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It is a contest Oxford isn't winning. While U.S. universities, and some upstart British ones, dangle lavish compensation packages to woo academic stars, Oxford remains bound to a policy of standardized pay across all disciplines. As a result, a top scientist at Oxford makes only half of what she would command at a large American university. "We've lost some very good young faculty members who would be making $45,000 here but have gone to other universities and earned $120,000," says Graham Richards, the chairman of Oxford's chemistry department. "It's very hard to keep top people at that rate."
That said, the university is hardly on the verge of collapse. "Compared to most we're not having a bad time," says Ryan. "But we're trying to figure out how to stay in the same league as Harvard, Stanford and Princeton."
Oxford has lately tried to make up lost ground, pumping $15 million a year into maintaining its technological infrastructure. Five years ago, few Oxonians had even heard of e-mail; now many professors put up class schedules and lecture notes on the Web, and the Bodleian Library has developed a comprehensive online catalog of its holdings. Even in the most antique colleges, a majority of student rooms are connected to the Internet, and the university now provides one computer for every four students.
The university has also actively sought new sources for cash. In 1997 Oxford created a business incubator, Isis Innovation, to spin out companies from the discoveries of Oxford researchers, with profits from the new firms flowing back to the university. Isis has backed 16 companies in the last two years, with hopes of taking some of them public. And Oxford has dipped into the potentially lucrative well of distance learning, creating degree courses in local history, computing and immunology. "The way we have to look to fund ourselves is through multiple streams of income from multiple sources," says Oxford's top official, vice chancellor Colin Lucas. "But I don't think there's one El Dorado out there."
That's why the most radical changes at Oxford may be still to come. The most inevitable shift is the likely introduction of modest tuition fees to make up for lost government funds. Two of the most idiosyncratic, and cherished, Oxonian traditions may face an overhaul as well. The tutorial system, in which undergraduates study solely within their subject of concentration, supervised only by a weekly individual meeting with a professor, is both expensive — and, for some students, intellectually stunting. "Tutorials are completely useless," says George Baily, a third-year philosophy student who has publicly criticized Oxford's teaching system. "Students don't prepare for them, they have nothing to do with the exams, and many tutors don't even realize if they're reading an essay written last year."
Ryan says that "in the long run we may turn into a university ... where much of the research faculty is cut off from undergraduate education." If that happens, says Stevens, then Oxford will offer "classes rather than tutorials, and have graduate students do the teaching."
The demise of the tutorial is a blasphemous thought to most Oxonians. So is this one: the central administration may come to assume more control of Oxford's individual colleges, as Cambridge's administration has done over its various fiefdoms. The loose federation of self-governed residential colleges has long been at the heart of Oxford's mystique. But it has also created a two-track university, where well-endowed colleges can attract top scholars and offer students better facilities, while poorer ones flounder.
Of course, meddling too much with Oxford's time-honored mores would speed its decline faster than the current pressures will. So the libraries will still require sworn oaths of fidelity from students; tutorials will take place in some form; students and professors will continue to live and dine together. "Having communities where faculty and students mingle is an extraordinary element of energy at this university," Lucas says. "It's what gives us character. And you don't have to be a believer in Edmund Burke to think that you don't lightly take an axe to that." But Oxonians might keep in mind another maxim from the father of conservatism: "You cannot plan the future by the past."
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