Oxford University is no longer one of the world's best academic centres, according to two reports.

For the first time, Oxford has slipped into third place, behind Imperial College, London, in the annual Times league table of universities. Cambridge is still top.

Sir Ron Oxburgh, rector of Imperial College, put Oxford's decline down to its failure to reform itself.

He said: "I have a real concern that Oxford is being held back by a system of internal governance that it has been slow to revise. Cambridge is superficially similar to Oxford, but in fact it is run very differently because there is a different relationship between the colleges and the centre." Paul Flather, Oxford University's director of communications, said: "League tables can only provide a snapshot and cannot tell all the story. It may be that the statistics underestimate the facilities provided by the university and colleges."

Meanwhile, Prof David Cannadine, the new head of London's Institute of Historical Studies, reported that universities including Oxford and Cambridge were so starved of cash they were being outstripped by the American Ivy League universities like Yale and Harvard. He said the belief that Oxford still led the academic world was "at best nostalgic delusion, at worst mistaken fact".

A spokesman for Oxford University said: "Significant reductions in public funding since the 1980s clearly must have had some impact on our efforts to maintain our excellence."

Story date: Friday 23 April

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