Autonomy for the people

It’s protected in legislation, appealed to by vice chancellors and trade unions alike, used to justify and argue for laissez faire market-led policies and the extremes of targeted state intervention – but what exactly is institutional autonomy in higher education and why does everyone care so much about it?

Autonomy, after all, is just the right and ability to act independently. Someone or something that is autonomous makes their own decisions, be that on how to act or how to decide whether to act. For an organisation, autonomy is very closely aligned to the idea of self-governance: those structures and processes that determine how decisions are made happen within the boundaries of the autonomous organisation itself

But universities are not unique in being autonomous in the wider world – your local pub can decide when to open and what (or who) to serve, your energy company can set prices and enter into contracts, and you yourself can do pretty much whatever you want whenever you want to.

Compared to other education providers, universities do have a substantially greater level of autonomy than schools and colleges. Universities are not as constrained in the way that they are managed, the way in which they spend money, the way in which they recruit staff and students, and the way in which they decide what to teach and how to teach it.

That list may remind us that very few things (even nation states) are totally autonomous: we are all bound by laws and agreements on the one hand, and social or political norms on the other. If someone or something wishes to be taken seriously and to be trusted, it will allow its autonomy to be constrained by rules and conventions set by others even though it retains the (technical) right to full and radical autonomy.

And the same is true for universities.

Where does university autonomy come from?

The unique status of the university (I’ll focus on England, but this is true more generally across the UK and Europe) is bound up with the history of the church. Our earliest universities became established as a means of training clergymen – as such, they drew on the organisational and legal approaches of church (Canon) law rather than secular law. The church, for a long time, acted as a parallel legal system – with its own courts, its own statutes, and its own ability to punish or pardon church staff and (in many cases) church members.

So universities of Oxford and Cambridge developed judiciary and police functions in order to deal with offences committed by students (who, ostensibly as trainee clergymen, had the right to be tried and sentenced in a church court: even for very serious crimes like murder). If this sounds like ancient history, do have a stroll around the centre of Cambridge and recall that members of the Cambridge University Constabulary still (technically) have the same powers of arrest as any other police officer, within a four mile radius of the university.

As universities grew, this two tier system (with townspeople subject, in effect, to one type of law and students another) grew increasingly problematic. The universities were granted various rights and privileges by King Henry III, in return for the beginnings of a state regulatory system to address some of the more glaring issues. But the universities got benefits in return, and anti-competitive ones at that: Henry III disempowered and effectively abolished the emerging medieval universities of Northampton and Stamford primarily because Oxford and Cambridge didn’t like competition.

The biggest bargain

So universities traded autonomy for power, funding, and influence. This established the value of jealously protected autonomy as a bargaining tool – a stance which made it both difficult and expensive for the crown (and later the government acting on behalf of the crown) to get Oxford and Cambridge to do what they wanted.

Despite the efforts of various monarchs and prime ministers, this something-for-something situation lasted until the mid-nineteenth century, by which point both Oxford and Cambridge were (by all accounts) in a pretty shocking state. Whig prime minister John Russell received a petition claiming that the two English universities were “failing in their duty to promote the advancement of learning” and, in 1850, appointed a Royal Commission to sort things out. The report of this Commission made some pretty far-reaching recommendations about what should be taught, how it should be taught, and who should be admitted.

None of these changes would be possible to enforce without changes to the way that universities were governed, and the government had no means of influencing that. After several fraught years of arguments, a familiar solution was enacted via the 1923 Oxford and Cambridge Act. This legislation reinforced the right for both universities to make their own decisions and rules, but required that changes to university statutes be approved by the Privy Council (a group of senior politicians advising the monarch, originally described as appointed university commissioners in the 1923 act). Other universities had already been established with Royal Charters that required this kind of oversight – but it is no coincidence that it took the first allocations of substantial public funds to universities (Haldane’s reforms) to bring the two ancient universities into line.

Autonomy, oversight, and regulation

Now that universities in England were a regulated sector (if only very loosely by modern definitions), having fought a long battle to preserve as much autonomy as possible, the idea ossified from a practical description to an ideal. A part of this was to do with expertise – nobody knew as much about research or advanced teaching as universities, so who could possibly tell them what to do. The research end of this became the Haldane principle (which had comparatively little to do with the great man himself, but it is what we call it): the direction of general research should be determined by researchers – in the form of research councils – and not by government. It is a principle that – despite the best efforts of Michelle Donelan – persists largely to this day, though many are alarmed at Labour’s policy linking UKRI funding priorities to the priorities of the government.

The teaching end of things initially worked in a similar way, academics (as external examiners) would vouch for the quality of teaching and the validity of awarded qualifications across the sector. It took until the quality wars of the early 1990s for the state to gain a direct oversight of the quality of higher education provision, a bitterly resented intrusion into what was by then seen as the ancient principle of university autonomy. Those angry about the QAA as an arms-length peer-driven approach to inspections would have been livid about OfS taking the whole thing in-house and making it indicator-driven, but in many senses the battle had already been lost.

