Speaking of Universities

by Stefan Collini

Now, it will be immediately clear that universities in Britain had their origins in more than one of these forms, and that they have long been hybrid types, not directly corresponding to any one of these four models. Historically, British universities mostly evolved as self-governing corporations, protected in some ways by their charters, but increasingly reliant in the course of the twentieth century on public funds and hence subject to close oversight and regulation, though some of them also have their own endowments as well. They are not directly state-run, as in France, but nor are they wholly independent charities. If anything, they have been closer to certain other cultural institutions that, though in receipt of substantial public funds, operate on the arm’s length principle as semi-autonomous bodies, such as, say, the British Museum or the BBC. The BBC is emphatically not run by the government, but nor does it depend on commercial transactions with individual customers. Thus, the somewhat complex sense in which we may want to say that Oxford, unlike Harvard, is not a private university may seem quite like the sense in which we say that the BBC is not a private broadcaster.