At Advance HE Student Governors 2025, Mike Ratcliffe’s journey through nearly a millennium of university governance began with a photograph that should haunt every current board member.
The University of Leeds Council from 1991 – a sea of white faces in suits, almost entirely male, arranged like “a small Parliament rather than a governing body.”
“People made formal speeches, which was an interesting thing,” Ratcliffe recalled of his time as a student representative. “They had notes and they made speeches, and people made counter speeches.”
But the photograph represents progress, not stagnation. Those weren’t the “good old days” of university governance – they were the last gasps of a system that had calcified into dysfunction.
Understanding how we got here matters because the current crisis in university governance isn’t unprecedented. It’s the latest iteration of tensions that have existed since the first students formed guilds in medieval Bologna to regulate their teachers and prevent exploitation by locals charging extortionate rents.
Yes, even in the 12th century, students worried about dodgy landlords.
The student power origins
Ratcliffe’s historical excavation revealed that the first universities were student-controlled institutions. The University of Bologna emerged because travelling legal scholars, lacking citizenship rights in the city, “established guilds of students to make sure there were rules to run the university.”
The first university in Western Europe was essentially an SU with academic oversight powers.
Their regulations, translated from complex Latin, included requirements that teachers start on time, don’t run over, and cover the full curriculum – “because we’re all going to have to take tests on this, and we don’t want you skipping for our money.”
Medieval students understood something modern governance sometimes forgets: universities exist for educational purposes, and those being educated deserve a voice in ensuring quality delivery.
But the Northern European model that shaped Oxford and Cambridge took a different path. These became associations of teachers – masters who organized themselves, elected a chancellor, and eventually developed the vice-chancellor role when the chancellor became honorary.
“It was a club,” Ratcliffe explained. “They themselves won the club. That’s how it worked.”
Universities have always engaged in competitive myth-making about their origins. Oxford claimed King Alfred as founder; Cambridge countered with King Arthur. Oxford escalated to claiming foundation by Trojans who sailed from the siege of Troy through the Mediterranean to establish a university.
“We’re so old the Romans burned us down,” became Oxford’s ultimate claim to ancient legitimacy.
This mythologizing impulse reveals something important about institutional psychology: universities have always felt compelled to justify their authority through appeals to tradition and antiquity, even when those traditions are entirely fabricated.
The mythology serves a purpose – legitimizing institutional power and autonomy. But it can also obscure necessary adaptation to changing circumstances.
The corporate structure question
The American model offers a contrast. Harvard emerged from community decision-making – religious leaders establishing a college to train ministers because they “dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”
The community created the corporation. The corporation employed the staff. The distinction between ownership and employment was clear.
But they got it wrong initially, appointing Nathaniel Eaton, who “beats the scholars, the students” and whose wife ran a catering operation that served “bad fish brought to the table” and “goat stone in the Hasty Pudding.”
Sound familiar? The first Harvard management were dismissed for trying to “fleece the students.” Even more familiar – catering remained a Harvard problem for decades.
The 19th-century expansion of English universities created new models of corporate control. University College London used shareholders – pay £100, get a vote and a free place for your son. The proprietors chose the committee, the committee chose staff, but crucially: “the person in charge of the staff is not in charge of the institution.”
Other new universities adopted different approaches. At Owens College (later Manchester), donation size determined governing body membership. Leeds didn’t bother with a principal initially – council directly employed professors, who met on Saturday afternoons to “try and work out how they can organize things, because they have no structural control.”
By the mid-20th century, the tripartite system emerged: court (stakeholders), council (working body), and academic body (senate). But the academic body initially included only professors – no other staff, no students.
The 1960s changed this fundamentally. Student power movements, exemplified by future Home Secretary Jack Straw occupying buildings to demand library committee representation, forced democratization of university governance.
The polytechnic alternative
The polytechnic model represented a completely different approach—public ownership through local education authorities. These institutions had minimal autonomy: “the amount of money you could spend without authority from the local authority was as low as £100.”
Ratcliffe showed Oxford Polytechnic’s 1975 governing body, packed with local councillors including future Cabinet minister John Redwood. The balance between public accountability and institutional autonomy was weighted firmly toward public control.
This model disappeared in the 1980s reforms, but the tension it represented – who controls universities and in whose interests – remains unresolved.
The 1981 budget cuts created the first modern university financial crisis. Most institutions responded sensibly, reducing expenditure or expanding strategically. But Cardiff University College continued spending as if nothing had changed, relying on international students who failed to materialize.
The crisis was severe enough to generate panic at government level. Prime ministerial files show officials worried about MPs losing seats because “students will all be out on the streets.”
The University Grants Committee – supposedly the most benign regulator in higher education history – intervened decisively, essentially firing the principal. The Public Accounts Committee was “absolutely furious” that he was allowed to retire on full pension rather than being dismissed.
This established a crucial precedent – when universities fail to govern themselves effectively, external intervention becomes inevitable.
The Jarrett report and managerial revolution
The sector’s response to governance failures produced the Jarrett efficiency study, which diagnosed the problem with painful accuracy. Universities had become committee-obsessed institutions where “everything had a committee” and “everything was run by committee.”
