey is of a University faced with an intransigent benefactor being forced to accept a benefaction which threatens the integrity, independence, and financial well-being of the University. Nothing could be further from the truth. The benefactor has been a remarkably loyal and dedicated supporter of the University, not just to Management Studies but to numerous areas of the University. He has responded to the concerns raised in last November's Congregation debate in a constructive and co-operative fashion to a point at which they have all now been addressed. He has never intended to be involved in the academic activities of the school, and that point has now been clarified. The University will not get a better donor or a better donation.
The terms of the benefaction merely reflect existing practice in the school and in the University at large. There is currently no trust deed, and points of drafting will of course be taken into consideration when it is written. But there are no points of substance in what has been raised today.
I will begin by considering the question of the directorship. Let me clarify the position. The Director will be appointed by Council on the recommendation of the General Board in the normal way. Neither the foundation nor the benefactor will be represented on an electoral board, as happens for some other university appointments. The benefactor has explicitly stated that he does not wish to be involved in the selection process. One candidate will be offered for approval by the foundation, a foundation which has equal representation from the University and the benefactor and two trustees appointed by prestigious independent organisations in business or finance. When would approval not be granted? When the elected person does not command the international standing which is required of someone appointed to the post. Does this set a dangerous precedent of outside interference? Of course not; it is a very weak form of approval. It is very difficult to think of a circumstance in which it could create a problem, but if it did the Business School could operate perfectly well with an Acting Director appointed from amongst its professoriate.
Let me now turn to the school's committees. Again, let me begin by clarifying the position. The establishment of an Advisory Council was part of the original plans for the school. It was thought helpful, and indeed has been very helpful, for the activities of the school to have representation of four outside members. It is not interference, and the school is free to ignore this advice if it so chooses. This composition has nothing to do with the benefaction. The committee structure, including the Council of the School and the outside representation on the Committee for the School, was set out as part of the original 1990 proposal. The benefactor will have one representative and no special privileges on a council which will have up to sixty people, and one representative and no special privileges on the Committee for the School which has between sixteen and twenty members on it. Appointments and promotions are entirely in the hands of the academic members of the school and the University.
Mr Murray has presented a picture of a collection of chinks which are causing the university armoury to collapse. All that Mr Said is seeking to do is to ensure that this project is an overwhelming success. He has no interest in the academic activities of the school and wishes to leave them entirely to the University. He, like us, appreciates that the creation of a world-class business school involves a partnership between business, government, and the University. The provisions regarding the appointment of the Director and representation of outside experts on the school's committees are merely designed to ensure that the Director commands the necessary respect of business, government, and future donors, as well as of the academic community, and that the school can receive adequate counsel from outside. This is only sensible: every other business school has similar committee arrangements, and both the school and the University welcome it.
What about the point that the terms of the benefaction can only be changed by a four-fifths majority? It does not seem unreasonable to say that the terms of the benefaction can only be changed with the agreement of both parties, including the University. This is a normal contractual arrangement and it provides proper protection to both parties, including the University. It does not constitute any diminution of university authority whatsoever.
Reference was made to the running and maintenance costs. It has always been intended that the University should be responsible for the running costs of the building. Furthermore, the terms of the agreement are such that these will fall on the school's income from non-publicly funded courses and not on the rest of the University. The suggestion that as a consequence this is not an exceptionally generous benefaction is, to my mind, an extremely surprising one.
The arrangements which are described in the resolution do no more therefore than encapsulate existing practices in the school and the University. There is no serious objection which can be raised against any of them. Of course there is not. Nor can there be about the academic study of management. I recall that Mr Murray wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement less than a year ago about academics here in the University, indeed in this building today, `I am uneasy to admit into the heart of this particular chosen people, a tribe whose very discipline, I suspect, urges them to worship other gods.' These are the same prejudices as the ones which were voiced in previous generations against the sciences, medicine, geography, engineering, women, and non-conformists. It did this University no pride to expound them then and it does it no pride to expound them again today.
I, like my thirty or so other colleagues, came to Oxford in the belief that it had finally put past doubts behind it and was now firmly committed to a creating a business school of international distinction. We have worked hard to implement the resolution approved by Congregation in 1990 and we have, I believe, achieved a modest amount. At the undergraduate level we have one of the most oversubscribed programmes in the University; at the postgraduate level we have just started an MBA which attracts students of a quality equivalent to those going to the very best North American schools. What the past four years have demonstrated is that Oxford can create a business school of international distinction. We can establish research projects to look at the management of science and technology, the management of the environment, the impact of new technologies on corporate and social organisation, the management of public sector and charitable organisations, the political and economic influences on organisations operating in developing as well as developed countries. We can look at these issues in a way in which no other major business school in Europe can because they do not have the intellectual hinterland on which to draw. But we cannot progress any further without the physical infrastructure to complete the process. Academically, we have made more progress than was originally envisaged, but, physically, we are entirely constrained.
