Professor of Law
Faculty of Law
University of Leicester

E-mail ney@le.ac.uk

© Copyright 2002 A Bradney
First Published in Web Journal of Current Legal Issues.

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University law schools, like their parent universities, are faced with ever-increasing demands to demonstrate the fact that they are properly accountable to the communities in which they are situated. This article argues that such calls need to be examined carefully. The article goes on to argue that in the past both universities and their law schools have not in fact manifested a belief in such accountability. Finally the article argues that whatever view one takes of the function of a university law school close accountability to local communities is in fact incompatible with the mission of the law school.

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Writing at the end of the 1980s, Barnett observed that

Evidence for the recent close connection between the university and its community that Barnett describes takes a number of different forms. It has expression in, for example, the notion that universities should contribute more directly to servicing their national and local communities by improving economic performance and in the efforts of some universities to respond to that suggestion (“The Development of Higher education into the 1990s”, 1985, para 1.2; Fraser, 1999). It is also to be seen in the idea that universities should see that their teaching role benefits the community widely and not just those drawn from a narrow stratum within the community (Blackstone, 2001). However, more importantly and more deeply than any of these forms of the idea, the concept of close connection is also to be seen in a vision of the political relationship between community and university; in an argument that universities should be closely accountable for the work that they do to the communities in which they are located (see, for example, “Higher Education: A New Framework”, 1991, para 58). Thus, for example, Johnes and Taylor have written of

Barnett’s observations reflect the political orthodoxy of their time; “the idea of accountability...[has] become embedded in assumptive worlds” (Henkel, 2000, p 84). Both the main British political parties subscribe to the notion of the close connection between university and society in all its various forms. Thus for example, when the Conservative government introduced the concept of the external inspection of teaching in universities, their measure was supported in principle by Labour MPs (1991/92, Standing Committee F, col 392).

Nevertheless, notwithstanding all of the above, both the general notion that separation between university and society is undesirable and the particular notion that they there should be detailed accountability by the universities to their host communities are contestable and have continued to be contested. In recent years Kogan, for example, has suggested that

Russell concluded his 1993 book, “Academic Freedom”, even more trenchantly. “The argument that universities know best how to manage their own business has been one of the central themes of this book” (Russell, 1003, p 101). More recently, disquiet amongst universities about the intrusive activities of the Quality Assurance Agency that some universities saw as being an unacceptable impingement on their autonomy has resulted in a curtailing of that body’s activities (HEFCE 01/45, 2001, para 9: Bradney, forthcoming, chp 7). Moreover, it is important to remember that the contest between the argument for connexion of university and community on the one hand or separation on the other, itself in part a manifestation of wider debates about the place of different groups (especially professional groups) within the state, is not one that is new. Calls for academics to ally themselves more closely to the immediate service of their host states have echoed down through the centuries; as have the rebukes administered to those who heeded such calls. In 1922 Léon Bérard, the then French minister of education, asserted that, as regards the universities,

a sentiment in keeping with the current views of many British politicians (T Zeldin “France 1848-1945: Intellect and Pride” (1980) Oxford University Press, Oxford p 325). In contrast, the American academic Thorstein Veblen, writing in 1918, had warned against the possibility that the search or knowledge becoming

and had gone on to declare that “work that has a commercial value does not belong in the university” (Veblen, T, 1965, p 2 and p 151). Benda, in a book originally published in 1927, wrote of a

Benda’s view of “clerks”, who included academics as well as others, was that

Such a position, which involves both the connection and the accountability seen above, was, he thought, “the treason of the clerks”; a failure of clerks to live up to their traditional calling.

The notion that there should be close connexion between university and community and the arguments around this notion has a deep resonance for the law school. British law schools have long been very aware of their relationship with their host community. Indeed, in the early decades of the twentieth century those working in British university law schools saw themselves first as being lawyers, and thus members of their host community, rather than academics or members of a separate university. Holdsworth, for example, began his 1925 Presidential Address to the Society of Public Teachers of Law by repeatedly asserting that the academic lawyer was a member of a separate branch of the legal profession alongside solicitors and barristers (Holdsworth, 1925, p 1). For many decades law schools have accepted a requirement to account for their teaching to professional bodies of solicitors and barristers if they wished to have the accreditation that would exempt their students from the first part of such examinations as would permit entry to those professions. As the years have passed and law schools have gained in experience and confidence, they have begun to wrestle with this kind of accountability, sometimes finding it a limitation and a hindrance in the development of the curriculum and, because of the effect of the curriculum on research, a block on the evolution of the law school (Birks, 1995, p 16). Despite this, at the same time, as they have become more international in their recruitment of students, so law schools have accepted wider demands of accountability as they have sought accreditation by professional bodies outside their immediate host countries, seeking this accreditation because successive government have encouraged universities to take ever increasing numbers of overseas students (Williams, 1987). Thus, for example, the University of Leicester Law Faculty is now accredited by professional bodies in India, Malaysia and Singapore as well as by those in the England and Wales. Now, along with universities as a whole, law schools are experiencing demands for accountability in a different way, as British governments seek to dictate curriculum content (by, for example, seeking a greater emphasis on skills that are thought to be useful in the work-place) and investigate how effectively resources are being used in the law school through exercises designed to measure the quality of teaching and the quality of research (Kogan and Hanney, 2000).

