The changing idea of university autonomy

ABSTRACT Recent changes in the relationship between the state and the universities have caused many to doubt the continuing aptness of describing British universities as autonomous institutions. However, university autonomy was always exercised within a political context which, to varying degrees, prescribed its boundaries. Furthermore, an analysis of autonomy should make a distinction between the autonomy of the individual universities and of their academic staff. The argument is that, in the past decade, the link between institutional and individual autonomy within the British university system has been broken. A decline in the autonomy of the dons has been matched by an actual enhancement of the autonomy of the universities as institutions. The state has established parameters which are managed by the funding councils. It is within the framework of these parameters, and the managerial strategies of the funding councils, that the universities now exercise their autonomy.