There is a long and detailed story about the way academics lost the right to tenure during the 80s, and admissions – while still nominally within the gift of a university on academic grounds – now also turn on the availability of fee and maintenance loans which are very much within the gift of the state

And yet

In other ways England’s universities have never been more autonomous. Back in 2023 and 2024 the European University Association (EUA) comparatively assessed European higher education systems against four axes of autonomy:

• Organisational autonomy (covering academic and administrative structures, leadership, and governance);
• Financial autonomy (covering the ability to raise funds, own buildings, borrow money, and set tuition fees);
• Staffing autonomy (including the ability to recruit independently, promote, and develop academic and non-academic staff);
• Academic autonomy (including study fields, student numbers, student selection as well as the structure and content of degrees).

England rated very high on each axis (100 per cent, 89 per cent, 96 per cent, 89 per cent) and has been up there since EUA started writing these reports in 2010. It’s a sample survey methodology moderated against a scorecard, but it is an indicator as to how good we have it here. Scotland was assessed for the first time in 2023 (100,80,96,89 – the difference in financial autonomy reflects the focus on formula funding, numbers controls, and the existence of borrowing approval requirements. Neither Wales nor Northern Ireland were rated.

A part of this strong performance was the attention that governments pay to preserving institutional autonomy. In England the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act it is right there in section 2 subsection 1(a): “the OfS must have regard to the need to protect the institutional autonomy of English higher education providers.”

Later parts of this same section clarify that this autonomy extends to a provider’s right to “conduct their day to day management in an effective and competent way;” to determine course content and teaching approaches; to select, appoint, and dismiss academic staff, and to admit students.

It’s not all good news – the “have regard to” wording is notoriously slippery, but embedding these principles (and indeed the Haldane principle) in the letter of the law is a serious commitment to the cause.

What if autonomy is, like, bad?

Though made up primarily of independent private organisations, higher education is substantially funded by the state to secure public goods (higher levels of education, and research and innovation capacity) for wider benefit. On one level you could see that simply as procurement, but as such the Treasury has surprisingly little choice over what it is paying for.

Having attempted to (and failed to) set up a price-sensitive market among undergraduates, it is notable that it is price that represents the main tool by which the state exercises control over what is taught and where. In recent years we’ve seen cuts to the amount that government is willing to pay for certain subjects (additional funding for the arts is mostly gone), and a more generalised cut – brought about by a per-student fee freeze – to all home undergraduate teaching.

Autonomy means that although the government can set the climate, it cannot prescribe the way providers respond to it. Lower real terms income has induced many providers to attempt to cut the costs of teaching, either via a worsening of the student experience or franchising out teaching to those who can do it cheaper (and not asking the questions about quality). Would it have been simpler, cheaper, and more targeted for a minister to say what they wanted teaching and where? Possibly. Is there a benefit from doing it the other way that isn’t immediately apparent? Again, possibly.

“We want to pay only for the stuff we want,” is commercial logic attached to workforce skills development. The argument works for research too – many would see it as more efficient if we could just fund useful research that led to substantial public and economic benefits, and not fund the stuff that just results in (another) unread journal publication. It’s also difficult (in 2026) to convincingly build an argument that the way universities are run and the way they make decisions represents the best of all possible worlds.

Put the message in the box

So what is the argument for autonomy – assuming that the old fallback “we’ve always had it” is undermined by the current state of the sector?

If you imagine a university as a black box: money (and students) go in one end, and good things (research, graduates) come out of the other. The traditional argument of the university is that what happens inside the box is very much where the magic happens, and as such no external intervention is possible without detriment. And that the good things that come out of the box may have a value that is only apparent many years later (pure maths, which underpins global commerce, is my go-to example here).

Institutional autonomy – over the people involved, and the decisions they make – is the only way to ensure that universities do what needs to be done. For fans of mid-period South Park, it is absolutely the “manatee argument” writ large. And it is dangerous – it doesn’t take much history to figure out that neither the enlightenment nor the industrial revolution started on campus: the 1850 review of Oxford and Cambridge happened precisely because (with a few exceptions) universities were so far off the pace.

There are parts of the world where what universities can teach (and to whom) and what researchers are permitted to examine are very closely controlled by the government: sometimes for religious or political purposes, often by very authoritarian governments. In many places universities are – effectively – branches of government, with staff as government employees. Clearly the UK sits a long way from these extremes.

Regulation and a system of financial incentives do constrain institutional autonomy. Decisions are not shaped by “donnish dominion” in isolation: political economics and partisan planning for many possible futures have an impact. There are national security implications to some decisions universities may make. The freedom of speech agenda has, arguably, removed the ability of the academy to discard old, discredited, and harmful ideas with impunity. But our universities still run their own affairs – not always well, and not always in the immediate public interest – but because this is better than any of the alternatives.