U.S. Targeted in Campaign : Isn’t It Rich? Oxford Appeals for Funds

The “dreaming spires” mirage of Oxford University--made real for many by the TV series “Brideshead Revisited”--is of a place wallowing in wealth. Refectory tables groan with antique silver; rubicund dons guzzle vintage port from crystal goblets; dandified undergraduates squander family fortunes on expensive cars and rakehell jaunts to London.

All of those things still happen occasionally at Oxford, but the university, as an institution, is far from rich. In fact it is hard up--down on its uppers and ready to extend a dignified begging-bowl.

Its 35 colleges--jealously autonomous institutions--have their separate endowments and some own great tracts of land and farms. But the university, the bonding element of the colleges, depends on state funds for at least half its budget (the rest comes from gifts and benefactions), and Margaret Thatcher’s government has dramatically cut them back--about 25% since 1981.

No Spare Funds

As a result, some professorial chairs and lectureships are vacant. The library system is scarcely able to keep up with demands made upon it. And no spare funds are available for two institutes under slow construction. If the university were to do nothing, says Sir Patrick Neill, Oxford’s urbane vice chancellor, it would have no capital resources left within four years.

So this most-enduring of British institutions has decided to do what some American universities have been doing for decades: try to tap private sources for money. It’s looking to America for a good bit of the help. And logically enough, it’s appointed an American as chief fund-raiser.

He is Henry Drucker, a 45-year-old native of Rutherford, N.J., who as chair of an academic committee helped steer Edinburgh University in Scotland through the first Thatcher cuts in 1981. When the Oxford job was advertised, he applied and was selected.

“The first thing I had to do,” he says, “was to convince Oxford that it needed to think of a major fund-raising campaign of the dimensions of the American university campaigns. The standard British ‘appeal,’ as they call it, for patching holes in roofs was inadequate.

“The opportunities for Oxford, because of its international reputation, were so great that it could do much more than that. The dimension of our problem is that we compete for staff and other intellectual resources with Stanford and UCLA and other American universities. Stanford at present is trying to raise $1 billion-- that’s the dimension of the problem.”

These days, Neill and Drucker are often in the field--a kind of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of fund-raising, their financial target not yet firmly set.

In July, they were in Tokyo. “What we believe is that corporations will want their up-and-coming executives to have an understanding of how the West works, how the Western mind operates, and will be interested in the growth, the history of ideas, Western philosophy and modern politics,” Neill says.

In February, Neill is going to Australia for a meeting of Commonwealth vice chancellors. “It so happens that there will be a big reunion of the Rhodes Scholars in Canberra in connection with the Bicentennial celebrations of the foundation of Australia,” he notes with satisfaction. “So it’s quite good timing.”

And then there is the big thrust in America, including a visit to Los Angeles and a luncheon speech by Neill 10 days ago to a group consisting largely of Oxford graduates. There are 7,000 Oxonians in this country, and the Rhodes Scholars, especially, are a power base for the campaign. But Drucker emphasizes, “We are not only going to graduates of Oxford for money. We are hoping to capitalize on the respect for Oxford around the world--every bit as much among those who are not Oxford graduates as among those who are.”

Second Place

Drucker emphasizes that he takes a diffident second place to the 61-year-old Neill in the work of propaganda on Oxford’s behalf. So it has fallen to the cool, reserved--many would say “typical”--Englishman to spearhead (he would wince at the word) a campaign which has to compete with the showmanship and panache of American fund-raisers.

He is a tall, patrician figure with the slightly austere manner of a head prefect, a quiet line in gentleman’s suiting and a fastidious Oxford accent. In Who’s Who he gives as his hobbies “music and forestry.” (He was not delighted with the piped-in music in the lobby of his hotel, the Bel Age: “It cheapens the music--little chunks of the Archduke Trio as you go out.”) But he is not a dull dog.

He seasoned his L.A. speech to the Oxford graduates with a subtle, at times withering, irony and with those Oxford anecdotes that are common currency, almost shibboleths, wherever two or three Oxonians are gathered together.

He recalled, for instance, a story about former Prime Minister and then-Oxford Chancellor Harold Macmillan, “a most brilliant, witty speaker.” At his 90th birthday party, Macmillan got up and made a speech.

“He said right at the beginning that he was very honored to become chancellor, but it was odd that he had never himself taken a degree at Oxford, although he had been an undergraduate,” Neill recalled. “And then he explained that after he’d been there a couple of years, the First World War broke out . . . and he immediately joined the army. Referring to that, he said: ‘I was sent down (expelled) by the Kaiser.’ ”

Some of the chestnuttier stories he managed to avoid telling.