Mr Murray has suggested that it will not do the University great harm to reject this resolution. I beg to differ. The headline which appeared in newspapers after the vote in Congregation last November was, `Oxford rejects business school'. This came as a painful shock to the students and faculty who were under the impression that they had come to a business school in Oxford. The effect of a rejection will be even more pronounced this time. It will no longer be possible to hide behind the pretence of rejecting a site. We should not be surprised if a rejection is interpreted by existing and potential students, employers of our students, collaborators on research projects, donors to every part of this University and every college, as saying, `Oxford turns its back on business and government and has no interest in the questions of the day.' It will suggest that the management of the University, its faculty, the General Board, and the Hebdomadal Council cannot handle their own affairs and it will deprive the City of Oxford of the opportunity of renovating an eyesore in an important part of town. I am sure that Mr Murray will wish to make a virtue of the outcome and I do not wish to appear to appear alarmist, but I do not think that we should underestimate the lasting damage of a rejection of this motion.
What every leading university in the UK and US, including this University in 1990, has recognised is that they benefit from having business schools of international significance. Without the site and benefaction, Oxford's business school will be an impoverished rival to its main competitors. It will not disappear, there are already too many commitments for that, but it will limp on to the academic embarrassment and financial cost of the University. With the benefaction, the University will have a school of whose academic achievements it will be justifiably proud. That is the choice before Congregation today.
Mr Vice-Chancellor, I beg to support the motion.
I welcome the setting up of the School of Management Studies integrated into the University on the same footing as other disciplines. I support the allocation of the site. However, a couple of remarks. The wording of the explanatory note to the resolution omits to mention a significant problem. The old railway station is, I understand, a Grade II* listed building. Not only will it have to be taken down and moved to a new location, but I understand that this is likely to provoke a public inquiry which could entail considerable delay and expense. Mr Said is in a hurry, and the agreement appears to allow just one year to complete this operation.
Secondly, there are very few sites available in Oxford for expansion. The second part of the site with 1.3 acres of useful area is one of these. It is unknown at this time what the sensible and proper use for that site might be. The proposed arrangement with the Said Foundation means that this site would be effectively frozen out: it would be owned by the foundation, and until such time as it was agreed that it was not to be used for Management Studies or for some other use by the foundation which the University, with its minority representation, might not favour.
I would like to oppose the resolution because I think that the proposed decree is injurious to the goal of a School of Management Studies integrated into the life of the University. The decree is isolationist. It is protectionist. It is inward-looking. It sets Management Studies apart with its own buildings committee, its own council, a trust with a majority of external members clearly designed to build up a separate sense of identity. It will make joint initiatives between Management Studies and other disciplines less likely.
The University is not a commercial organisation; there is no need to tie it hand and foot for 299 years. From the debate on the Mansfield Road proposal Mr Said, and any other benefactor, will know that, when this House binds itself to a long-term agreement, it will stand by it! It has agreed to establish Management Studies. If it were to agree, in addition, to accept an outstanding gift of a magnificent new building on this new site dedicated to Mr Said's name, it would stand by that pledge. Would that not be enough? Further legal restraints add nothing, but subtract much. The convoluted relation between landlord and tenant of this building seems calculated to generate misunderstandings in later years. In particular, as has already been referred to, it appears that after the construction all subsequent costs will be born by the University although it will have a minority representation on the controlling foundation. A recipe for difficulty.
The proposed decree would form a dangerous precedent. If it could find a suitable benefactor, should History have its own external trustees, its own buildings committee? Which is only quorate when the Vice-Chancellor attends? With a Committee for History from which members of Congregation were specifically excluded? And should Physics follow suit? I suggest not. Should we welcome a major benefaction for Chinese Studies if it carried with it a cocoon of external trusts and committees isolating it from the rest of the University? We should not. I suggest that the University should not engage in raising money to encourage fragmentation of its very purpose and ethos in this way.
I support Management Studies. I still hope that Mr Said will understand our problem and join us. Indeed I would implore him to do so. But I urge you to vote against this resolution and the harm it would do to the Oxford ethos and to the successful integration of Management Studies into the University.
The debate we heard last time was of very high quality, and while I then voted in favour of the motion, I recognised the force of the arguments so skilfully deployed and so elegantly presented by Mr Alexander Murray. Those who were present will recall what he then said in opening the opposition to the motion:
`I stand here to oppose the special resolution. I do so only because I understand counter-resolutions are not allowed to special resolutions, which can only be supported or opposed. Otherwise I would have proposed this counter-resolution: that yet further efforts be made to find another site for the Business School. What I am against in this resolution is the site, and the procedure by which a claim has been made on it.'