The library committee had subcommittees reporting elsewhere. Committee structure charts ran for pages. Nothing could change quickly because each committee could stop proposals. Senates had become so powerful they could “pretty much stop anything happening in the institution.”
Jarrett recommended streamlining decision-making and strengthening executive authority. This remains controversial – senior academics still grumble about where “managerialism came in” and committee-based collegialism was abandoned. But the alternative was institutional paralysis in the face of financial pressure.
Ratcliffe’s examples of recent governance breakdowns revealed recurring patterns. In the 90s, Thames Valley University’s “very young, charismatic vice-chancellor” with a mullet, earring, and office jukebox who was “very encouraging of people being flexible with their academic standards.” Then in the 2010s, Leeds Met’s bold decision to charge below-market fees, creating unsustainable financial pressure and irreconcilable differences between the vice-chancellor and governing body chair.
One institution that received a glowing governance review one December – “the standard of corporate governance in this university is, in our view, high and amongst the best we’ve seen in the sector” – then faced a devastating Office for Students intervention two months later.
The gap between governance rhetoric and reality can be breathtaking.
Current concerns centre on validation and franchise arrangements with external providers. Multiple institutions have faced regulatory intervention because “management has not been candid with boards of governors about the risks attached to this kind of relationship.”
These aren’t isolated incidents. Governing bodies have approved financial statements where “the risk profile attracted to this kind of work and the cost of old are not appropriate.”
The pattern is that executive teams pursuing financially attractive arrangements while failing to ensure governing bodies understand the full risk profile.
The culture versus process distinction
Ratcliffe’s most important insight concerned the limitations of procedural approaches to governance. Universities focus on “process, policies and papers” when governance is “at least as much about culture and relationships.”
The relationship between chair and vice-chancellor, between governing body members, between governors and the wider institution – these determine effectiveness more than committee structures or paper distribution systems.
“Relationships can go south very quickly, and governance can start to unravel,” Ratcliffe warned.
Student governors often have the best antennae for detecting when relationships are deteriorating. They can sense “whether things are going smoothly” before formal breakdowns occur.
The progression from the “benign” University Grants Committee to (In England) the current Office for Students reflects broader shifts in university-state relationships. The UGC was chaired by former vice-chancellors with current academics as members – effectively sector self-regulation.
OfS operates at arm’s length, focused on consumer protection and regulatory compliance rather than sector development. This creates different dynamics – less collaborative relationship-building, more adversarial regulatory enforcement.
Both approaches have limitations. Benign regulation failed to prevent Cardiff-style financial mismanagement. Arm’s-length regulation can miss developing problems until they become crises.
The systemic governance problem
Ratcliffe identified a crucial systemic weakness: “there is nobody that can sit down and say, well, here is our master plan for university education in Scotland. This is what your role is going to be. Stick to this, and we’ll fund you.”
Individual institutional governance operates within a system that lacks coherent strategic direction. Universities compete rather than collaborate. Market pressures encourage behavior that may be individually rational but collectively destructive.
The long-awaited skills white paper may provide strategic direction, but policy fragmentation means universities must navigate multiple, sometimes contradictory, government priorities.
For many institutions, financial pressure will “dominate your year. Every single governing body meeting, we’re just talking about finance, it will be the biggest issue… take up 80 per cent of the meeting.”
This creates a governance trap – boards become reactive, focused on immediate financial survival rather than strategic direction. The long-term trustee responsibility that Helen Watson emphasized becomes secondary to short-term crisis management.
Student governors face a particular challenge: “trying to navigate how do you protect student interests, whilst being realistic that some difficult things are going to have to be made.”
Ratcliffe’s historical journey revealed both continuity and transformation. The fundamental tensions – between institutional autonomy and public accountability, between academic freedom and managerial efficiency, between stakeholder representation and effective decision-making – persist across centuries.
But the specific manifestations change dramatically. Medieval student guilds, Oxford’s gentleman’s club, Victorian proprietary institutions, local authority polytechnics, and modern corporate universities represent radically different approaches to organizing higher education.
The lesson isn’t that nothing changes – it’s that change is constant, often crisis-driven, and frequently leaves unresolved tensions that resurface in new forms.
Understanding this history provides essential context for current governance challenges. The financial pressures aren’t unprecedented – universities have faced existential crises before. The tension between different stakeholder interests isn’t new – it’s been negotiated and renegotiated for centuries.
But the scale and complexity are different. The regulatory environment is more demanding. The financial model is more precarious. The stakeholder expectations are higher.
Student governors inherit this complex history and must operate within its constraints while adapting to contemporary realities. The Bologna students who formed the first university guild to regulate their teachers and prevent exploitation would recognize many of today’s challenges.
The question is whether today’s student governors will prove equally effective at defending student interests while adapting to institutional necessities. History suggests that’s possible – but only if they understand both the continuities and the changes that brought us to this point.
The photograph from 1991 looked impossibly antiquated. But the governing body it showed was attempting to address similar fundamental questions about institutional purpose, stakeholder representation, and effective decision-making that today’s student governors must navigate.
They just had fewer templates for getting it right.
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