2006: Many colleagues at Oxford are concerned that the problems of organisation and underfunding faced by the University should be properly understood and responded to by those whom we have elected to run the University. With that in mind we have published a ''blue paper'' in response to what we consider to be the inadequate response of the Governance Working Party.

The blue paper was originally published internally, but we have recently been informed that it has been published on the Web in altered form without our permission.

Here is the correct version of the Blue Paper: A Democratic Approach to Oxford Governance.

2007: I wrote the above remarks during the summer of 2006. Since that time the University's sovereign legislative body, Congregation, has rejected the proposals of the Governance Working Party by decisive majority of 3:2 on the largest turnout in its history.

The HEFCE has now asked the Audit and Scrutiny committee of the University to explain our system of governance, and to make suggestions for "improvements". It is clear that while the HEFCE is unwilling to enforce prescriptions on the University at this stage, it is using language designed to suggest to the University that it would be a good idea to make changes in line with what HEFCE deems "best practice" -- a governing body with a majority of external members. This suggestion is made by asking us to compare our governance, point by point, with the Code of Practice recommended by the Conference of University Chairmen (CUC) -- to which Oxford and Cambridge do not belong.

It is noteworthy in these circumstances that the CUC itself has published research that includes the remarkable statement that high-performance of a University in the various league tables is inversely correlated with "best practice" as recommended by the CUC. "11. In such a situation some HEIs believe that despite the Higgs and Smith Reports and the importance of the Combined Code, the appropriateness of private sector models of governance has yet to be proven. Increasingly in the private sector high performing companies [...] require high performing boards, and it is difficult to conceive of a board being held to be effective where a company is performing less than satisfactorily. [...] However, in higher education corporate governance has usually had little relationship to the effectiveness of teaching and research; indeed, some of the universities who score most highly in the various performance league tables may have weak systems of governance if measured against best practice in the sector and the Combined Code." A Final Report to the CUC on Good Practice in Six Areas of the Governance of Higher Education Institutions. (CUC-CHEMS, 2004)

My personal view is that our discussions on governance ought not to be driven by the idea of structural change for its own sake.

We have to achieve a system of governance which is fit for the purpose of maintaining the University's excellence and which starts from the current reality, rather than just complying with a general structural schema that has not been empirically validated in either of the ancient Universities.

In Richard Layard's words: "Reorganisation is much less important than some think. In fact, many different organisational structures can be made to work equally well. What cannot work is constant reorganisation, where nobody understands what is happening, institutional memory is lost, and everybody worries about their future rather than the job in hand. No change should be introduced without being piloted. The speed of any change is much less important than its sustainability, and over-hasty change can even lead to cycles which eventually return the system to where it started."

As I wrote the above in the autumn of 2007 the newspapers were full of accounts of the near-disastrous consequences for the Northern Rock Bank (a privatised former Mutual society) of its "adventurous" business policies -- policies endorsed by a board with a majority of external directors. So much for "best practice".

And as I write in the late autumn of 2008 we have seen a near meltdown of the global financial system precipitated by the activities of banks and other companies whose boards no doubt conformed to "best practice".

David Colquhoun has some interesting things to say about the use of non-scientific methods of evaluating organisational structures.

I demitted office in May 2006 after 7 years' service as Trustee and Honorary Secretary of the Oxfordshire Dyslexia Association. In April 2010 I was re-elected as a Trustee, and served for another 5 years.

I left office in 2005 after eight years' service as a Foundation Governor of Saint Mary and Saint John First School in Oxford. People who know my views on religion will appreciate the irony of my having been appointed to this position by the Bishop of Oxford! People who have served as Governors will understand just what I mean when I say ''Responsibility without power is frustrating.''

I have nothing but admiration for schoolteachers, and little but contempt for governments who are content to blame schools and teachers for social problems that are beyond their control.

During the mid 1970s, a period when many academics had become disillusioned with their representation by the Association of University Teachers (AUT, subsequently incorporated into UCU), I left that association and (other academics) joined the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS, now part of unite, the UNION). I was elected to its (Academic Staffs) National Committee in 1975. I served on it until I moved to Oxford in 1978, whereupon I rejoined AUT. I learned many things during my membership of ASTMS: the most important being what it means for one union to 'go on a raid' against another union.

• Written
  • Tony Hoare at Belfast and Oxford This is an expanded version of my chapter entitled Teaching at Belfast and Oxford in the ACM-published volume: Theories of programming: the life and works of Tony Hoare, edited by Cliff B. Jones and Jayadev Misra. It also appears behind a (zero-price) paywall on the ACM site.
  • Interpreting Dreams of Abstract Machines Slides for my talk on Ada Lovelace's Bernoulli numbers "program" given at the Lovelace Symposium in late 2015. This includes an account of why the published "program" was not, strictly, a program, and of a couple of serious bugs in Ada's published paper. It also includes an explanation of the Analytical Engine viewed as an abstract machine, and the outcomes of simulated computations of done on a "good faith" extension of the actual machine with a good faith correction of Ada's program.
  • Contrarians Unite! Speech at a dinner of the Worcester College Senior Common Room.
  • Richard Punctures a Windbag. (An essay in metananobiography?) The (lightly defamatory) memoir of working with Richard Bornat that I presented just before my technical talk at the Fest to mark his retirement. Aldeburgh, June 2009.
  • No Confidence in the Higher Education Policies of the Government
    (A speech to the Oxford Congregation Discussion on Fees and University Funding of 8th February 2011 -- as published in Open Democracy on 13th February)
  • On Bureaucracy, Scrutiny and Democracy
    (A speech to the Oxford Congregation Discussion on Governance of November 2005)
  • A talk given at the 50th Anniversary commemoration of the Computing Laboratory -- Oxford, June 2007
  • After-dinner talk given at Richard Bird's 60th Birthday Celebration -- Oxford, March 2003
  • After-dinner talk given at Bill Roscoe's 60th Birthday Celebration -- Oxford, January 2017
  • 60 years a Wizard: a talk given at Michael Goldsmith's 60th Birthday Celebration -- Oxford, February 2019
  • Illustrated reflections on Life at Oxford (after 20 years here) -- 1998
  • A paper that will speak for itself, if you can listen. Some Finiteness Results for Completely Hyper-Invertible Homeomorphisms
• Audio
  • Richard Bird's Speech at his retirement dinner -- Oxford, June 2008
  • Tony Hoare's seminar on the Verification Grand Challenge -- Oxford, June 2008
  • How does Bernard sound?
  • How on earth do you pronounce Bernard's name?