University government in Great Britain, as in so much else in British society, is the complex product of an extended process of historical development. The British university ideal and the structures of academic government owe much to the venerable tradition of Oxford and Cambridge, sometimes reinforced by the heritage associated with the five Scottish universities founded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Yet the contemporary forms of the British university rarely go back more than a century. Apart from "Oxbridge" and the old Scottish foundations, no British university had been established before the nineteenth century, and half the present number received university status after World War II. The result is a paradoxical combination of strong adherence to tradition, both in ritual and symbol and in day-to-day practice, and of considerable de facto flexibility and adaptability. (Author)