Strings that strangle freedom

Oxford is to vote again on a business school part-funded by Wafic Said. Valentine Cunningham is against, John Kay for

After all the huffing and puffing in Oxford over the past few months - the mutiny of dons in their parliament of congregation, the threatened withdrawal by the Wafic Said Foundation of its promised Pounds 20 million, the egg on the face of Oxford's main governing body the Hebdomadal Council - Oxford University's new business school will, I expect, be given the go-ahead on June 17. Which is not to say that its predictable onward march is altogether a good thing.

For a start, the established democratic principles of Oxford's governance, the managerial goals which have traditionally respected the idea of a university as a collaborative unity, a place where all the members meet on equal footing, might be emerging from this affair more or less intact but they are still worryingly bloodied.

Since last November's vote against the business school it has become clear that the Hebdomadal council does not like interference from congregation, the teaching and researching members of the whole university who elect it into office and whose servant it is.

Throughout the saga, council has shown a taste for inappropriate high-handedness. Its original plan was secretly patched together. It chose a site earmarked for a sports ground in Mansfield Road which was pledged in perpetuity as open space. Then, control of the proposed school was signed away to a majority of donor appointees. Fears about impending autocracy were compounded among academics when council next decided to disenfranchise certain groups of retirees. These are congregation's traditional wise old heads, an extraordinarily able list of intellectuals - just the sort to be appalled at council's cheery disposition to break promises about open spaces and to abase itself at the promise of great pelf from a controversial source.

Congregation has just now forced the re-enfranchisement of the elderly from whom a vote was so rudely snatched, though not without council showing its annoyance by spitefully raising the cost of this democratic insistence (faculties must re-register these oldsters annually). Still, importantly, congregation has insisted on its old wide franchise. It clearly thinks it needs all the support it can get in retaining control over schemes like the Said Business School, and in reversing bad central management ploys - such as throwing out the proposed honorary doctorate for the murderous Mr Bhutto of Pakistan and for our own Mrs Thatcher or, to take another notorious occasion, refusing permission to the theology faculty to abolish its compulsory Greek requirement. Such voting registered the way Oxford belongs to all its senior members, not just to those temporarily in charge of its committees and boards.

No doubt council's members look forward to implementing the recent Coopers & Lybrand report on Oxford's governance which recommended the virtual extinction of congregation and the creation of super-faculties run by highly paid professional managers.

And on the ticket of keeping university affairs in the control of the university as such, there is still room for worry about the revised proposals for management of the Said school. Gone is the plan to have the university appointees on the business school board outnumbered by Mr Said's particular nominees. Good, council got that message. But still nominees from outside the university will outnumber insiders among the trustees. Faces are thus saved, but the control of the school is still for this reason to be suspected.

Not, naturally, that benefactors should be made to feel unwanted. Appropriate recognition should be afforded where it is due. Mr Said is already a highly useful donor to Oxford. I am grateful to his foundation for funding an Arab graduate student of mine who would otherwise not be able to be in Oxford. But, properly, the foundation has no say in the admission of such students. Donors must expect to be kept at arm's length from the running of their beneficiaries.

What happens when donors get too close is the cock-up and embarrassing face-saving still going on over the proposed business school. By contrast, Oxford's new American studies building will go up near Mansfield Road, without dispute because the benefactors - the Rhodes Trustees, Drue Heinz, et al - know by long experience what donor tact is about. There have always been plenty of central sites for the new Said project. Everyone local has a long list. What was missing was local nous and tact. The railway station car park has been identified as the new Said site, we're told, "after an exhaustive trawl of possibilities". Exhaustive trawl? It's been an obvious place all along. But still, if this is the one (and it does belong to Railtrack and the new plan seems to have mislaid the old listed GWR station building that's on it) the Said school will be located as centrally as any glory-seeking donor might wish. It would be the first thing that anyone would see upon arriving in Oxford by train.

And a bit more tact in modus operandi might endear some of us rather more to the idea of having a business school in such a prominent position. What irks about the present messy run-up to the new school is that the arrogance of its devisers mirrors all the monstrous arrogance about what management studies claims to offer the world, and which has manifestly underpinned much of the recent destructive interference from the state in the running of universities.

Most of what we have had recently to endure, all of the intense messing about, the endlessly distracting time-and-motion studies, the protracted assessment exercises, the misguided application of production-line metaphors, all the desperate institutionalised atmosphere of what Foucault has called the will to survey and punish, and of course, the roughly applied staff-shedding, has been done in the name of management efficiency, in the voice of management-speak, and in the garb of the business school. It has come, insufferably, precisely from the School of Coopers-&-Lybrand-think, from the limo-driven world that benefactors tend to inhabit, from the mindless region of what J. B. Priestley once called lolly as opposed to the ordinary world of mere cash in which your average academic languishes. Which is the world, of course, that the business school professors look forward to having a big toe in, with the sort of business-appropriate salary differentials that make the present medical differentials look small potatoes.

And what some of that lot think of the rest of us is not only the old silly Thatcherite belief that you must be a bit stupid if you are not making lots of lolly, but the kind of intellectual contempt nicely illustrated by the tirade of Robert Stevens, the master of Pembroke College, Oxford, in The THES, slagging off English studies as a soft option and no basis for any criticising of the business studies ethos. It was good, at least, to have him sound off thus, to know just where we all stand, to have out in the open such real contempt for what goes on in those humanities buildings abutting humbly onto the heli-pads and limo-parks of the corporate besuited.

Valentine Cunningham is professor of English at Oxford University and a fellow of Corpus Christi College.