Well, the University has now done exactly what Mr Murray would have urged it to do; it has made strenuous efforts and it has found a site, a good site, one that is acceptable to the donor and is quite free from the objections to the earlier site made so cogently by Mr Murray and his supporters. In addition, numerous changes to the trust deed have been agreed which substantially reinforce the University's control over its affairs. These have already been presented to you and I need not repeat them. Of course, the control is not total, nor can it be in the creation of a major foundation of this kind; but I believe the major changes that have been agreed provide the reassurances that were rightly demanded at the first meeting.
Concerns have been expressed about some of the legal drafting. I have some experience of this, not merely as an academic commercial lawyer but as one who has practised, full-time and part-time, on both sides of the legal profession for over forty years. It has been objected that clause 18 requires the consent of the foundation to any modification of the agreement. Well of course it does! What would be the point of vigorously negotiating a contract if one party were then left free to change its terms unilaterally? It was said, concerning clause 2, that it was `pure window-dressing'. But contracts frequently contain provisions which may not be strictly necessary but are designed to convey the philosophy of the agreement. It was contended that clause 13 gives the benefactor a right of veto over the appointment of the Director. It does not; consent cannot be withheld without good reason. It was argued that under clause 3 the benefactor could sell his power of veto to, say, an American corporation. But if one were to seek to cover every situation, every contingency, however remote, there would never be an end. Frederick of Prussia thought to solve every legal problem with a code in excess of 19,000 clauses - and was surprised at the lack of enthusiasm with which this was received! The fact is that the lawyers' love of debating is almost as great as their love of talking, which is considerable. There is a medical textbook which describes how to tell the state of a lawyer's health. `If you want to tell the state of a lawyer's health,' it says, `look at his mouth. If it's shut, he's dead!'
There will always be debating points on legal drafting, for language, particularly legal language, is inherently elusive. If, when I die, I am allowed to pass through the gates of Heaven - which my friends assure me is exceedingly unlikely - I shall seek one great favour, and that is to be presented with the perfect draft, for such a thing is not to be found on this earth. If the terms now proposed are interpreted and applied in good faith - and surely none of us would wish to impugn the good faith of either side - then with a little fine tuning no difficulties should arise.
There has been much speculation about the impact of the proposals on potential donors. I have had some experience in raising donations and I cannot see anything in the proposals which would deter prospective benefactors. But I can see grave problems if we rebuff for the second time Mr Said's munificent benefaction.
I cannot match Mr Murray in eloquence or my distinguished colleague Professor Finnis in academic rigour. What I can do, as one who has had no involvement of any kind in the School of Management Studies, is to express my strongly held belief in the immense academic value of this endeavour. We have the opportunity to create an institution that will make this University one of the world leaders in this important field. We are not talking simply of a school of international standing operating within the confines of its own central expertise; we are talking of a school that has the potential to interact with a wide range of other disciplines within the University, enriching them to the benefit of us all and in turn being enriched by their contributions to the intellectual life of the school. Through Mr Said's munificent benefaction we can create a powerhouse of multi-disciplinary learning and scholarship that will add further lustre to this great University.
Mr Vice-Chancellor, I urge this House to give this resolution its whole-hearted support.
A number of points have been made in the name of academic freedom and academic integrity. I want to begin by saying that I and my colleagues in the school are as concerned about academic freedom and academic integrity as anyone in this House, and before being any party to this agreement it was natural for me to go through it carefully, to discuss it with lawyers (and I have done both these things), and to visualise for myself what would happen even in extreme cases. I should say that among the many difficulties and problems which I believe I have to overcome in discharging the task which the University has given me, the danger of my academic integrity or that of my colleagues being impugned by the actions of people under this agreement is so remote as hardly to register on my radar screen.
Let me be specific about the principal points that have been raised. There is clause 18 in the decree. Professor Goode has already dealt with that. What that clause says is that it is not open to one party to this agreement to unilaterally modify it. That, we are told, impugns our academic integrity. Before I took this job I went to see Mr Said; I discussed the benefaction with him; I discussed his objectives in relation to the benefaction with him. It was evident to me in less than ten minutes that Mr Said had no intention of interfering in the academic affairs of the school. I said that at the last debate we had on this issue. However, I understood at that point that many members of Congregation who either had not met Mr Said, or who feared what Mr Said's successors in title, a phrase I shall come to in a moment, might do, wished more reassurance than that. We have now obtained that reassurance in the form of clause 2, which, if you refer to it, explicitly disclaims any such intention:
`Notwithstanding any provisions of this decree the academic direction and day-to-day management of the School shall be entirely and exclusively the responsibility of the University.'
I never had the slightest doubt about that issue. It is now spelt out in black and white, and what we are told by Mr Murray is that we should now be suspicious of the fact that that particular provision was put in.
