Admission and other arrangements for postgraduate students are handled primarily through Wellington Square, in contrast with the collegiate arrangements operating for undergraduates. The steady increase in postgraduate numbers — to a total of about 5,000 by the end of the century, around half as many as the total number of undergraduates — meant a need for more central officials. So did rising requirements, and opportunities, for research grant applications, mainly in medicine and the physical sciences, together with prospects for commercial exploitation of scientific findings.

Equally significant, in the later 1980s Oxford established a Development and Alumni Office to raise money from private and overseas sources. The individual colleges did likewise, mainly vis-à-vis their own alumni, and a good deal more effectively than the central authorities. Given that until the mid-20th century Oxford had depended throughout its history on private and charitable funding, it is surprising how readily it was seduced after 1945 into reliance on government handouts, and how lamely it submits now to orders from Whitehall, when public funding has again become a small enough fraction of its total income to be readily discarded through constructive management. Moreover, not just Oxford itself and the small number of other universities that might join it in such an initiative but the British university system as a whole would benefit from a Declaration of Independence on Oxford's part.

This failure of will and perspective has been associated with an internal decay of governance and corporate culture. And this was just when the expansion of the central administrative apparatus (its numbers had more than doubled by the end of the millennium, to some 650 persons) called for a strengthening of grassroots control to ensure that academic purposes were not submerged. 

The opposite happened. Reflecting an old Russian saying, the fish began to rot from the head downwards. It is now 20 years since Oxford had a vice-chancellor fit for purpose. The cause has been less the fallibility of individuals than a misconceived shift in the nature of the office. The vice-chancellor at Oxford needs to be a team captain, not a half-baked chief executive. The office customarily rotated through the heads of college, who held it in turn for two or three years. The early 1990s brought a Whitehall-inspired decision to lengthen the vice-chancellor's tenure. An early incumbent under the new dispensation, Dr Peter North (1993-97), appointed himself head of a commission of fellow-academics, advised by Coopers and Lybrand, to propose changes in Oxford's governance structures. The outcome was calamitous. Far from showing sensitivity to the merits of Oxford's inherited decision-taking machinery, North proposed further enlargement of central bureaucracy, together with emasculation of grassroots governance, both through enhancement of the vice-chancellor's role and entourage, including the University council, and fragmentation of the former General Board into several separate boards, subsequently renamed divisions. 

The renaming was apt. The new structure precisely divided the university against itself, has provoked a waste of effort and resources, and created threats to academic standards. Faculties were cut off at a stroke from sharing in strategic academic policy decisions. Division heads and pro-vice-chancellors were, and are, appointed top-down rather than by election from the grassroots — a clear recipe for installing the unsuitable, those relishing authority rather than agreeing to be of service. The only appropriate piece of divisional organisation was that of clinical medicine. Alone among the divisions this comprises just a single faculty. More important, it is semi-detached in every sense from the university at large, and is essentially a network of research institutes, accounting for two-thirds of the university's proclaimed research income.