The History of the University of Oxford was published in eight volumes between 1984 and 2000. It was a huge contribution to the field of university history, and it will be actively used by scholars for decades to come. But the kinds of questions obscured by such a many-handed enterprise are the long-run questions, and these are among the most important issues raised by Oxford's history. There are, for example, questions of institutional identity: is there any sense in which the University of Oxford, as it exists in 2016, is the same institution that came into being in the thirteenth century? There are questions about the relationship between antiquity and the ability of a university to thrive today. Do old institutions possess a market advantage in comparison with their younger rivals? At a time of acutely fierce global rivalry and competition from “new providers,” this is a peculiarly pressing concern for the university historian to address.

It was therefore a welcome decision by Oxford University Press to commission a major single-volume history of the University of Oxford that would, among other things, pose these big questions, and L. W. B. Brockliss was an excellent choice as author. Although he is an insider who has been a fellow of Magdalen College for more than thirty years, his background as a historian of French universities under the ancien régime and as a former editor of History of Universities meant that he approached the task equipped to explore how Oxford fit into wider systems of higher education, in Europe and beyond, and the sections in which he does this are strikingly good. Moreover, although a specialist in the early modern period, he has an unusually wide chronological range, and he deals as confidently with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as he does the medieval centuries.

Faced with the problem of identity, Brockliss divides the Oxford's history into four periods, so emphasizing discontinuities rather than continuities. The “Catholic university” up to 1534 was very different from the “Anglican university” that succeeded it; likewise, the “imperial university” of 1845 to 1945 was very different from the “world university” of today. This chronological scheme makes clear that Brockliss does not believe it makes much sense to think of the University of Oxford today as the same institution as that which came into being in the 1200s. He makes some telling points in support of that case. While several colleges trace their origins back to the thirteenth century, the collegiate university really took shape in the early modern period. The tutorial system, another marker of Oxford's distinctiveness, was in some ways in being by the seventeenth century, when it was recognized that each undergraduate must be under the care of a senior member of the University of Oxford, but only slowly did it come to be accepted that this should be a fellow of the college. Meanwhile, the “tutorial” as a form of instruction was a Victorian creation, and even then, Victorian tutorials were radically different from their counterparts a century later. Moreover, the global university of today, recruiting its faculty and students from across the world, is radically different from the university in which I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s, when the history faculty's more than one hundred tenured teachers included no Americans, and I think just six non-UK natives.

Brockliss does not believe that antiquity in itself does much to explain Oxford's success. Instead, he argues that Oxford's success as a globally competitive research university today should be attributed to the success of Victorian reformers in reinventing it. Oxford could easily have dwindled into insignificance, he thinks, as many of its nineteenth-century critics thought that it would and should. Is he right, or did antiquity effectively shield it from the possibility of failure? Oxford, like Cambridge, possessed what were by European standards huge endowments. But how much do these historic endowments explain? There are two reasons for thinking that they do little to explain Oxford's survival. First, they were overwhelmingly held by colleges rather than by the university itself, and to some degree have been deployed for purposes that have more to do with intercollegiate competition than for the common interests of the university as a whole. Second, for Victorian reformers, endowments were a hindrance, since they yoked Oxford to the pursuit of purposes prescribed by wealthy benefactors in the past. Whereas today's university managers see endowments as a way of generating an income stream which can be used freely for strategic purposes, Victorian reformers confronted endowments which were, by and large, tied to very specific purposes (scholarships for the study of classics, fellowships restricted to natives of a particular county, and so on) and which were defended by conservatives who insisted upon the sanctity of founders’ intentions. For Thomas Babington Macaulay, espousing the cause of the unendowed London University in 1826, the new university was well placed to provide for the needs of nineteenth-century society precisely because it was unencumbered by historic endowments. It was therefore “destined to a long, a glorious and a beneficent existence” (Edinburgh Review, February 1826, 340).

But is Brockliss right to discount the advantages conferred by antiquity? I doubt it. For one thing, although it is undeniable that Oxford changed radically in the nineteenth century and again in the post-1945 period, it still remained powerfully marked by its past. University fund-raisers have no doubts about the advantages conferred by a long and distinguished past, and indeed universities across the world are more alive than ever to the potential to use heritage to construct a distinctive brand and hence to gain an advantage in the competition for students. Among the various communities that universities serve, alumni are often underestimated, but they constitute a powerful force on the side of continuity as opposed to discontinuity; or, to put it more accurately, on the side of the preservation or construction of traditions that join today's university with a particular sense of its own past.