New Vice-Chancellors have taken office in Oxford and Cambridge since the beginning of 2023, Oxford’s in January and Cambridge’s on 5 July. The Committee of University Chairs’ Code of Governance requires a governing body ‘to appoint the Head of Institution as Chief Executive’. Oxford and Cambridge do not belong to the CUC, having no ‘Chairs’ to make them eligible. Two decades ago their governing bodies (Congregation and the Regent House), numbering thousands of their academic and academic-related staff, decided that their Vice-Chancellors are not ‘Chief Executives’.
Both had recently decided to change the tradition of having Heads of House act in rotation for a few years and now appointed new-style salaried fixed-term Vice-Chancellors. On 26 June 2002, a Report of the Council on governance was published in the Cambridge Reporter. That led as required to a Discussion. Speakers argued against an amendment which would have made the Vice-Chancellor a Chief Executive. The Regent House agreed, and voted against it. In Oxford similar ‘modernising’ governance changes were proposed by John Hood when he became Vice-Chancellor in 2004 and voted down by Congregation in 2006, after much debate. In his demitting Oration of 2009, Hood accepted defeat.
Oxford and Cambridge Vice-Chancellors are left largely to determine their own job descriptions. They will find little guidance in their Statutes. There are some instructions, but they omit any mention of Chief Executive powers, though for both various Chairmanships of committees are expected. Cambridge’s new Vice-Chancellor at least could be forgiven for any confusion about who was responsible for what in the complex structure of the University in which there are thirty-odd independent colleges. A circular sent around in mid-August offered help for administrators, describing the ‘silos and hierarchical layers’.
