A couple of days ago, I came across this post from user @CapelLofft on Twitter:
My first reaction was to pooh-pooh this. There are many historical examples of mandarins and politicians being appointed heads of house at Oxford and Cambridge colleges – it’s a recurring plot point, for example, in Yes Minister – so this could hardly be seen as a novel situation which interrupts a previous pattern of simple academic self-governance. But, because I was curious and had nothing better to do, I decided to sit down and properly investigate how this pattern has changed over time.
How I carried out my analysis (plus some heavy caveats…)
I decided to take four points in time to investigate, which cover the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st: 1950, 1975, 2000, and 2024. For each point, I then looked up who each head of house (Master, Principal, Warden etc) was at the start of each of those years for nearly every Oxbridge college, and using easily available online information – mainly Wikipedia – I did a fairly cursory review of their biography and classified them by their previous occupation before appointment. Of course, nothing is ever that simple, so I should explain some details of my methodology:
- Lincoln College, Oxford doesn’t have an obvious list of its rectors online, so I decided to exclude them entirely. Thankfully all other colleges in my sample did have easily available lists, and these lists are themselves largely taken from Wikipedia.
- I’ve taken a narrow definition of ‘college’ – so in the case of Oxford that means excluding PPHs, and for Cambridge it means only including colleges at the point at which they were issued a royal charter.
- Findings for each year are expressed in percentage rather than absolute numbers to allow for comparison between years, given the steady increase in the number of colleges over the period.
- Trying to summarise any person’s ‘main’ occupation/vocation is inherently fraught, and a number of methods could have been applied here (e.g. self-description). I was conscious of the risk of mischaracterising someone by including their early career in their assessment, so for the sake of simplicity I tried to look at what they did in the ten years leading up to their appointment. This leads to some oddities – David Marquand (Principal, Mansfield College Oxford, 1996-2002) was a Labour MP for 12 years and then SDP candidate and advisor but is counted as a pure academic by my rules – but it normally felt right, and I still think is better than part classifying someone on the basis of their first job out of university.
- For the sake of simplicity, where there are medical doctors who also held academic positions I’ve simply characterised them as academics. The one only exception is where I couldn’t find evidence of an individual holding a formal teaching position.
- Similarly, I’ve bundled in curators and managers of museums into the category of ‘academic’.
- There are also a lot of legal scholars who have been called to the bar, are registered solicitors etc. If I could see evidence that they practiced during the decade before their appointment I scored them as academics/lawyers; if not, then they were put down only as academics.
- ‘Civil servant’ here includes diplomats, and that in turn includes people who worked for international institutions like the UN.
- There are a lot of academics on my list who also hold (or held) life peerages. It would seem odd in many cases to describe them as ‘politicians’ even if that is literally true, so I’ve only done so where they held a party affiliation.
- I realised fairly early on that there were a lot of people whose prior careers fell into two or even three different overlapping buckets, and it would be artificial to force them into one category. So I created categories as required for academic/lawyers, academic/politics, law/civil service/NGOs, and many more.
- Even within those constraints, a lot of this is very subjective and reliant on (a) the quality of the information available, and (b) my patience in doing much more than skimming a Wikipedia page.
With all those caveats in mind… let’s unpack my main findings!
1. The move away from ‘academic’ heads is real, and relatively recent.
At least one part of Lofft’s hypothesis is unarguably true – there are fewer heads of house in my 2024 cohort classified only as academics. Currently, according to my review, there are 40%, down from 72% in 1950.
It’s worth expanding to include the people I classified as being academics + something else. There’s a long tradition of scholars in Anglican holy orders, for example, which continues today albeit in smaller numbers. Then there are the likes of Lord Blake (Provost, The Queen’s College Oxford, 1968-87) who was both an eminent historian and a committed Conservative peer, or the example of Alan Munro (Master, Christ’s College Cambridge, 1995-2002) who at various times was a university researcher and biotech director. There is also the strain of academic come civil servant, which were reasonably common in the mid-20th century as economists and scientists were recruited by government in service of the welfare state and the warfare state – Alex Cairncross (Master, St Peter’s Oxford, 1969-78) and James Chadwick (Master, Gonville & Caius Cambridge, 1948-58) are good examples of each respectively. This type is now almost extinct.
Even if you include these ‘academic +’ types, however, the trend remains the same – a fairly strong decline between 2000 and 2024. At the current time, according to my count, 49% of heads of house at Oxford and Cambridge can be considered to have a background working for a university, museum or other learned institution.
2. There are more lawyers…
What could it be about a role overseeing a hierarchical institution made up of solo practitioners, which involves a lot of dressing up and allows time for outside interests, which could attract members of the legal profession?
