Initial implementation of the North proposals under his successor Colin Lucas (1997-2004) coincided with failures of new IT systems and of financial control, which furnished a pretext for employing scores of additional central administrators. When, however, those control failures were rectified under the abrasive Vice-Chancellor John Hood (2004-09) the number of central administrators continued its remorseless increase. Central administrative staff numbers rose between 1999-2000 and 2008-09 by approximately two-thirds, from 650 to 1,020, the entire increase being surplus to any intrinsic requirement. Since then, the total has continued to expand by about 1.5 per cent per annum on a like-for-like basis. In 2012 Wellington Square added a further 200 to its staff numbers by absorbing two computer services units from the academic establishment, on the grounds of overlap with central administrative functions and greater efficiency. But there has not been a single consequent redundancy. The extent of overstaffing is today at least 35 per cent, or 450 individuals, at an annual cost of around £25 million. Assuming a yield of 3 per cent, this corresponds to an endowment of £850 million, i.e. the whole of what the central Development Office (as opposed to the colleges) has raised under the current "Oxford Thinking" campaign. Is that what the campaign donors wanted? 

The astonishing thing is that Wellington Square tacitly admits its guilt, in two distinct ways. First, it obstructs external scrutiny of its own finances, and second, it masquerades as an academic body in its own right.

In principle, Wellington Square is constitutionally obliged to seek approval for its own budget from the sovereign academic assembly of Congregation. In practice, the obligation is simply disregarded, and Congregation has been lamentably incapable of asserting it. Wellington Square appropriates upfront whatever sums it finds convenient to spend on itself. Thereafter it has been content — until now — to order the rest of the university and colleges to make up any resultant faculty "deficits" by whatever means they can devise. 

Forcing separate parts of the academic community to be financially self-contained in this way runs counter to the fundamental idea of a university, and is a cheap substitute for serious collaborative thought about its structure and interrelationships. A prominent route to correcting some faculty "deficits" has been the proliferation of one-year postgraduate taught courses, for which neither fees nor student numbers are subject to Whitehall approval. Such courses account for much of the doubling — to around 10,000 — of the postgraduate student population since 2000. It is an open secret at Oxford that some of these additional students and the courses they take are sub-standard. Furthermore, the strategy is a distraction from any serious attempt to reach out to the disadvantaged and encourage social mobility. In effect, in order to maintain the central administration in comfort, Oxford nowadays offers to sell a Master's degree in nine months, i.e. one academic year, without too much fuss about academic quality on either side. This cannot continue indefinitely without damaging Oxford's academic standing. 

Belated recognition of the danger may underlie the recent apparent U-turn by the current vice-chancellor, Andrew Hamilton. No longer, it seems, can the balancing of academic budgets be palmed off onto separate faculties. Instead, in his oration marking the start of the academic year, he announced an impending £70 million deficit in something called the university's overall teaching budget, a refreshing if incoherent new concept. Correction of this deficit, we were told, will require an increase in the standard undergraduate fee from £9,000 a year to £16,000.

The way to achieve this is not, however, to look plaintively for a nod from Whitehall. Rather, it is for Oxford's academic community to resume control of its affairs, and to introduce a proper means-tested fee-structure, with the richest 10-15 per cent of undergraduates paying not £16,000 but at least £20,000 a year, and the least affluent paying nothing, as at present, with diminished reliance for revenue generation on one-year postgraduate courses.