I fear that for Mr Murray, when one puts in specific provisions they mean the opposite of what they say. When Mr Said says he is determined to maintain our academic autonomy and integrity, this is interpreted to mean the opposite. When we say we are confident we will raise the balance of funding, that is interpreted as meaning the opposite. I have to say we on this side of the House, at any rate, do believe what we say.
Then we were told that our academic integrity was to be impugned by the fact that the position of successor in title was likely to be sold to an American corporation which would apparently wish to pay for the rights to appoint one member to the Council of the School and one member to the Committee of the School. At this point I really find it difficult to believe I am living in a real world, that this debate is intended to be serious. However, I am quite sure that when the final draft of the trust deed is put together, as it will be subsequent to its approval by this House, there will be no difficulty in incorporating, in the provisions of the deed, a provision which precludes the position of benefactor being sold to an American corporation. I think members of this House need have little fear on that point.
Then we were told that a lecturer in the school hoping to be promoted to reader would go in for an interview and find himself faced by the benefactor. Well, as at least most of the members of this House will know, when an application for promotion in this University is made, it is considered by a Distinctions Committee which is appointed by the General Board. The only way in which the benefactor would be there when the lecturer in question went for his interview for promotion would be if he had been appointed for that purpose by the General Board. I am not entirely clear whether in fact the General Board would be free to appoint non-members of the University for this purpose, but again we are dealing with a scenario which is simply impossible.
We are told by Mr Allison about the complicated provisions of the lease. The provisions of the lease arise only in relation to the use of the building. That is, so long as the building is used as a Business School, it remains paid for, maintained, directed, and managed by the University. There is no question of our conducting the affairs of the Business School in a building which is maintained, operated, or managed by any body other than the school and the University.
All of these points are elementary misunderstandings, which could easily have been resolved had those who have opposed this resolution taken the time and shown the courtesy to discuss the matters with those who are putting forward these proposals today. I regard it as extremely unfortunate that they have been brought before Congregation in this way: they are virtually without substantive foundation, and more than that, they represent an attack on the academic integrity and autonomy of me and my colleagues in the Business School for which I hope, these errors having been pointed out, those who have presented these arguments will ultimately have the grace to apologise.
I would like to go on to talk on a much more positive and constructive note, because these points of detail are not the ones which I came along this afternoon to convey to this House.
Seven years ago this University decided that it wished to establish a major international business school. Today we are half-way through the process of setting up that major international business school, and what we are asking you to do this afternoon is to honour the commitment which Congregation made to itself and to us when it passed that resolution in 1990, because you cannot charge us with implementing your decision and deny us the means actually to do so. But I am not simply going to hide behind the fact that Congregation has already approved the establishment of a business school in Oxford University. Although I would emphasise that it has done so, I would reiterate that that decision was, I think, right in 1990 and it is right again today.
A few weeks ago one of our MBA students asked me whether I agreed with him that the achievement of a body like our Business School was to be judged ultimately by the achievement of its students, and I said to him, `Well, I half agree with that.' Certainly I think that judging it by these criteria is better than judging it by how well we are able to fill out HEFCE assessment forms. But it is not just by the achievement of students that a university is to be judged, but by whether they bring to the positions they enjoy through these achievements the intellectual rigour which they have acquired as members of this University. That is the test, or rather that is the combination of tests, by which Oxford in the twentieth century has been such an extraordinary success and has been by any standards one of the world's great universities. It is a fact so commonplace in Oxford that we almost take it for granted, that both the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain today studied at this University. It is not just, I think, that they occupy these positions but that they do bring to these positions at least some of the values that we have sought to inculcate.
That is simply representative of Oxford's extraordinary success over this century in educating people effectively for major positions in the outside world. Why have we been so successful in that? We have been so successful because an earlier generation of scholars in this University 100 years ago modernised the curriculum. They introduced a variety of new degrees in tune with the needs of the modern world. PPE (`Modern Greats') was in a sense the great success among Oxford's innovative courses in the twentieth century. And we have been so successful because there has always been within this University a group of people determined to look outside at the world beyond Oxford.
But that world changes and goes on changing. A century ago there was really no connection between the University and business. Leland Stanford founded a great university but he had never been to one. William Morris, Lord Nuffield, founded a college but he had never been to one. Even twenty- five years ago, a majority of senior executives in British companies had not been to any universities at all. Today that has changed and the large majority have been, and an increasing proportion have had some business education as part of their university studies. Today 60 per cent of the jobs to which our undergraduates go are in industry and commerce. Are we to say that this is a world to which the research we do in this University has nothing to say, that we are unable to demonstrate anything of relevance to that world from the teaching we do here? That is what there are still some people in this House who think, people who point to the world of business and wish to dissociate ourselves from it, people who say, as Mr Murray has said, that their gods are not our gods.