Both the accountability that the law schools have long been used to and the new forms of accountability seen more recently raise questions about the way in which that accountability is demonstrated. These are questions about the audit process. They involve both technical issues (how do I write a more effective student questionnaire to demonstrate quality of teaching?) and theoretical concerns (what is the ideological impact on the university of living in an audit society?). Both these things are of enormous importance for the university and its law school (Bradney, 1996; Bradney, 2001). However, behind and before these matters are questions about the very concept of accountability itself. Audit presumes accountability but to whom or to what should law schools and their universities be accountable, if anything? The idea of accountability may, as Henkel suggests, be part of our assumptive world but should this be the case? Have law schools been correct in accepting, to the degree that they have, demands of accountability?

Faced with arguments about accountability, university law schools need not only to examine the mechanisms of audit that they are presented with when asked to demonstrate that accountability but also to reflect on the reason for that audit. In the parlance of modern administration in the universities, law schools need to ask themselves what place, if any, the various different concepts of accountability have in their mission. In doing so law schools need to distinguish the mission of the law school and the mission statements that universities now publish. Mission statements in universities are of limited efficacy (Davies and Gaister, 1996, p 291). Moreover “[t]he more the nature of mission is explored, the more it becomes apparent that an overall institutional mission is little more than a veneer” (Peeke, 1994, p 126). However, in contrast, the mission of the law school is the purpose(s) that it has genuinely set itself. One of the consequences of new pressures on the universities is that law schools need to be a lot more self-conscious about what their mission actually is if they are not to be find themselves drifting in a sea of constantly changing currents resulting from changing political fashions.

There is amongst academics in university law schools, as much as the rest of the university, a feeling of guilt, consequent on the relatively benign conditions of the academic work-place that are unusual in a modern economy. Evidence of this guilt that many academics seem to experience because of their working conditions is widespread in the literature on higher education. It is to be seen, for example, in the academic who comments on their research thus: “[I]t is a great privilege to be able to it. The kind of research we do here is parasitic on the public purse and if we are educating the younger generation, we are giving a little bit in return” (Henkel, 2000, p 184). Rationally it is difficult to see why academics should either feel it a privilege to do the work that they are contracted to do or to see it as being “parasitic on the public purse” when research is part of what the state funds the universities for. Nevertheless, the comment probably captures at least part of the feelings of many academics about their job. Partially for this reason, many academics, both in the law school and in the wider university, will find it easy to assent eagerly to the suggestion that “[a]ll could agree that universities are ‘in the service’ of the societies which nurture them” (Duke, 1992, p 111), assuaging their guilt with this notion that their mission is properly one of service to their community. However, immediate, unthinking acquiescence to this proposition is dangerous, both for the individual academic, the university and societies more generally.

In his lecture on the place of the study of theology in the context of changing conditions of governance in the university Jenkins argued that

The theoretical questions that university law schools have to ask is, notwithstanding the culture of guilt that often pervades the university, do the new demands of accountability give sufficient space for giving an account of why the law schools wish to set their own standards and, if there is no such space, can law schools hold themselves accountable to other people’s standards without pleading guilty to Benda’s charge of treason?

Two stories of accountability, two stories of the relationship between academics and their host communities, will serve to illustrate the centuries-old, divergent possibilities that there are in the way that academics can relate to those in the outside world.

Between the tenth and the twelfth of February 1355 a riot occurred in Oxford, pitching the townspeople against scholars from the university. According to various accounts a number of people were killed and a large amount of property was destroyed or stolen.

