David Cannadine
Once a year, and sometimes more often, many Oxford and Cambridge colleges engage in rituals that are collectively known as the ‘commemoration of benefactors’. They are attended by distinguished guests, honorary fellows and fellows, and sometimes by graduate students and undergraduates, and they often involve a grand dinner with splendid food and abundant wine. Such feasts are normally preceded by a service held in the college chapel, when a sermon is preached, saluting the venerable largesse of earlier donors, and when their names are read out in what is often a lengthy recitation, which frequently concludes with an appropriately uplifting peroration:
These are our founders and principal benefactors, whose names we have thus publicly recited, to the service and glory of God, to the perpetuating of their memory, and to the demonstration of our gratitude.
Such occasions are also designed to reaffirm the historic continuity of college life, and the sustaining appeal of institutional identity, and they can be genuinely moving, as I can well attest, having myself attended several such gatherings in Oxford and Cambridge, and on one occasion even preaching the obligatory sermon. Yet it is not necessary to be an anthropologist to recognize that such ceremonies and commemorations are also classic examples of what might be termed institutionalized ancestor worship.
These ritual observances and celebrations of benefactors are particularly identified with Oxford and Cambridge colleges, but individual giving has been important, indeed essential, across most of British higher education for most of its history. This has certainly been true of the Scottish universities, of the constituent colleges which make up the University of London, and of the great civic redbricks of Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Bristol, all of which relied on private philanthropy (as well as student fees) long before the British state committed itself to the large-scale funding of higher education in the aftermath of the Second World War. Where would the University of Oxford be without the founding gift of Sir Thomas Bodley, which established what would eventually become one of the great libraries of the world? Where would the University of Cambridge be, without the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cavendish Laboratory, both the products of (unusual and atypical) aristocratic generosity in the nineteenth century? Where would the University of Birmingham be without the major gift that Joseph Chamberlain successfully secured from Andrew Carnegie, or the University of Bristol without the support of the Wills family? Where, in the University of London, would the Warburg Institute be, without the benevolence of its eponymous founders? And where would the Institute of Historical Research be without the initial benefaction of £20,000 that Professor A. F. Pollard obtained in 1921 from Sir John Cecil Power?
I
It is, then, beyond doubt that the connection between private philanthropy and higher education in the United Kingdom has been both long lived and in many ways beneficent and benign; and it is, for obvious reasons, a connection which is of much longer-standing than in the case of the great, but less venerable, universities of the United States. Yet apart from the annual commemorations in Oxbridge colleges, it is a philanthropic history that was largely forgotten on this side of the Atlantic during the years from 1945 to the 1970s, when higher education became increasingly dependent on funding from the British state, as exemplified by the government-sponsored foundation of new universities in the 1960s (endorsed by the Robbins Report of 1963), and when the unprecedentedly successful efforts at fundraising that were by then being undertaken by American universities from rich alumni and foundations were often disparaged in this country for being vulgar and inappropriate (and, in the British case, unnecessary). Only since the 1980s have universities in the United Kingdom begun to engage with what is now termed ‘development’ in the sort of serious, systematic and aggressive way that has for much longer been characteristic of their American counterparts: employing fundraising staff, mounting public appeals, targeting their own alumni, and seeking major donors and cultivating potential prospects from rich individuals and foundations, not only in the United Kingdom and the United States, but increasingly in Asia and Australia. Indeed, as any head of an Oxbridge college or university chancellor or vice-chancellor well knows, raising money and schmoozing possible donors are now essential and time-consuming parts of their job, involving extensive wining and dining and much foreign travel.
In recent decades, and on both sides of the Atlantic, university fundraising has become more widespread, more important, more professionalized and more competitive than ever before. Perhaps this in turn helps explain why such activities have also become more controversial and, in some famous instances, fraught with grave reputational risk to particular universities, which have suffered serious embarrassment as a result of fundraising efforts that were ill-judged and went badly wrong. Here is one example. In 1995, Yale University returned a gift of $20 million to the Texan billionaire and alumnus Lee Bass, on the grounds that the donor’s demand to have veto powers over faculty appointments to teach the courses in western civilization that his gift was intended to fund, would constitute unacceptable interference in the University’s academic freedom and autonomy. And here is another. In 2008, Princeton University settled a six-year lawsuit brought by the Robertson family, who contended that the $35 million benefaction made by Charles Robertson in 1961 to establish the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs had not been spent in accordance with the terms of the original gift, and they wanted their money back. In the end, Princeton kept the money, but the University also agreed to pay out millions of dollars to defray the Robertson family’s legal fees.