I say to this House that if we wish to go along with that line this afternoon, then we have a University which will be increasing marginalised in a modern world, because the job of a university is not to worship any gods; the job of a university is to tackle whatever problems become of intellectual importance and of intellectual challenge as society and technology evolve. To do that for the affairs of business is not unimportant and it is not, I believe, unworthy of a great university. That is the exercise which Congregation charged me and my colleagues with in 1990 and which we have come to this University in order to discharge. This afternoon we ask for your support in realising that, and I hope you will give it to us.
I am here because of one provision in this document, and that is the provision that gives control over, a veto over, the appointment of a Director of part of this University to a body on which this University is represented only by a minority of members. That seems to me wrong. It seems to me in violation of standards of academic independence that have been nurtured for centuries but that can be lost, particularly in today's climate of opinion, in an afternoon.
We are told not to worry about that provision. We have been told that it contains that marvellous bit of lawyer's boiler-plate, that consent on the part of the board controlled by others will not be unreasonably withheld. I think most lawyers here will join with me in thinking that that is slender protection indeed. A genuine dispute over academic policy would not be an unreasonable ground within the meaning of that phrase. We are also told that in extremis, when the time comes, if things get bad enough the University can evade the terms of the document by appointing an Acting Director who will serve perhaps indefinitely. I would not want to be in a university that was evading the clear intention of a document in that way, and as a lawyer, because I too have practised, I would not long vouch for the security of that provision. I think it would ultimately be seen, even in court, as an evasion.
We are told, too, that we should look to the personality of the donor (and I take this occasion, joining with others, to express my deep gratitude for the prospect of such a gift), that we should look to his personality and his good will. But we should remember that the deciding votes on this board of Trustees are held by people who will be appointed by distinguished commercial organisations (they will be distinguished men of business and men of affairs), and that we should repose some confidence in that fact. But as others have reminded us, this is a document, roughly speaking, for ever. It will last, it is intended to last, for a very long time; and it is not merely a hypothetical exercise, but a near certainty that we must confront right now, that sooner or later one day a set of distinguished business men or women may take a very different view on academic matters than our successors in this University then will take.
So we cannot, I believe, avoid the central issue of academic independence that is posed in that way. What is this central principle? We are told that we need not worry, again, because the donor or his successors in title himself or themselves will only be able to appoint a minority of people on this board, and that there will be independent members whom our representatives can hope to convince. But with respect, I do believe that misses the point: the point is not that others whose interest may be opposed to ours may control this process; the point is that we will not. We and the other great liberal universities around the world enjoy really remarkable independence, independence even from democratic political institutions, independence that no other institution does or should claim. And we hold that remarkable independence on a premise, and that is the premise that we have a single, sole, and undiluted goal, which is to pursue and report the truth as we see it. The addition is important because governments and outsiders may say, `We see the truth more clearly than you do.' That is actually the most dramatic threat over the centuries to academic independence. We reply, `That may be; no doubt from time to time it is so. But the enterprise will not succeed unless we make no exception to the idea that we appoint the directors of our institutions, we appoint them to represent the values and convictions, the academic values and convictions, that are ours, no matter how much those values and convictions may be thought mistaken outside the University.' I dare say that applies as thoroughly to the academic study of business as to any other department of the University.
Mr Vice-Chancellor, I would have thought, I would have hoped at least, that what I have just said went without saying. Many of you will be familiar with the decision of a sister university of ours, Yale University, two years ago, to return a completed gift of $20 million. It had no legal responsibility to do so but when the donor said that he would insist, and thought it only right, that he had some role, some vetoing power over the appointment of academic officers, academic staff, the President of Yale said, `I am returning your money forthwith.' No one, that I remember, doubted that it was right to refuse that request. No one in the discussion doubted that had it been made before the gift, the gift should have been refused. There were voices that said that Yale should have kept the money and told the donor, Mr Bass, that he was seriously mistaken in his expectation. The President of Yale said, `This is too important a matter for us to accept and hold money on any misunderstanding of that sort.' Of course, that hurt: Yale is rich, but not that rich. Of course it will hurt if through our action in declining this motion that leads to the loss of this gift (if, as people tell us, this will happen). Many others have said it will hurt more if we do not refuse the gift.
Mr Vice-Chancellor, I do not believe that is the important point. We and our sister universities around the world are the guardians of what is really a remarkable trust; we are the guardians of privileges and we inhabit a tradition, and it is our responsibility to protect those as zealously as we can, to be pedantic, if you will, in our enthusiasm and protection of those principles central to our organisation. I would find it embarrassing, even shaming, if we were to accept the idea that those principles can be waived if there is enough money on the table.
It is not, I think, as we have had suggested to us, a measure of a trade- off between undesirable features on one side and really positive values on another. I think if you look at most of the items it is a win-win situation. If we consider the school, we have already heard about the opportunities to be excellent. If we consider the site, it is a worthy gateway to Oxford. And then we come to the role of the foundation, and this is the cause, as we have just heard from Professor Dworkin, of some concern. But as has been pointed out, we are not dealing here with the appointment of academic staff; what we are dealing with here is the endorsement of, or admittedly the refusal to endorse, appointments that have been made. We can have no Director forced on us by the foundation; it is simply a matter of endorsement. I would like us to look at it in a positive way, as the world of business giving a blessing to the appointment that the University has made.
We have of course recently changed the arrangements concerning the Regius chairs, but I dread to think what sort of debate we might have had in the past about the Regius chairs if some of the arguments that have been advanced now had been brought forward at that time. Members of Congregation, I will not go into the details of our relationship with the medical authorities and the Medical School, but as has already been indicated in relation to appointments there, we often have a representative of the Health Authority or other body present. The University has lived with this. The University has a most excellent Medical School; it is not corrupted by this sort of influence from outside.
Lastly, I think I can speak with some authority about the attitude of benefactors. I heard not once but countless times, privately and in public, the concern of people about our last decision. I accept that there were important matters of principle in the last decision, but now I think we are dealing with `chinks', as somebody mentioned earlier, with relatively small issues. Mr Murray was looking out of his aeroplane and seeing white clouds. I think he is looking out and seeing a thunderstorm which is not there. In every case, if any of these chinks threatened to open, the University has defences in place that will prevent the basic freedoms which we all cherish being swept away. If we are able to give a large positive vote this afternoon, I have no doubt that it will send out a positive signal not only to this benefactor but to others, not only for the Management School but for many other purposes in the University. I urge you all to vote `yes'.
Although I am a (not very dutiful) member of the Advisory Council of the School, I was reluctant to lend my support on the previous occasion on which the question of the site for the Business School came before this House. But all of the doubts that I had then, which related primarily to the importance of the commitments given to and by this House, have been resolved. Indeed, they have been reversed, as has been indicated already to some extent by Professor Mayer.
This House resolved in 1990 that there should be a £40 million Business School. Mr Said is offering to fund half of that daunting sum and is insisting that the standards of the school are those that were envisaged at the time that that estimate was made. And it is the reliance that people, such as Professor Mayer and Professor Kay, have placed in affecting their academic careers, and making academic decisions, and affecting the location of themselves and their families that is rather more serious in fact than most of the practical consequences of the commitment of the Mansfield Road site to being a playing field. But the main thing that I want to talk about now is from a collegiate point of view.
A number of the things that the opposers of this resolution have said have suggested that one benefaction was at stake, and that the University might be being induced to grasp it by temporary financial difficulties. It seems to me that both of those statements reflect a departure from reality to which Professor Kay has already referred and which is also indicated by the statement that we heard earlier today that the decision on 5 November was unanimous. That was not my impression at the time.
The difficulties that we face in the colleges are acute: more acute, I would suggest, than in the university departments. Simultaneously with HEFCE's concentration of its research funding, in which, as has already been pointed out, we have been extremely successful in this University, it has embarked on a programme of uniformity in the funding of teaching. We have just heard that an imposed fee settlement is going to cost the colleges collectively about half a million pounds, this year and in every subsequent year. That is not the first, nor is it the last, of such reductions. Most colleges which have made any indication as to what their fund-raising intentions are have put a figure of least £10 million on that activity. It is donations mainly from people in business which are crucial to the sustenance of the distinctive features of Oxford's collegiate and tutorial system. And I might mention that that collegiate system is also one of the things which should ensure the integration of Management Studies with other studies, of the kind that concerned Professor Allison, and that it seems to me singularly improbable that, as one or two speakers have suggested, we could go away and renegotiate for a third time with Mr Said to meet the objections of some of the objectors. As I have mentioned, I have an example in my own college. All fund raising now involves reciprocation. We make people members of the Chancellor's Court of Benefactors, or we make them Foundation Fellows in the case of Wadham. One of our business men who has already made some generous contributions to the college is also a member of the Advisory Council of the School.
I find implausible the suggestions that there is more money waiting to see us support an alleged principle of academic freedom. I do not underrate academic freedom. I believe that this University is exceptional in the amount of freedom and autonomy and democracy, as is reflected by this gathering today. But there are many universities which do excellent work which enjoy very much less than we do, and the suggestion that a small breach in the wall would lead to a flood and an inundation, and a disappearance of the University and its freedom from the scene in Oxford, seems to me to be wildly implausible in the face of the evidence.
As has already been mentioned by the Master of Balliol, the resolution of 1990 stands. No one has proposed that it should be rescinded. We have a Management School. We have a commitment to find £40 million for it. The defeat of the resolution today would put everyone else at least £20 or £30 million further back in the queue, and I believe that the queue would advance very much less rapidly than it otherwise would.
There has been a handbook which suggested that heads of colleges should spend at least 50 per cent of their time fund raising. I spend 10 per cent and am not particularly anxious to spend much more than that. I would not particularly welcome it being made very much more difficult to preserve the features of college life which we are all anxious to preserve. I think that the defeat of today's proposal would set us all back at least five years, and probably nearer ten, at a time of external pressures, including, for instance, the rumoured withdrawal of ACT credit which will reduce colleges' endowment incomes by another 20 per cent. So we are running up an escalator which is moving in the wrong direction if we seek to use fund raising as an answer to our problems. There are many things that are making it more difficult for us, and it seems to me to be unnecessary to add to them by the rejection of this resolution. I therefore urge you to support the resolution.
I have listened with great admiration, as I did last time, to the speeches of the people on the other side, and when I heard Professor Mayer and Professor Kay talking I had a great feeling that I was swept away, as I did last time. And if I kept myself in `purdah', as I said, when I was thinking about this, this is precisely because I thought people were being rather swept away. I will just say three things, one about the past, one about the future, one about the present.
About the past, one of the reasons I did not take notes while points were being made against me personally was that I thought `I like my colleagues on the whole and I will spare them self-defence.' I anticipated all of them and I have witty replies for them, but I will not give them to you except to say that they are not actually relevant to the debate. One point Professor Kay mentioned was that the opponents, meaning me, had not had the courtesy to tell everybody else what I was going to do. In fact one of my legal advisers sent the entire memorandum of his Opinion to a member of Council, and that is where I learned that all of his points had been the subject of a struggle by Council until the last minute before the decree came in. And I approved of what the man had done.
I may say that I owe Professor Kay an apology, apparently, for having raised this debate. It seemed to me that this was a matter which most certainly did need debating, whatever else we did with it. If Professor Kay is unused to Congregation debates, that may be because this famous decision of Congregation in 1990 which was quoted, I think, six times in the Gazette in November and is in every document on the subject, was taken, as one of them says, nem. con. Well there was nem. con. because there was hardly anybody there except the Management people and the University. That is faultless from a constitutional point of view, but politically I think there was a danger, and I think if they had read History and not Management Studies they would have heard Disraeli's voice at that point, saying, `Gentlemen, if the most important thing in politics is to know when to take an opportunity, the second most important is to know when to forgo an advantage.' I think that they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had been more aware of the debating possibilities here.
Well, that is about the past, and I am not going to defend myself for having this or that view. I can change my views on all sorts of matters, and my view of Management Studies goes up when I read their works, goes down when I hear them debating because, I may say, last time and this time I have stood in astonishment as the most distinguished representative of Management Studies uses all this breath to talk about something that nobody has ever raised, not in this debate anyway.
That is the past. On the future, we have heard that everybody will be against us and nobody will give us any money. I have had a long, long talk on this subject with the London correspondent of the New York Times, because he has been phoning me ever since the last occasion. We talked about the problem of university autonomy; that is the word I used. (By the way, Professor Kay, when you say that I say something is likely when I say it is possible, and when you say that it is academic integrity I am talking about, not academic autonomy, I feel this is why I am rather afraid of this great tank that is rolling in front of me, because there is not sufficient accuracy in these ideas. I am talking about autonomy, which means self-rule, and that means rule according to our own principles.) I think that autonomy is of fundamental value, and Professor Dworkin, I think, put it very well. I will not say much more than that, but the New York Times will be very interested in what we do. American universities are very interested in it. If the most famous university in the world says we cannot accept a gift when it involves a relinquishment of academic autonomy, that will be very well understood by quite a lot of people the world over, and it is a very important principle.
So that is what the papers will say. As for the predictions about the future of fund raising, I cannot see the future much better than anybody else, but at least I am not going to make certain statements. I do say that what I have raised is a matter of fundamental importance to our University. I will not try to double-guess what Professor Dworkin has said: that is for the future.
On the present, Professor Goode has sought to minimise my queries, my demurs, about the decree by saying that lawyers can go on talking for ever. That is the way (it is a rhetorical trick, and medieval rhetoric teaches you how to do this) to minimise the opponent's objections. What cannot be denied is that by passing this decree we relinquish the authority of our University over an academic appointment. I could keep you here for ever talking about the parallels. I have spent the last few days looking up all the parallels they have talked about, including the Regius chairs. None of these actually apply, but I will not keep you. We are relinquishing that control of an academic appointment, we are relinquishing our power to change our decree, and we are allowing a benefactor to have a direct role in the day-to-day management of an academic course. Those three points I have made cannot be denied: they are in that decree; they are in that decree, as I understand it, against some of the judgements of many of the people in Council, because a benefactor has insisted on that condition.