The privileges which the university had were impressive and

The events in Oxford were unremarkable for their times. In medieval Europe, universities sought to negotiate a relationship with the political powers around them, at time when such power was more obviously pluralistic than in the modern nation state. The University of Oxford sought to play off the power of the town against the power of the King and to exist in the interstices between the two, using the fact of the riot to increase its autonomy. Elsewhere universities sought similar advantage from the conflict between secular and spiritual authorities. Thus, for example, in the thirteenth century the university in Paris successfully sought to control its chancellor, not at that time a member of the university, by appeal to the papal authorities (Powicke and Emden, 1936, p 308). However, whatever the detail, the aims of universities throughout Europe remained the same; an attempt to acquire privileges that amounted to a degree of separation from the society around them.

The events of 399 BC in Athens are better known than the riot of St Scholastica’s day and can be told more shortly. Socrates was charged with a number of crimes including heresy and corrupting the minds of the young (Plato, 1959, p 43). Having been found guilty, Socrates was sentenced to death. Despite the entreaties of friends, Socrates refused to flee Athens, arguing a duty to obey the laws of the state, took hemlock and died.

Notwithstanding their many differences both these stories are broadly accounts of the relationship between academics and their host communities. Of the two it is the second, the death of Socrates, which is closer to the conditions of accountability and audit that are currently being suggested as the proper relationship between university law school and its host community. Society, through a jury, audited Socrates’ teaching, found it unsuitable for the prevailing social conditions and then ended his tenure in an unusually emphatic way. The story of St Scholastica’s day is more complex. The relationship between the town and the university had been troubled before the riot and continued to be so for many decades after it (Hammer Jr, 1986). However, in part the events clearly constituted a negative judgement on the position of the University of Oxford by the town of Oxford. Socrates, arguing a path of virtue, accepted the judgement of his society. The university, using political stratagems, sought to overturn the judgement of the town and, indeed, sought to overturn the right of the town to sit in judgement. Socrates died. The University of Oxford presently has 16,386 students and an income of 378,100 million pounds (University of Oxford Annual Review, 2001). Both Socrates and the University of Oxford now enjoy an enviable academic reputation.

Both the behaviour of Socrates and a straight-forward reading of the proposition that “[a]ll could agree that universities are ‘in the service’ of the societies which nurture them” offers the law school a very clear model if it does wish to accept the necessity of close connection with its host community and accountability to that community. Some illustrative examples will serve to show the behaviour that is required of law schools by this model. Professional bodies indicate to law schools what they require if law schools are to be accredited. In the words of the current Chair of the Law Society’s Training Committee, the professional associations decide what “demands of academics” they wish to make (Holroyd, 2001). Law schools sometimes find these requirements agreeable and intelligent; sometimes they find them contradictory, ambiguous, self-serving or simply silly. When, in 1992, Law Society draft proposals sought to replace the 1990 Joint Statement, which had limited descriptions of the content of core courses to six lines or so, "with two pages of detailed requirements as to course content, coupled with restrictions on methods of assessment and an additional requirement to teach and examine skills" the proposals were attacked as being "wholly wrong in principle", "imping[ing] upon academic freedom" and "bizarre” (Unger, 1992; Birks, 1993). Following the example of Socrates, in such situations law schools should argue with the professional bodies, stating their case in the plainest language possible. Indeed following Socrates, one might argue that the law schools do not simply have the right to make their case but are, rather, under a positive duty, when faced with what they see as being irrational or undesirable suggestions for accreditation, “to inform them [the professional bodies] of the facts and to [seek to] convince them by argument” (Plato, 1959, p 68). However, if they cannot convince by argument, as Socrates failed to do when he was tried, in the end they should submit to those bodies, following their dictates even if they believe them to be wrong. The professional bodies are, after all, not simply private interest groups but are instead associations with, in the case of the Law Society, powers and duties delegated to them by the state under s 2(3) Solicitors Act 1974 so that they can ensure that, amongst other things, the legal professions are appropriately educated (“Competition in professions: A report by the Director General of Fair Trading”, 2001, p 6).

As with the law school’s relationship with professional bodies so with its relationship with governments. In the last few decades governments have sought to influence the curriculum in universities in a number of ways. For example, through the Enterprise in Higher Education scheme the then Conservative government sought to make “the curriculum more relevant to the world of work” (Prickett, 1994, p 168). Once again the example of Socrates suggests that law schools are entitled to argue with these suggestions, and may be under a duty to do so, pointing to any intellectual deficiencies inherent in proposals. However, if such arguments fail the law school must accept the judgement of society made via the voice of its elected government and implement the new ideas. The lesson of Socrates is plain. The right to intricate and excellent argument is something that the law school can claim but, when it comes to action, its actions must be in subservience to the wishes of its host community; accountability is the watchword and accountability means obedience, deference and submission.