As these two examples suggest, the giving or receiving of gifts in the world of higher education can result in both parties being dissatisfied and disillusioned: universities may be unhappy with what donors want, and donors may be unhappy with what universities do, and there have been similar, recent episodes in the United Kingdom as well as in the United States. In 1996, Dr. Gert-Rudolph Flick gave the University of Oxford £360,000 over five years to endow the appropriately named Flick Professorship of European Political Thought. But it soon emerged that Flick’s grandfather had built the industrial empire which was the basis of the family fortune while serving as an adviser to Heinrich Himmler, and there was widespread criticism of Oxford for having accepted what was deemed to have been such a tainted gift. Having made his donation in good faith, Dr. Flick was mortified by these public attacks, and asked for his money back; Oxford duly returned it, and Flick’s name was no longer associated with the chair. Instead, it was supported by an anonymous donor, who specifically wanted to support intra-European academic co-operation. And in 2011, Sir Howard Davies felt obliged to resign as the director of the London School of Economics, when it was revealed that the L.S.E. had accepted a donation of £300,000 to support work on civil society in North Africa from the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Corporation, which was run by the son of the Libyan dictator, Colonel Gaddafi, who was himself an L.S.E. graduate. The subsequent inquiry chaired by Lord Woolf concluded that the School’s vetting procedures for assessing potential donors had been inadequate, and as a result they have been significantly tightened up.
More recently, there have been the campaigns against Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, and against Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, where undergraduates have urged that their universities should no longer commemorate past benefactors or leaders whose conduct and opinions (especially on matters of race) now seem at best inappropriate, at worst offensive, judged by our own very different ethical standards, and in the (often outraged) opinion of those who belong to a much more diverse student body, of which African-Americans form a significant proportion. As a result of these controversies (and they are far from being the only ones), universities on both sides of the Atlantic, and many other cultural institutions which also depend on fundraising to support their programs, acquisitions and building plans, have been falling over themselves to establish ethics committees. They in turn have been charged with setting out general guidelines concerning the acceptance of gifts, and they have also been tasked with assessing and evaluating potential donations in the light of them. All this is a long way from the eloquent cadences quoted near the beginning of this introduction, and the easy certainties they expressed, which now seem almost pitifully naïve. Far from being simple, straightforward, honourable, high-minded and transactionally symmetrical – admired donor generously gives, enhanced institution gratefully receives, and ancestor worship subsequently ensues – philanthropy nowadays can often seem an enterprise fraught with moral ambiguity, likely to provoke student protest and running the risk of damaging publicity.
It was, then, both timely and appropriate that the Institute of Historical Research should have sponsored a conference in the spring of 2017 that was devoted to exploring these controversies and these issues, and I was greatly honoured to be invited to offer some general thoughts and reflections to frame the proceedings. I did so, not only as a former director of the I.H.R., but also as an academic with experience of both British and American higher education, and as a historian of philanthropy, who has been responsible for raising money, and for helping to give money away. One of my books is a biography of Andrew Mellon, the Pittsburgh banker and plutocrat, who donated a large part of his fortune, and all his finest pictures, to establish the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; and my current major research project is to write the history of the Ford Foundation, which for much of the second half of the twentieth century was both the largest and the most controversial philanthropist in the United States. Since the late 1990s, I have also been active in raising money, primarily for the Institute of Historical Research and now for the British Academy, but also for the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy, the National Trust and the Gladstone Library. From yet a third perspective, I have become, albeit indirectly, a philanthropic practitioner, as a trustee of the Wolfson Foundation, which is much involved in supporting higher education, and whose Arts Panel I chair. It is from these varied viewpoints that I look at past philanthropy in the light of current ethical concerns, and offer some speculative comments on present and future giving.
How, then, should we now deal with past philanthropists and their benefactions, and with their resulting institutional commemoration and celebration, when certain individuals now seem far less admirable than they once did, when their gifts appear tainted rather than talismanic, and when their values and attitudes seem not just different from our own, but at best unacceptable, and at worst abhorrent and deplorable? The classic case of this is the recent ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign, which began in South Africa, at the University of Cape Town, and subsequently took off in Oxford. The University of Cape Town is housed on land that was donated by the Rhodes estate, and a statue to him was unveiled on the campus in 1932; but it was removed in April 2015 in response to widespread undergraduate protests, especially by African students who were offended by its continuing presence. For more than one hundred years, the University of Oxford has awarded Rhodes scholarships to promising young men (and more recently women) from the British Empire (now Commonwealth), the United States and Germany (intermittently). There is a (much smaller) statue commemorating Rhodes in a niche high up on the Oxford High Street façade of Oriel, his own college; and Rhodes House is the headquarters of the scholarships that bear his name. By the standards of its time, and still in real terms today, Rhodes’s gift was a prodigiously generous benefaction, and from a man once widely esteemed as a great British patriot and empire builder. Yet today, by contrast, Cecil Rhodes stands condemned by many people as a racist and as an imperialist, and as being no longer deserving of Oxford University’s approbation and commemoration.
