Legal revisions can change substantially the scope of university autonomy, but government-university relationships effectively determine on-going changes in university autonomy. The English case is an interesting phenomenon in, that while English universities did not lose their legal powers, they had a sense of loss (Eustace 1994) of their autonomy.
Farrant’s study (1987) lends some support to this observation. Farrant attempted to investigate the extent to which the five desirable constituents of university autonomy, identified by the Robbins Report (1963)