Oxford University’s two most senior figures have offered competing visions of the institution’s recruitment policies and the legacy of its traditions during a ceremony to install the university’s first female vice-chancellor in its nearly 800-year history.

The woman taking that role, Louise Richardson, from Tramore, Co Waterford, and Chris Patten, the Conservative grandee who serves in the ceremonial post of chancellor, gave subtly differing views on how the university can maintain its success, with Ms Richardson saying it must not let its traditions fossilise.

Ms Richardson, a former Harvard professor and principal of the University of St Andrews, argued that one of Oxford's biggest challenges was in identifying and attracting talented scholars.

“In an increasingly complex world, the best may not be those who look and sound like ourselves. They may not be those who naturally think of coming to Oxford,” she said. “Those with the greatest potential may not be those who have already attained the most. We need to go out and seek them.”

She added that said the university’s rich traditions “must not become an immutable bundle passed like a sealed package from one generation to the next”.

“If we permit our traditions to become a legitimisation for the exclusion of others, we do these traditions a disservice. We cherish our traditions, but we must not allow them to become a rationalisation for the protection of privilege,” she added.

Admission rules

Her comments were countered by Mr Patten, the former Hong Kong governor, who criticised recent suggestions that Oxford’s admissions rules should be widened to encourage students from state schools and disadvantaged backgrounds. “We should not be harried into ill-considered actions ... actions, moreover, which may cast doubt on the ability of some who study here to gain a place at this university on their own merits,” he said.

“I fear that some conceivably well-intentioned efforts to make progress in these areas may have the effect of deterring applications from exactly the sort of young men and women whom we want to welcome to our university in larger numbers.”

Mr Patten delivered remarks that appeared to be aimed at protests over the university's continued honouring of Cecil Rhodes, the controversial colonial-era benefactor who endowed the prestigious Rhodes scholarship programme. "Our history is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views and prejudices," Mr Patten said.

In his opening address to the university’s congregation at the Sheldonian Theatre on Tuesday, Mr Patten welcomed Ms Richardson as “the 272nd vice chancellor, or thereabouts, since 1230”. “I know you would wish to be judged primarily not on the glass ceilings you have smashed, but on your achievements as an academic leader on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Terrorism expert

Ms Richardson, an expert on terrorism, responded that she was “in truth, daunted” by her new post, before criticising what she saw as rising levels of government oversight within higher education.

“The ever increasing cost of compliance with ever more bureaucratic, ever more intrusive and ever less useful regulation - much of it, paradoxically enough, designed to ensure value for money - instead diverts resources, both financial and intellectual, from the central tasks of research and teaching. Strikingly, there is little or no effort to measure the effectiveness of these measurements.”

But Oxford cannot rely on state funding to compete with the “eye-watering endowments” of US universities, she warned.

For Prof Richardson, it is not the first time she has filled a historic role: at St Andrews she was not only the first woman vice-chancellor in 600 years but also the first Roman Catholic.

Her parents still live in Tramore in Co Waterford, where she grew up and went to a convent school. “I think they are delighted and proud,” she said.

Oxford’s exact foundation is shrouded in uncertainty but the first recorded vice-chancellor was in 1230, according to the Encyclopaedia of Oxford.

Guardian News and Media