In many ways the lesson of Socrates seems unremarkable. It tells the university and its law school no more than that they should behave in a democratic manner, taking their proper integrated place in the orderly intercourse of society. The authority of Socrates and the general left/liberal political leanings of those working in law schools as evidenced by the voting patterns of academics all seem to point in the same direction (Times Higher Education Supplement, 11^th May 2001, p 1); to a more connected and more accountable law school. There are, however, two problems with this path. First, it resulted in the death of “the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man” (Plato, 1959, p 183). The jury in Athens may have concluded that Socrates’ teaching was unsuitable but more than 2,000 years of subsequent history has taken a different view. It would be difficult to argue that this particular example of accountability to the community proved to be of service either to the development of research or teaching. Secondly, it is not at all clear that this path is consonant with the present behaviour of universities or their law schools.

One analysis regularly found in the recent literature on universities in the United Kingdom argues that an examination of the structures of governance that now exist in many universities suggests that universities are in the process of undergoing a radical change in their institutional shape so as to ensure much closer accountability both on the part of individual academics and units within the university and on the part of the university as a whole (see, for example, Salter and Tapper, 1994). Rather than individual and departmental autonomy and freedom being the signature of the university, new structures ensure a form of bureaucratic and even managerial government that leads to compliance to demands that are generated either by central university authorities or by bodies external to the university; following this view, one could argue that, with the decline of donnish dominion, universities have begun to follow the path of Socrates. However, whilst there is a degree of truth in this argument, in part it results from the mode of analysis and more specifically the type of data chosen by those who put forward this view.

The behaviour of universities and their law schools can be analysed in a number of different ways. One obvious course is to see them as institutions and to look at the various structures and offices that exist within them. Such a method, because of the materials that it uses, has a tendency to focus on what the universities say they do rather than what they actually do and to concentrate on those structures that are hierarchically important rather than the everyday behaviour of the vast majority of individual academics. Commentators who see the universities as undergoing a process of radical change commonly rely on this kind of material, pointing to changes in committee structures, job titles, ostensible lines of authority and the like. An analysis of this type, whilst valuable, has its limitations. In reporting the public face of the university there is an assumption that what the university says it does is what it actually does; there is also an assumption that the wishes and beliefs of those in a position to set policies within the university determine or at least significantly influence the behaviour of the majority of working academics. Assumptions are always dangerous and in this case they can result in a false picture of the university.

Use of other material can supplement a purely institutional analysis of the university, enriching the view that is gained. A number of writers have sought to explore what Trow has called “the private life of the university” (Trow, 1975, p 115). For Trow and for others the private life of the university is the cultural experience of being an academic, “the moment-by-moment, day-to-day activities and interactions of teachers and students engaged in teaching and learning” (Trow, 1975, p 115); an experience that is sometimes an experience of being a university academic but is often more precisely an experience of being an academic within a particular subject discipline; an experience that is revealed not in the study of university mission statements or Quality Assurance Agency institutional audit reports but in the observation of the everyday behaviour of those working in the universities (see, for example, Becher and Trowler, 2001; Evans, 1988; Evans, 1993; Trowler, 1998). A detailed resumé of the various studies of this life lies outside the remit of this essay. However, one aspect of the life that has been revealed, its reluctance and at times its refusal to conform to external direction, is germane to arguments about accountability, the university and its law school.

There is abundant evidence that reveals the resistance to outside control that exists within the universities. Trowler’s study of the introduction of a credit transfer scheme in one university looked at what he called “ground level” academics and detailed the ways in which

This culture, Trowler argues, results in “the ability of academic staff to obstruct and change policy during its implementation phase” (Trowler, 1998, p 153). This resistance to external pressure is a phenomenon that exists at all levels within the universities and is not restricted to academic staff. Trow, for example, has written of

Such behaviour, whether on the part of “ground level” academics or university administrators, is not redolent of the lesson of Socrates, suggesting instead institutions and individuals that are keen to pursue their own ends even if those ends are not sanctioned by external authorities; suggesting that the lesson of the aftermath of the riot of St Scholastica’s Day continues to be understood in the modern university.

