Have now read article - the 'college adviser' is presumably separate from an academic supervisor, so presumably them not reading your thesis is only bad because the college gains money from purporting to provide academic support, rather than in itself affecting the students.
I think I had a college tutor at UCL (who award Mill Hill's degrees), but never met them. Got a nice letter from them congratulating me, a year after getting the PhD, though.

At Cambridge, my [poor] college went on rent strike for both of my first two years - with the effect that rent was well below private accommodation costs. But Cambridge colleges are much more like glorified halls of residence than Oxford ones.