I have been involved in a few debates at University level, and summarize these (with my contributions) below.
It should of course be noted that the matters on which I have spoken tend to be those where I disagree with the direction in which the University administration seems to be taking things, so what appears below may represent a rather skewed version of my view of the University. I hope at some stage to be able to write a more general introduction to this page; for now I have added this seasoning.
I do not pretend that any of my lists of documents is anything like complete: they tend to constitute a subset of the documents I felt it necessary to consult in order to prepare my remarks for Discussions.
It would probably be fair to say that my real love lies not at all in politics, but in framing a system of rules that are well-drafted (I often use the word “neat” when speaking) and that work well in practice. I think that it would be fair to say that it is often the case that the way the University works is somewhat different from what one might expect from looking at the regulations. Whilst not believing the fallacy that it is necessarily the case that legislating is the best way of resolving this, I think legislation has a part to play, and certainly that bad legislation will not help matters.
This debate is ongoing, and relates to the University's voting rules. The issue of the voting method being used (the University uses a form of single transferable vote) seems to have been conflated with a number of related issues (such as registers of voters and the functions of the presiding officer). There is a good deal of mathematical complication in some parts of the debate, as well as some rather technical procedural aspects. I shall try to write something that does this justice at some stage.
Yes, I'm afraid I actually care about these. Somebody has to, and since these are about the process of lawmaking, they suit me down to the ground. The items in this category are somewhat more abstruse than voting, in the sense that they contain provisions such as one that says that somebody acting other than in accordance with the rules thirty years ago does not make it possible to challenge every legitimate consequential action. (OK, you're probably bored silly by now and should skip to the next section, but I think it's really pretty clever.)
I spoke at the most recent Discussion on such matters (transcript of my remarks), to which the Council has responded with a Notice that does not give a strong indication of having been written after the Discussion, and with the promotion of a Grace that has now been passed. This was remarkable because it was observed in the Discussion that the proposals conflicted with another Statute, and the Vice-Chancellor was invited to withdraw the Grace so that the problem could be corrected. (Proposals to change Statutes have to be approved by Order-in-Council, and it was suggested that a proposal that created two conflicting Statutes might not be the best to submit to the Privy Council.) It will be interesting to see what the Privy Council makes of the proposals.
The extent of my involvement in the debate at national level about top-up fees was a single email to the then MP for Cambridge (she lost her seat at the following general election), Anne Campbell, on the eve of the second reading debate on what became the Higher Education Act 2004. I was not, therefore, extremely active on the issue.
When the Higher Education Act 2004 passed into law, the matter of top-up fees came to University level and the University received the Report of the Council on the arrangements for University Composition Fees from 2006–07. I was less than impressed that the Report appeared to presume that because the University would be allowed to charge higher composition fees, it would obviously do so, and at the highest rate allowed. The proposals also removed the power of review over fee levels previously enjoyed by the Regent House (even when these levels were previously fixed at national level!), and contained some rather elementary drafting errors that seemed to suggest a lack of care taken over a matter that most students would consider rather important. I made a speech at the Discussion on the Report (I have not put online my copy of the speech as I changed what I said on-the-fly when the Administrative Secretary corrected some (but not all) of the errors I had previously notified to the University's Secretariat, and when the then President of the Cambridge University Students' Union expressed his support of aspects of the Report to which he had dissented).
The Council then published a Grace on the matter (the University’s web pages have an informal explanation of what a Grace is for those who might wish to know), which was passed automatically at 1600 on 10th December 2004.
Debates about who should own what intellectual property have rumbled on for years, and I have not been around long enough to have been a part of much of the debate. This is not something I am currently competent to summarize, either.
There was recently yet another debate on the issue, and it is probably easiest to jump in at the Second Joint Report of the Council and General Board on the ownership of Intellectual Property Rights, on which I spoke on 11th May 2004 (transcript of my remarks).
After the Discussion at which I spoke, there was another Report, Discussion and eventually a Grace, which ended up being passed. The publication of the results of the ballot on the Grace was itself slightly controversial, mainly in the Registrary's response to a mistake in the first publication in the Reporter being to attempt to have the incorrect copies pulped, rather than taking the more canonical action and publishing a correction.
Before I end this section, I should place a reference to the Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms. Whilst I do not necessarily agree with absolutely everything there, I do agree with much of it. It also has more background information than I have provided.
A reasonable list of even recent documents related to this issue is rather large, so for the time being I include only the Report on which I spoke and the relevant Report of Discussion: