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After its recent Assurance visit from HEFCE, Oxford went through a high profile public debate at the end of which its academic community voted against moving to a governance structure which would have given Oxford a majority of external members on its Council. The Higher Education Funding Council asked Oxford to answer eight questions justifying its governance and administrative arrangements. Cambridge had had a very similar internal "governance" controversy a few years earlier but no HEFCE Assurance visit coincided with it. Cambridge had fewer external members on its Council than Oxford (two to Oxford's four) though that has now moved up to four. The process of the decision-making to bring about this change involved a rough ride for the administration and some strong words from the academic community. Cambridge has now had its own Assurance visit and the result seems to have been a report from HEFCE much less intrusive and not seeking to insist that it make radical and immediate changes to its governance. Apparently Cambridge is not going to have to answer the "eight questions". Perhaps the most interesting feature of the outcomes of these parallel processes of interaction with Oxford and Cambridge respectively is that it appears that HEFCE does not intend to treat them alike. Cambridge's anomalous governance is to be allowed to continue while Oxford is being put under heavy pressure to change its own to comply. HEFCE should perhaps tell us why.

In a previous article (Evans, 2007) I explored some of the challenges HEFCE has recently presented to Oxford and Cambridge governance. These are far from over, with HEFCE insisting that Oxford answer eight "questions" later this year and Cambridge throwing down the gauntlet, with a ballot on the modest attempt to raise the number of external members on the Council from two to four (Cambridge, 2008). But Oxford and Cambridge are also unlike any other universities because of the special features of their "collegiate" structure, which is now creating unprecedented problems in striking a balance between the funding of teaching and research, in which teaching does not suffer.