In law schools this phenomenon of resistance is illustrated by the response of English law schools to the 1993/94 Teaching Quality Assurance exercise. The exercise stemmed directly from the then Conservative government’s belief that the universities should be accountable for what they did (“Higher Education: A New Framework”, 1991, para 58). However the object of the exercise was not just to ensure that universities reported on the teaching that they were doing. Instead, the government had a clear and long-standing view about what kind of teaching should be going on in universities. In 1985 the then Conservative government had said that universities should

and the exercise was intended to show how well the universities measured up to the government’s views. Thus the “Assessors’ Handbook”, issued to those taking part in the exercise, said, amongst other things, that equipping student for employment was an example of good practice in teaching (HEFCE, 1993, para 11) HEFCE, 1993, para 11). A mock report included in the Handbook gave the falling employment prospects of students as something that was of concern (HEFCE, 1993, para 32). Moreover, the government thought that the exercise should go beyond the universities assessing their own teaching and should include a measure of scrutiny that was external to the university sector (“Higher Education: A New Framework, 1991, para 69). Thus when teams of assessors visited law schools they included one non-academic as a full member of the team. Notwithsatnding all of this, what is noticeable about the results of the 1993/94 exercise for English law schools is, however, the degree to which it failed to fulfil the government’s original intentions. Teaching was certainly reported on but both the reports on individual law schools and the overall subject report on law analyse the quality of teaching in terms that are entirely academic. Whilst the exercise was widely criticised within law schools no-one ever suggested that any of the judgements made resulted from the influence of non-academic assessors nor was there any suggestion that the government’s view about the type of teaching that ought to be done in universities impacted upon final reports (Bradney, 1996).

There need be no contradiction in data that, on the one hand, suggests that study of the public face of the university broadly indicates compliance to new demands whilst study of the private face indicates resistance. Those who are in universities do not possess, or do not perceive themselves as possessing, the kind of power that allows them simply to reject or ignore external pressure. In the end they feel they have to at least appear to comply. And in some cases, and for some individuals, compliance reflects a genuine measure of agreement with the validity of the external demand. Some academics, for example, welcomed the idea of externally assessing teaching quality in universities (see, for example, Perry, 1992, p 118); others have long believed in the need for a wider democratic accountability on the part of the universities (see for example, Rustin, 1986, pp 59-60). However, the evidence above suggests that such compliance and appearance of compliance as does exist in universities and their law schools does not reflect complete acceptance by academics of the value of new demands of accountability put on the universities.

The observations above suggest that, whilst Halsey may have been correct in writing about a decline in donnish dominion in the universities, he was over-hasty in proclaiming an end to that dominion (Halsey, 1992). Publicly universities and their law schools have taken the path of Socrates but privately they have, at least on occasion, followed the University of Oxford’s path after the riots of St Scholastica, seeking to find a route that will preserve and perhaps even improve their own position and their ability to pursue their own ends. In turn this might lead one to ask whether this continuing attempt to retain a dominion indicates anything other than the truth of Bourdieu’s comment that

In more prosaic language and in a more simplified theoretical framework, is the current behaviour of universities and the current behaviour of those in university law schools anything more than self-interest; an attempt by one body of workers to preserve the peculiar and unusual non-monetary advantages that they derive from their employment?

The justification for the attempt to maintain at least a measure of donnish dominion lies in the purpose that is ascribed to the university law school. This ascription has notoriously become a matter of debate and controversy in the modern era. Commentators analysing the purpose of a university law school currently situate themselves at one of two poles or at some position on a continuum between those poles. At one pole the view taken is that academics in university law schools are not paid to train lawyers, but to study the law and to teach students what they happen to discover” (Fiss, 1985, p 26). At the other pole the law school is seen as being the practising profession’s “House of Intellect” (Savage and Watt, 1996). However, both these very different visions of, first, the law school as a place of liberal education or, secondly, as something related much more closely to vocational concerns give reasons for the law school rejecting demands for close accountability.

If the law school is a place for liberal education then its work is validated by the fact that the pursuit of knowledge is seen as being its own end (Newman, 1960, p 77). “[I]t has within it the source of autonomy – the quest for and even discovery of the truth according to nature” (Bloom, 1987, p 254). The law school cannot be closely accountable to its local community because, whilst the community will benefit from its presence (through, for example, the educating of its children), it does not exist to benefit the community. What legal academics “happen to discover” may be beneficial to the host community in which they find themselves but, equally, the discoveries may be harmful to the community or simply irrelevant to it. Academics in their teaching in the law school may support the mores of the host community or of sections of it (such as, for example, the practising legal professions) but, equally, they may be critical of those mores or simply be indifferent to them.

