Ridiculous research into the legal structure of Cambridge colleges
I am ashamed to say that I initially paused composing this post because it seemed frivolous. I have recently digressed into investigating the legal structure of Cambridge colleges.
Nowadays, they are all corporations with their own charters granted by the Crown, but they arose over seven centuries from a variety of other forms. There lots of interesting points of detail in how these processes occurred over time, but I want to focus, for this post, on a central question of the so-called "Foundation" of a college. A living-document version of this post can explore the other dimensions later.
College structure
Most of the colleges have a similar structure:
- a Master (sometimes a Provost, or President, or Warden or Principal, etc)
- the Fellows
- students
- a Council
- a Governing Body
and the statutes of the colleges effectively express a "set theoretic" set of relationships between those groups: the Council and the Governing body comprise Master and (some of) the Fellows, and maybe some subset of the students, etc.
Typically the Fellows and the Master constitute the Governing Body, and a smaller group the Council. This is analogous to shareholders and directors in a company, or members of parliament and government ministers in the UK constitution.
What is it to be "on the foundation"?
But in many of the colleges, there is also something called the Foundation, and particular groups of people are said to be "on the Foundation" or "not on the Foundation", or, even, at Corpus Christi, "on the Old Foundation". What on earth is this?
It seems to be the notion of which individuals comprise the "corporate body" that is the college, from the point of view of being paid out of the income from the original assets of the college. The composition of this "foundation" generally overlaps strongly with both the Fellowship and the Governing Body, but is conceptually distinct:
- the Foundation in some colleges includes Scholars, a subset of students elected by the Fellows for their academic achievements, who as such receive some of the college's income. Not all colleges with a foundation have such scholars "on the foundation".
- the Governing Body might be a smaller group than those on the Foundation, because Governing Bodies might exclude certain people, such as those over 70, or holding particular classes of Fellowship
- alternatively, the Governing Body might instead be a broader group, including some student representatives
Calling this concept the "foundation" is a practice which skews very heavily towards the old colleges, e.g., pre-1600. All but two of them have a "foundation" in this sense.
There are two alternative models: making mention of a corporate body, as many of the post-1800 colleges do. This doesn't imply anything about the relationship between members of that body and income from particular assets. The other model is simply not mentioning this in the statutes at all (perhaps it is in the Charter of the one old college which ignores it).
Some colleges are explicit that there is a notion of membership of the college which is distinct from membership of the legal entity that constitutes the college. This might include students or associates or what have you. As the colleges are chartered corporations, they have the power to bind *non*-members legally. That kind of power subsisting in a corporate body like a county council, the Royal College of Nursing or a harbourmaster's authority makes some sense: they *need* to be able to make rules for people who are not consenting to these rules. But it's slightly anomalous in the present century for educational bodies to be able to make rules binding people who aren't members.
I'll leave it there and come back to this later.