Keeping Oxford on Top

We believe philanthropic giving on this scale will be needed to secure Oxford's vision of its future. We need to attract the most gifted students from around the world, regardless of their ability to pay. We need to be in a position to compete for the best scholars, tutors and researchers, and to provide the infrastructure and facilities needed to support world-class students, academics and cutting-edge research.

By the standards of Britain and Europe, Oxford is wealthy. But compared with its major transatlantic competitors, it is a pauper. Oxford's college and university endowments currently total about $6.8 billion (or $11 billion, if you include trusts and foundations to which the university has access and the average annual value of money transfers from the Oxford University Press). That may sound like a lot. But Harvard's endowment is about $35 billion, Yale's is $22.5 billion and Princeton's is $14.8 billion.

A pessimist might look at those figures and say there's no way Oxford can continue to compete. But that would be to mistake the true nature of the challenge we face. Oxford needs the resources to go on being Oxford—not to become some other school in some other place. It needs the resources to maintain its rightly admired college and tutorial system, which is the bedrock of our teaching excellence. And it needs the resources to fund the kind of multidisciplinary approach to major problems that an institution with the depth and range of our tradition is uniquely placed to provide.

You might think that now is the wrong time to go fund-raising. But philanthropic giving during economic downturns has historically proved surprisingly robust. We hope that will continue to be the case. But again, we're not being complacent. We know we have to work to show that Oxford deserves to hold a special place in the world's esteem. And to do that, we have to go on showing that Oxford can, and will, make a special contribution to the world's well-being.

Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former European commissioner for foreign relations, is chancellor of Oxford University.

© 2008