In more detail, the case against Rhodes is as follows: he made a fortune in gold and diamonds, exploiting black labourers working down the mines in ways that would be unacceptable today. The British South Africa Company, of which he was the founder and chief shareholder, was a rapacious exemplar of capitalism and imperialism at their worst, its treatment of King Lobenguala of the Matabele was beyond deplorable, and the loose morals and mores of the Company’s employees, in administering Rhodesia and Nyasaland, were unacceptable even by the lax standards of the late nineteenth century, let alone today. Moreover, Rhodes was complicit – and was proven at the time to have been complicit – in the Jameson Raid, launched in December 1895 as an unlawful attempt to overthrow the Transvaal government which, whatever its faults, was the legitimately elected authority of an independent sovereign state. And in observing that ‘the British are the finest race in the world, and the more of the world they inhabit, the better it will be for mankind’, Rhodes might have said something that was the conventional wisdom to Anglo-Saxons in 1900, but a century further on, such imperialist arrogance and racist bigotry is no longer deemed acceptable, and least of all in Oxford, where one aspect of the University’s mission is to encourage ethnic diversity among undergraduates.
The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement is only one example of protests that have taken place on university campuses on both sides of the Atlantic. Yale University has recently agreed that Calhoun College will be renamed, on the grounds that John C. Calhoun was one of the last high-profile defenders of slavery in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, and that it is no longer right to commemorate and venerate such a racist and reprehensible figure on a campus with a significant African-American population. Instead, the college has been renamed for Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, a woman, an admiral in the U.S. Navy, a computer scientist and a Yale graduate student. Yale has also agreed that it will no longer call the heads of its colleges ‘Masters’, on the grounds that the association of this word with the superiorities and inferiorities of slavery is again both reprehensible and inappropriate in a university with an ethnically diverse student body. There have also been student protests at Princeton University against what was deemed to be the sanitized veneration of Woodrow Wilson, embodied in the naming of Wilson College and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs, on the grounds that Wilson was a southern racist, and that whatever may have been his achievements as governor of New Jersey and president of the United States, he should not be held up to acclaim in the university of which he was once president, on the grounds that Princeton now espouses very different (and more enlightened) values from those which he proclaimed. Like Rhodes and like Calhoun, so this argument runs, Wilson is an ancestor who should no longer be worshipped.
Hence in Oxford, the demand that, as in the University of Cape Town, the statue of Rhodes must be removed, on the grounds that its continued presence is both offensive and provocative, especially to undergraduates of colour. For if, so this argument runs, the University of Oxford is genuine in its claim that it stands today for equality of access, for the ending of racism and racial prejudice, and for a world-view that extends beyond British or Eurocentric parochialism, then the continued celebration of Rhodes, who seems the very antithesis of the values that Oxford now embraces, must end. Hence the additional demands that the money Rhodes left to Oriel should be repaid, that the Rhodes scholarships should be both renamed and rethought, and that the Oxford history syllabus should be ‘de-colonialized’. But that is not the only view that has been taken of this matter. One alternative position concedes that Rhodes is not a figure who would command contemporary approbation, but also insists that he was undeniably a significant historical personage and a no-less significant Oxford benefactor. Yet we also need to recognize, so this argument goes, that Rhodes was a figure of his time, with the prejudices and presuppositions of his time, who needs to be understood and judged by the standards of his time. Context is all, and contexts change, and the context has certainly changed in Rhodes’s case. That being so, this argument continues, we should not seek to obliterate Rhodes from the historical record, by pulling down his statue, or by renaming Rhodes House. Instead, we should explain that Rhodes’s time was not our time; but we should also recognize his historical and philanthropic importance, even if his values were not as ours.
In the case of Woodrow Wilson, there have been similar demands in Princeton to those made in Cape Town and Oxford about Rhodes or at Yale about Calhoun: that his name should be removed from Wilson College, and from the Woodrow Wilson School, since it is a reproach and an insult to African-American Princeton students, and should be replaced by that of someone else more acceptable to, and exemplary of, contemporary values and sensibilities. No such changes have yet been made, but Princeton did set up a working party to look more fully into Wilson’s views and achievements than the University had been willing to countenance before, and it has published the findings of the wide variety of historians whom it consulted. The result has been a broad recognition that Wilson did, indeed, hold views on the subject of race that seem unacceptable to us now, and that whatever his national achievements as an educator and his international accomplishments as American president, these less admirable aspects of his life need to be recognized. One response is that his views, while reprehensible now, were no worse than those which were generally held in his day, and that it is ahistorical and anachronistic to condemn someone by the later standards of our different era. Another is to insist that even by the standards of his own time, Wilson’s segregationist and racist attitudes were indeed reprehensible. Yet a third is that, notwithstanding his shortcomings, Wilson was a major figure in the history of Princeton, of his country and of the wider world, and should be treated as such, but no longer be regarded as a fit subject for ancestor worship.
