Oxford's Business Blues.(Brief Article)

Oxford University mooted the idea of establishing a business school six years ago, prompting 500 black-gowned dons to storm into the 17th- century Sheldonian Theatre in protest. Harvard's business school dates from 1908. Cambridge succumbed in 1990. But outraged Oxonians unleashed volleys of Ciceronian oratory, arguing that the groves of academe should be out of bounds to commerce. How times have changed. Frustrated by the British government's reluctance to let the university charge real-world tuition fees, demoralized by mounting charges of elitism, with research and teaching stifled by inadequate state subsidies, the dons are realizing that capitalism might just be the key to their future. At the notoriously traditional 800-year-old institution, increasing numbers of them are calling for their university to be (gasp) privatized.

That's a hugely controversial proposal in a country that still clings fiercely to the ideal of providing a free, state-funded education to anyone who merits it. Britain ranks just 16th out of 23 developed countries for higher-education spending, yet its universities are allowed to charge even their richest students no more than $1,600 per year, a quarter of the real cost of study and a figure that pales in comparison with Harvard's $22,694 annual tuition. Prime Minister Tony Blair wants 50 percent of Britain's under-30s in full-time education by 2006, and given his no-new-taxes style, universities suspect they'll be responsible for finding a large proportion of the $15 billion that will cost. Already Oxford is having trouble paying salaries sufficient to attract top teachers; a junior lecturer with a Ph.D. is offered just $23,000 a year, while a full professor gets $68,400--roughly half the salaries of their U.S. counterparts. For Oxford, long the global epitome of top-drawer education, the question is whether the university's days as a bastion of world-class excellence might be over.

Lately the issue seems to have taken on a new urgency. Blair may himself be a graduate of Oxford, but his government, which subsidizes the university to the tune of $304 million annually, has quite deliberately picked a fight. Two years ago, when the university rejected Laura Spence, a state-school student from the north of England who had stellar grades, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown lambasted the admissions system as "more reminiscent of the old-boy network... than genuine ...