There was a big change in Sanskrit pedagogy in the 70s.  Thomas Burrow had taught Sanskrit from the same syllabus for for 32 years.  By "syllabus," I mean the printed, published Oxford schools syllabus that gave the editions and even page numbers of what the student would do in each term of each of the three years of the BA.    You could look a head and say to yourself, "ah, in October next year, I'll be reading page three of the Mudraraksasa."

When Richard Gombrich became lecturer in Sanskrit, and responsible for the lion's share of u/g teaching, he stopped the use of Perry at Oxford.  He hated that book with a passion.  When I arrived in '74, Richard had already introduced Coulson, though it was only in photocopied typewritten sheets at that time.  (But the same was true of Mr Gray's famous Sanskrit course book at SOAS.  It was never published, so I don't know what this is.)

When Richard became professor, he began the bureaucratic Oxford process of changing the syllabus.  He said that if he had to teach the same pages of the same books for the rest of his life, as Burrow had done, he would go mad.  His idea was to make the u/g as śāstrika as possible, to make it more similar to a traditional pundit's education, but while still keeping it in the general mould of a European university course.  Also, because no one Sanskritist can master all the śāstras, he wanted the flexibility to be able to have guest teachers, people like David Pingree, who could give a course out of their special knowledge that would still count towards the undergraduate course credit. 

Richard got the changes through committee, and the new u/g course was born (after my time).  I'll leave it to others to describe it in detail if they wish, but it contained fixed core components such as readings from Panini, and the Asokan inscriptions, plus other components that were decided year-by-year according to who was in town or what Richard, Bimal, Alexis, Margaret Cone or others wanted to read.

Richard, any comments, corrections?

Best,
Dominik