In this vision of the university law school, to argue that law schools should be closely accountable to their communities makes as much sense as arguing that churches should be accountable to the same communities. Neither are committed to the immediate or transitory, neither are committed to the communities in which they fortuitously find themselves, having instead wider obligations. Accountability in this instance is to a commitment to search for new understanding. Moreover, for a law school with a mission of this form, notions of accountability to the local community are dangerous. New ways of understanding the world are, by their very nature, unsettling and, as Socrates found, may not be welcomed. Thus a law school that both pursues the advancement of understanding and seeks to be accountable to its host community will be likely to suffer the fate of Socrates. Knowledge may not have immediate utility and any utility that it does have may benefit not the local community in which the university law school finds itself but some other community, separated by geography or time. None of this is of import. What matters is that the law school pursues its function of seeking new understanding, acknowledging the fact that, as Aristotle argued, curiosity is part of the signature of the human condition (Housman, 1961, p 16).

A vision that sees the university law school as being linked to the practising professions as their “House of Intellect” appears at first sight to offer more purchase for an argument for close and detailed accountability on the part of the law school. In such a law school “there is potential conflict between our duties as professionalizers and our obligations to profess the truth” (Carrington, 1985, p 11). However, on closer enquiry the arguments for the law school claiming autonomy for itself, whilst different, are as strong for the law school that sees itself as being a “House of Intellect” for the professions as they are for law schools that see themselves as pursuing a liberal education. To argue that law schools should work in a manner that is beneficial to the professions is not the same thing as arguing that law schools should hold themselves as being accountable to the professions. Thus, for example, Birks has argued that if the law school’s “work is ever useless to judges and practising lawyers, we will have come adrift from our foundations” (Birks, 1996, p ix). However, at the same time, he has argued that

To argue for role of the law school in assisting the professions is not necessarily to ignore the special knowledge and expertise that is to be found in the law school; a knowledge and expertise that, like “the discovery of truth according to nature”, gives the university law school the source of its autonomy. The mission of the law school is educational and, even if that mission is linked to the needs of the practising profession, it is those who have devoted their lives to the practice of education who, uniquely, have the qualifications and experience that will enable them to tell how that mission is to be played out. Once it might have seemed appropriate to argue that untrained “visiting parties of practising solicitors” should judge the appropriateness of teaching in law schools (McLeod, 1988, p 14). Now, in an era when entry into the academic profession is usually dependant on the possession of a PhD and when HEFCE have announced that it is “no longer necessary to maintain comprehensive external review at subject level” and have promised “lightness of touch” in any new regime that audits teaching, such a position seems implausible (HEFCE 01/45 paras 8 and 9).

Many of the ideas that are central to the political rhetoric that presently surrounds universities are comparatively under-theorised. Universities, it is said, need to be audited in order to see whether or not they are efficient because they ought to be accountable. Power has noted that, in relation to the concept of auditing, “there is no precise agreement about what auditing really is” and that there is a “fuzziness” to the idea (Power, 1997, p 4 and p 6). In a similar fashion, the notion of “efficiency” has simply been presented as being an unalloyed good that therefore does not require further elucidation (Hopwood, 1984, p 173). In both cases the failure to amplify what is meant by the concept, in order to arrive at an agreed operational definition, should not be seen as being fortuitous but, instead, should be understood as being part of the political process that gives power to the terms. Both efficiency and auditing are presented as value-free, technical matters. The vagueness of the ideas assists in their application, making them easier to use, because it conceals their judgemental nature. In reality what counts as being efficient and what counts as an appropriate way of auditing so that efficiency can be demonstrated are policy matters that reflect political choices.

The same points can be made with respect to the notion of accountability. Unless the concepts of institutional autonomy for universities and individual academic freedom are dispensed with altogether it is unclear precisely what the concept of the accountability of the university law school to its host community means. University law schools have long been willing to account for themselves, indicating what they are doing and why they are doing it is one thing. This is what Blackstone did in his lecture, “On the Study of Law”, and Dicey did in his lecture, “Can English Law be Taught at the Universities?” (Blackstone, 1825; Dicey, 1903); that is what, amongst others things, the ever-increasing quantity of literature on university legal education does. For university law schools to hold themselves accountable to externally generated criteria, meeting other people’s standards rather than their own, is another matter; for them to do is that is to depart from their mission. Far from being nonsense as Barnett suggests, the aspiration to a degree of separation from their host communities remains a necessary goal for university law schools and the University of Oxford’s reaction to the riots of St Scholastica’s Day, a better lesson for the law school than the death of Socrates.

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