ABSTRACT
A wider view of how the state has shaped higher education and how it has been governed during the last hundred years or so is admirably dealt with by Professor Michael Shattock in a synoptic working paper published in 2017. The power of the idea has shaped the governance models of those two universities, with their large ‘governing bodies’ of the Congregation (Oxford) and Regent House (Cambridge) under whose deliberative, electoral and legislative powers the subsidiary executive organs of governance operate. The separation of research and its governance and funding from the governance and funding of education is possibly the most profound outcome of Higher Education and Research Act (HERA). In law, through the HERA, both the Office for Students (OfS) and the Secretary of State must have regard to the protection of institutional autonomy in the discharge of the Office’s functions, and in the guidance that the Secretary of State may give to the OfS.