Those about Herbert Warren, for example, a notorious snob who was president of Magdalen College between 1884 and 1929. An Indian prince, arriving at Magdalen as a freshman, told Warren he was known in his country as “the Son of God.” Warren coughed and said, “You will find, Your Highness, that we have the sons of many eminent people at Magdalen.”

Towel Over Face

Still less was Neill tempted to tell the story about the late Sir Maurice Bowra, warden of Wadham College, who when a boatload of girls floated past the river shore where he and other men were sunbathing in the nude, threw a towel over his face while the others concealed their private parts. After the giggling girls had moved on, Bowra snorted: “I don’t know about you fellows, but I am known in this city by my face. “

Or again there was C.S. Lewis, who when a fellow of Magdalen knocked out the smoldering contents of his pipe from a second-floor window of his rooms in college. An American tourist shouted up at him: “Do you realize you nearly blinded my wife?” Lewis replied: “My dear chap, I didn’t even know you were married.”

Neill, perhaps, did not want to confirm Oxford’s reputation as a nest of hopeless eccentrics and a home of lost causes. Rather, he views it as a peerless center of learning, “a torch of enlightenment to the world.”

There is another canard about Oxford that he is keen to scotch. He reacts strongly when people suggest that Oxford is still a bastion of privilege, elitism and “effortless superiority.”

“If they mean that people only from privileged backgrounds come to Oxford, that is completely mistaken. It is not so at all,” he insists. “The split between those who’ve been to state schools and those from the so-called public schools is about 50-50. . . .

“I think ‘elite’ is rather a term of praise. If it means ‘intellectually distinguished’ or ‘aiming at a high standard of attainment,’ then I don’t think there’s anything to be particularly frightened of in that word.”

No Trouble Finding Jobs

Yet an Oxford education still has a cachet that seems not entirely to derive from examination results. At his lunch in the Music Center, Neill said that in an England where Thatcher is charged with callousness for having allowed unemployment to reach high proportions as part of the cost of beating down inflation, Oxford graduates have no trouble in finding jobs.

“We have a very successful appointments office whose job is to get people into posts,” he said. “They have really tremendous success. I mean, people do not hang around unemployed when they’ve been to Oxford. The experience of the appointments office is that, except in the case of science subjects, the employers do not very much mind what people have read. If a person has got a first or a high second-class degree in any subject at Oxford, then they will utilize him.”

Some in America might dismiss that as the kind of inspired amateurism that Britain has always relied on. Along with its push for outside income, is Oxford moving toward training for actual careers rather than in some abstract and purist form of “learning”?

“Well, we’re looking more keenly at business studies,” Neill says. “I think there may be some specialization there, coming along.” But on the whole, he adds, the old attitude is still very strong. “I think it is the old attitude that in general a well-trained mind will be able to undertake any job. Somebody who can think clearly, express himself clearly, will not have much difficulty in moving on to some new subject.”

Some American university fund-raisers are puzzled that it has taken Oxford so long to join the scramble for private funds.

“I am surprised,” says Terry Holcombe, vice president for development and alumni affairs at Yale University. “That kind of philanthropic support has been at the base of Yale since 1701 when it was founded.

“Elihu Yale, governor of (the East India Co.’s fort at Madras) India, made a gift of books to some ministers in Connecticut. So we benefited from the philanthropy of the British and I’m a bit surprised that they haven’t got round to doing it for themselves for their own institutions before this.”

Roger Olson, senior vice president for university relations at USC, thinks that Oxford is making the right move, if not a moment too soon. “I would expect that anyone outside the United States who has a well-planned program for their university would look at the potential and support from the United States. . . . If anyone knows about giving away money, it’s Americans.”

James W. Osterholt, assistant vice chancellor of development at UCLA, says he is not surprised at Oxford’s tardiness. “Every institution has its own unique history and every institution seeks the answers it needs according to that history. I assume that Oxford started its campaign when it needed to.”

UCLA is in the middle of a campaign designed to raise $300 million. “What I would say to Sir Patrick Neill and Dr. Drucker,” says Osterholt, “would be: first, Godspeed; second, to do what no doubt they are doing--to focus on Oxford’s unique reputation and unique academic achievement.”

‘Internal Taxation’

With all their expeditions abroad, the Oxford fund-raisers have not forgotten that charity begins at home. “But we can’t just ‘tax’ the colleges,” Drucker says, “partly because they are autonomous, and partly because the colleges have a relatively new system of internal taxation by which the richer colleges help the poorer colleges--and that relieves the university of a burden. But certainly we have every intention of asking the colleges for money.”

For the dreaming spires, the message is simple: The dreaming has to stop, or it may become a nightmare. An American visitor to Oxford is supposed to have exclaimed in astonishment, after a short walk through the city: “Say, these ruins are inhabited!”

Oxford’s worry is that the tourist’s observation might come to seem less endearingly naive.