ABSTRACT
The British Universities are autonomous institutions, under the formal control of people who are not themselves scholars. There has, over a long period, been a steadily increasing academic participation in this control, so that lay control appears to many to be giving way to scholarly self-government. This movement towards academic self-government has in recent years begun to face not only the lay governors, but also several other contenders for control. The most visible has been the student movement, which has been based partly on a call for a definition of the community of scholars that will include the students. In writings about universities there is a clear, and usually fairly articulate, major premise that scholars should have a significant control of their own affairs; that there should be academic self-government. When the modern university movement started, with the founding of what is now University College, London, academic staff were not expected to organize themselves in any way.
