For despots and plutocrats, the question is which university
is the better laundry
As the richer of the two rich universities, Cambridge has largely been spared, until now, the public embarrassment when – as with Oxford – an already affluent institution boasts about donations that would still look dubious even if they could be characterised as important to survival or, say, establishing meritocratic access to its treasures.
However, Oxford may now, it emerges, have to compete with its old rival for the accolade of being UK academe’s top reputational laundromat. Cambridge, too, can soar above principles and, to judge by last week’s headlines about Faustian pacts, may even prove to be more ambitious than Oxford. For while Oxford’s vice chancellor, Professor Louise Richardson, was trumpeting the generosity of an American Trump supporter she had cultivated, or more recently, the benevolence of a chemicals entrepreneur with a history of tax avoidance and environmental damage, Cambridge’s vice chancellor, Professor Stephen Toope, had ideas that now make these bungs look, if not exactly worthy, fractionally less grubby. What, other than more satirical, is Oxford’s ethics centre memorialising a US private equity magnate when compared with Cambridge’s proposed deal, reported last week, with the authoritarian UAE leadership?