In terms of composition, it’s a mix – there’s currently at least one former senior judge in the form of Ernest Ryder, the current Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, but also a fair sprinkling of eminent KCs.
3. …and the arrival of the NGO professional
While it’s not hard to find senior Oxbridge dons in prior generations who held positions on the boards of charities and campaign organisations, my analysis didn’t identify any heads of house in the pre-2024 cohorts who worked for NGOs. Currently, 13% have at least some experience working in the Third Sector.
4. There have always been politicians and civil servants heading up Oxbridge colleges, but there are more now than previously.
Currently, just over a quarter of the current cohort of heads of house are either ex- or current politicians or former civil servants, compared to 11% in 1950. We recall the likes of Rab Butler in the late 20th century (Master, Trinity College Cambridge, 1965-78), but perhaps he was the exception that proved the rule: briefly an academic before his political career, whose own great-uncle had led the same institution. I think Sir Humphrey Appleby probably did end up as head of Baillie College, Oxford, but Jim Hacker would have fared better in the 21st century.
5. Overall, there are more candidates with a mixed background
I assumed doing my analysis that there would be considerably more people in 2024 who fell across multiple categories than in previous cohorts, reflecting the emergence of the ‘portfolio career’ in recent decades. That actually wasn’t the case, which in many ways makes sense – the kind of person who wants to lead a Master or Provost of an Oxbridge college will be the kind of person who pursues other side projects and public appointments, and the fellows will probably want someone who has fingers in many pies.
(Incidentally, William Deakin, the first Warden of St. Antony’s, Oxford, posed me the greatest difficulty in classification of any member of my data set. In the end I ended up putting him down as ‘soldier/author’, which hardly seems to do him justice.)
6. More generally, there is a greater diversity of professional backgrounds in the current cohort
While these don’t leap out as quantifiable trends, recruiting committees are clearly casting the net wider in recent years. The current Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge is a former Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff; Helen King, Principal of St. Annes, Oxford since 2017, may be the first former Chief Constable to head an Oxbridge college. 9% of the heads of house in 2024 have some kind of background in business. Clearly the leadership of Oxford and Cambridge colleges in far more variegated than even a few decades ago.
Does any of this matter?
There are two answers to this. One is that it doesn’t matter at all, unless you are an Oxbridge don or a student, or are looking for a stimulating but fairly cushy retirement gig.
The other is that it matters insofar as, for good or ill, Oxford and Cambridge still produce a disproportionate share of British elites – in politics, civil society, the media, academia, and business. I don’t think this matters in the sense that heads of house have much influence over these new elites – the curriculum and entry requirements, for example, are in reality in the hand of the university at large, and even within their own colleges they are often at best primus inter pares. What I find interesting is that who these institutions pick, and the reasons why they are chosen, suggests something about the broader ‘Establishment’ of which they are a part. Due to their prestige, these are desirable positions, where fellows can be discriminating and select for elites within British society of various kinds.
I would suggest that college selection committees are looking to non-academics for many of the same things that they wanted seventy-four years ago – they are seeking experience, connections, and prestige. In the post-war period, colleges could see the advantage of appointing an ex-mandarin or senior politician – or, even better, an academic who had spent a few years at Harwell or in HM Treasury – to help them navigate the University Grants Committee and perhaps give a little shine to their reputation. This all remains true today, but there is also a much more pressing need to schmooze donors and tap into funding from nonprofits as the ‘state as provider’ model has fallen away. I’m sure former PIMCO CEO Mohamed El-Erian has many favourable qualities which led the fellows of Queen’s College, Cambridge, to appoint him as President in 2020, but the likelihood that he could recruit American financiers to donate to the college must have been one of the attractions.
Perhaps most interesting, though, are the types of candidate which are clearly considered prestigious by colleges. Like all self-consciously elite organisations, Oxbridge colleges are constantly seeking to reinvent themselves and make themselves seem continually relevant both to prospective students and those holding power. In modern Britain, that might be someone like former head of GCHQ Robert Hannigan (Warden, Wadham College Oxford, 2021-present). Just as likely, it could be someone who ran a big charity (e.g. Loretta Minghella, Master of Clare College, Cambridge since 2021 and sister of Anthony), or an FT journalist like Gillian Tett (Provost, King’s College Cambridge, 2023-present), or a human rights silk like Dinah Rose (President, Magdalen College Oxford, 2020-present). From personal experience I can attest that colleges at Oxford and Cambridge are highly unusual institutions with their own peculiarities. At the same time, however, the leadership which they choose acts as a mirror – however distorted – to the British Establishment, past and present. It will be intriguing to see how the 2050 cohort reflects the society of mid-21st century United Kingdom.