After the crash, who owns the British university in 2014?

By David Watson. By international standards, British universities have extraordinarily high levels of autonomy. They control all of their assets, they employ their own staff, renew their own leadership and governors and can enter freely into contracts. They are formally masters of their own fate.
In practice, of course, this autonomy has gone along with dependence on government-originated contracts for teaching, research and other services, that impose their own conditions. As a consequence, higher education institutions have learned to lobby – individually and collectively – for their share of public funding. More...