is subject to a statutory retirement age, but otherwise permanent. He is
aided by an assistant registrar appointed by Council after consultation with [the Registrar], and if the consent of Congregation is obtained he may also be provided from time to time, with other assistant officers. The assistant registrar is charged with attending such meetings as the Registrar, with the approval of the Vice-Chancellor, may direct, to prepare their business and to keep minutes of their proceedings. He is thus an important instrument for co-ordinating the work of the various committees. [Brierly and Hodson, p. 93]
Both the Secretary of the Faculties and the Secretary to the Chest are also permanent positions, subject only to a statutory retirement age, nominated by the General Board subject to the approval of Congregation. The Secretary of the Faculties is secretary both of the General Board and of the several boards of faculties, while the Secretary to the Chest keeps the University accounts as well as the records of the meetings of the Curators of the University Chest.
Two Proctors, elected annually in rotation by the colleges, sit on all University boards and committees. In Tolkien’s time they still retained many of their disciplinary powers over students when the latter were found to be breaking rules outside of their colleges.
The Proctors are primarily a co-ordinating link in University administration, and their main function is to serve as co-adjutors of the Vice-Chancellor on all the more important administrative boards, committees, and delegacies, besides representing the University at the conferment of degrees and on similar ceremonial occasions. But this side of their activities is not spectacular, and is of little interest to the undergraduate, who sees them only as ministers of admonition and correction. They regularly patrol the streets at night, accompanied by minions who have been known throughout the ages as ‘bull-dogs’ …. They wear a distinctive costume, and the effect of their presence in public places is cautionary rather than minatory; but it is their duty to challenge any member of the University, being in statu pupillari [in general, students who have not yet received their Bachelor of Arts degree], who is failing to wear a gown [academic dress] after nightfall – or a violation of (a somewhat liberally interpreted) propriety …. The delinquent is required, with the utmost politeness, to call upon the Proctor at a stated time, when his defence is heard and judgement delivered. [Brierly and Hodson, p. 113]
Professorial chairs (professorships) were established at Oxford from the early sixteenth century. In Britain the term Professor specifically applies to the holder of a professorship; it is not used, as in the United States, to refer to any teacher at a university. At Oxford the teaching staff consists of University professors, readers, lecturers, and demonstrators, and of college fellows, tutors, and lecturers. Professors ‘are the principal means whereby the university, as distinct from the colleges that compose it, teaches [through lectures and classes] and directs study’ (Brierly and Hodson, p. 90). Each professor is selected by a special board of electors,
composed, as a rule, of the Vice-Chancellor, the Head of the college to which the professorship is attached and another member appointed by that college, a person nominated by the Hebdomadal Council and one by every board of Faculty concerned, and occasionally one or two outside persons. The professors do not ordinarily give tutorial teaching though they may voluntarily open small seminar classes or informal discussions. Their statutory duties include original work by the professors themselves, and the general supervision of research and advanced work in their subjects or departments. Every professor must give to students in their studies by advice, informal instruction, examination or otherwise. [Brierly and Hodson, p. 91]
During the nineteenth century the number of professors at Oxford increased from twenty-one to fifty-four. Among reforms made in that century aimed at strengthening the University, from 1877 the colleges were required to make contributions out of their revenues to the Common University Fund for University purposes, including the support of existing professorships and the founding of new ones. From 1925, following the report of the Asquith Commission, the University also received a government grant. Other changes made as a result of the Asquith Commission were that from 1926 ‘every professor appointed by the university was to be found a place in a college and every tutor appointed by a college would … receive an appointment as a university lecturer’ (John Prest, ‘The Asquith Commission, 1919–1922’, The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. VIII: The Twentieth Century, ed. Brian Harrison (1994), p. 41). Some chairs were already attached to a particular college, but the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon held by Tolkien was not: it was assigned to Pembroke College. Also, professors, heads, and fellows of colleges now had to retire on reaching the statutory retirement age of sixty-five, but were to receive a pension.
Tolkien became the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1925, with the responsibility to ‘lecture and give instruction on the Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, and on the other old Germanic Languages, especially Gothic and Old Icelandic’ (Statuta Universitatis Oxoniensis (1925), p. 117). At that time there were only two other chairs in the English School: the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, with responsibility for the History of the English Language, and the History of English Literature through the period of Chaucer, and the Merton Professor of English Literature, responsible for post-medieval literature. No more chairs were added in the School until the Goldsmith’s Readership in English Language was converted into the Goldsmith’s Chair of English Literature in 1948. The Professor of Poetry is also attached to the English School, but has minimal duties. Since Tolkien’s retirement other chairs have been established, among them the J.R.R. Tolkien Professorship of English Literature and Language, in the field of Medieval English Literature and Language in the period 1100–1500.
Professors generally were required to give at least thirty-six lectures or classes in each year, though the statutes for 1925 state that the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor had to ‘lecture and give instruction for six hours in each week, and for a period not less in any Term than six weeks, nor less in the whole year than twenty-one weeks’ (pp. 117–18), thus a minimum of 126 hours.
Next in importance after professors are readers, either elected by the University or appointed by the General Board to hold office for a specified number of years with the duty of lecturing and giving instruction. They are perhaps closest to the associate or assistant professors in American colleges and universities, positions which do not exist in Britain. In the Oxford English School during Tolkien’s day there was a Goldsmith’s Readership in English Language, until its conversion to a chair devoted to English Literature in 1948, when it was replaced by a new Readership in English Language; a Readership in English Philology from 1927 until c. 1950; the Vigfússon Readership in Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities, from 1941; and the Readership in Textual Criticism from 1948.
Although professors, readers, fellows, and tutors usually give lectures, ‘the separate boards of faculties have power to appoint to the status and title of university lecturers any recognized teachers in their faculties, as and when they may think fit, subject to the approval of the General Board and of Congregation’ (Brierly and Hodson, p. 92). These lecturerships were another result of the report of the Asquith Commission in 1922. Since the Commission also wanted to make it possible for college tutors and other teachers to undertake ‘specialized work of study and research in addition to their activities in College teaching, by freeing them from an excessive burden of teaching in term and from the necessity of seeking paid work in the vacation’, the University used the Common University Fund to create fifty lecturerships ‘for tutors who undertook to do specific research and limit their other commitments’ (J.P.D. Dunbabin, ‘Finance since 1914’, The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. VIII: The Twentieth Century, p. 652, partly quoting from the Commission report). These lecturers remained college tutors, but restrictions were placed on the number of hours they could spend teaching. The scheme having proved very successful, the number of CUF lecturers was gradually increased. In 1949, when their number had more than doubled, the Vice-Chancellor proposed that ‘all 286 “inter-collegiate