I have heard lots of things for and against Management Studies, or Business Studies as it is now called (slightly different). It seems to me that either it is a thoroughly respectable academic subject (and if so, let us have it, let us have a splendid school - we may be paying a high price for wanting an instant Management School; I think that that is what is the problem, we want it too fast - let us have it as a really first-class academic subject, but in that case why does it have to have a separate constitution?) or it is not quite a proper academic subject and then it is in a separate institute. In either case it is making a great hole in the side of our academic constitution. And we are the governing body with legislative power. I think we will do serious harm to the autonomy of our great University unless we ask that this decree be revised in those particulars which I have objected to.
I want first of all to be quite clear that we should all see Mr Murray and Professor Finnis as honest men, who are moved by genuine concern, who I do not think need to offer apologies for their concern. They do of course occupy the attractive role. If we were speaking of rhetorical devices, then there is no more attractive rhetorical device than to be the honest, simple man who comes to defend the great issues of the nation. As an historian, Mr Murray is well aware of the long success of that device: Cincinnatus from the plough to save Rome. Cincinnatus became lawyers of course this time, but then that is our generation. It is a role that has always enthused popular imagination, and Mr Murray referred to it when he referred to the heroic boy with his finger in the dyke, which became a fist in the dyke. I think he felt that it was the whole wall of the dyke. I stand before you belonging to another tradition, I suppose. I am an aficionado of western movies just as much as Mr Murray told us last time that he is, and I suppose that Mr Murray belongs to the tradition of the lone man who stands up against big government. And as we know, in movies big government always loses. It always gets shot. Or else I belong to the tradition of the man who appears before a court without a lawyer, and we know what happens to him. He gets sent down for even longer than he should do.
I think there are three main points that have been made, and I wish to address them really, though there are one or two bits in between. First of all, much has been made of clause 18. I think that a reply has been offered to that and I just underscore it. What we are dealing with here is an agreement. Would we welcome it if Mr Said could revoke or modify his side of the agreement at will without reference to us? So when we put clause 18 in, are we saying that we are abrogating our free right as a sovereign parliament or are we saying that we are expressing our understanding that we must honour two sides of an agreement?
Secondly, we have been given a number of examples of the way in which it is supposed that we have allowed the benefactor to interfere and to have a role in the day-to-day management of the Business School. And we were given this extraordinary image of somebody coming into an interviewing panel. (Let us set aside the details of how these things are done, but it is a wonderful image really, of coming in through the door and seeing, face to face, the benefactor.) I think arguments like this, and indeed much of the argument of the opposition, are really constructed upon a theory of academic spinelessness. Is it really to be supposed that academics are so weak-willed that the committee, if it is in a position to appoint the chairman of an interviewing panel, is going to appoint the benefactor? Are all these academics, like us, so spineless that we will meekly do this? Even if the benefactor is to be found, or his representative is to be found, upon an electoral board, are we to suppose that all the other people in it, like you and me, are so spineless that we will merely follow unquestioningly what he suggests? I think that is fanciful. I think it is fanciful also to think that all this will end up in the hands of an American corporation, but maybe ...
We are told that it will not harm us vis-à-vis donors, and Mr Gates's donation to Cambridge is cited. Well, I am quite sure that Mr Murray is a lot better at Latin than I am, but I think I have the edge on him in geography!
We are told that Management Studies is a people (or perhaps it was a tribe, was it?) who are not committed to the principle of impartial selection of the most suitable. I am not sure what connections people have had with active enterprises and businesses, but on the whole they prosper when they do indeed select the most appropriate people to do their work.
I think that the most impressive of the criticisms offered of what is before you was that offered by Professor Dworkin about the directorship. It is a theme that has run through but it was expressed with great eloquence by Professor Dworkin - a transatlantic oratory with transatlantic references. And Professor Dworkin has made the whole of academic independence bear upon this point. He has, with great skill and admirable elegance, called upon you to defend academic freedom everywhere that is contained within this clause. This is a grand and rousing call which is couched in the terms which we all understand and the terms to which we all respond. There is nothing dearer to us than our independence, nor should there be. Professor Dworkin raised the issue of Yale, who so splendidly returned this gift. I remember the Yale case. I think that the Yale case was fundamentally about the donor's right to appoint, and beyond that, I seem to remember, there was at least a suggestion in the newspapers (and I am trying to recall the article or articles in the New York Times, because the case did indeed occupy a large part of that newspaper when I was in America for a little while) that it was also about the donor's wish to determine what was studied, particularly Western Civilisation. I have a feeling, though maybe I am wrong about that (Professor Dworkin shakes his head in negation), but it was clearly implied in some of the coverage. Well, this is not a question about the right to appoint. It is certainly not a question about the right to prescribe content. The opposition is suggesting that we are losing our right, our ability, to appoint. The benefactor and his representatives are not gaining the right to appoint. They do not have the right to appoint. No Director can be forced upon the University. There is an impediment, but does it bear within it the whole principle of academic freedom? I would contend that the University is certainly not shackled. It is not unable to resist. But you must indeed decide whether you think that the principle of academic integrity and liberty is contained within this clause.