The true financial gap is about one-third smaller than that claimed by the vice-chancellor, because the university is spending about £25 million a year more on its central administration than is justifiable. Part of this is overstaffing in essential areas, such as finance or IT. But other parts sustain activities which have no place in the central administration of a collegiate university. Bits of Wellington Square, such as the so-called Learning Institute, or the Equality and Diversity Unit, contrive public seminar programmes and vacuous newsletters to keep their staff occupied. Others, such as the Undergraduate Admissions Office or the Student Administration Division, busy themselves duplicating, or interfering with, college responsibilities. Yet others, such as the pompously named Public Affairs Directorate or the totally otiose divisional offices, act as cheerleaders and propagandists by announcing who has won prizes, or that Oxford humanities graduates matriculating between 1960 and 1989 had jolly good careers after leaving university. How surprising. Especially when in those days only about 10 per cent of Oxford finalists were awarded first-class degrees, and not 30 per cent as is the case today. 

In 1951 the medieval historian Austin Poole, then President of St John's College, published his classic volume in the Oxford History of England, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 1087 to 1216. His preface began: "This book has occupied the leisure hours of some twenty years of my life, which has been principally engaged in teaching and administration." We cannot turn the clock back 60 years. But if Oxford is to maintain over the next 60 years its place of special esteem in the firmament of higher education, it has to find a way to reintegrate academic values with     university management, and to rid itself of the distasteful bureaucratic opportunism which now threatens to suffocate it.