So far, the official responses of Oxford concerning Rhodes, Yale on Calhoun, and Princeton in regard to Wilson have been different; but all three universities have been forced to recognize that previously acclaimed and venerated figures can no longer be viewed in an uncritical light, and that something must be done, ranging from the removal of Calhoun’s name at Yale, via deeper historicization in the case of Wilson at Princeton, to a recognition that multicultural and postcolonial Oxford has to do better, although in ways not yet fully worked out, and even if Rhodes’s statue remains (at least for now). But, as invariably in these cases, these are not the only views. One alternative is to argue that it is misguided and in fact impossible to set out to atone for what are now deemed the ‘wrongs’ of the past, because the past is indeed and by definition a foreign country, and that they did do things differently there. Nor, so this argument continues, is it right to obliterate from the past, and to expunge from the historical record, those events, people and reputations that we now deem unpleasant and unacceptable. That may be what Communist countries and African dictatorships do, especially when their ruling regimes change, but it is not what the freedom-loving west should do. On the contrary, and as Eric Hobsbawm once remarked, the historian’s job is to be ‘the professional remembrancers of what their fellow citizens wish to forget’.
It was, after all, none other than Edward Gibbon who, several centuries ago, urged that history was little more than the record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. So it is hardly a novel insight to be told that there is much in the past, in terms of people, events and reputations, which many nowadays find distasteful. The past is not a place for the squeamish, you cannot hug your way through history, and it is a mistaken idea to try. But in modification and extension of Gibbon’s dictum, we also need to recognize that what are retrospectively deemed to have been mankind’s crimes, follies and misfortunes do change over time, and they have especially changed during the last half century. As John Vincent once provocatively observed, we in the west now live in societies that are, or at least generally aspire to be, liberal, secular, democratic, feminist and egalitarian. But from such perspectives, this means that most of the human past was not like that and is not like that. Accordingly, the most important task for university educators, so this argument continues, should not be to give in to demands to produce a sanitized and bowdlerized version of the past, expunging from it those many people and events that now seem offensive to today’s values and sensibilities: on the contrary, our prime task, in helping undergraduates on their way to adulthood, should be (among other things) to try to get them to understand how keenly, honestly and painfully people in earlier times held views, pursued aims, entertained opinions and did things, that now seem to us wrong, misguided and even abhorrent.
Moreover, it is not only the past that was a sinful place and an imperfect world, inhabited by sinful and imperfect people, for the same is true of the present (and it will no doubt be true of the future as well); and among those past and present sinners are indeed to be found many entrepreneurs, industrialists, businesspeople, bankers, philanthropists, university leaders, politicians and United States presidents. Part of our job as educators is to confront these uncomfortable but undeniable truths ourselves, and also to ensure that the undergraduates we teach will have done so, too, for how else are we to discharge another of our tasks, namely that of preparing them for life in the flawed, fallible and sinful world that they themselves are going to inhabit? And in the process of doing so, we should not be obliterating figures such as Calhoun, Wilson and Rhodes from the historical record because some or most of what they did causes pain and offence to us, here, now, today. On the contrary, we should be explaining how and why they thought and did what they did and when they did; we should recognize that with all their faults (as it now seems to us), they were undeniably major historical figures of their time; and, in the case of Rhodes, we might at least be willing to concede that what we now regard as his ill-gotten gains have nevertheless been put to good use in the years since his death. Indeed, there are many past examples of tainted money that was eventually given away for admirable purposes. But what should be the attitudes of universities today, in the light of these recent controversies, if they are confronted with offers of what are now be deemed to be corrupted and contaminated giving?
III
Before getting to that question, it is important to state what is surely an obvious and incontrovertible point, that is equally valid on both sides of the Atlantic, namely that for the foreseeable future, as the costs of higher education continue to rise, the need for fundraising and the pursuit of philanthropic largesse is going to become more important to universities, not less. (The continuing digital revolution may at some distant date mean that all higher education will be provided and undertaken online, and that many campus-based universities, with full-time faculty and resident students will become a thing of the past; but despite the proliferation of M.O.O.C.s, that doesn’t seem likely to be happening any time soon.) In the United States and the United Kingdom, the respective consequences of the Trump presidency and the Brexit vote may well mean that less government money will be available for universities. On both sides of the Atlantic, there are also real and pressing problems with raising tuition fees further: in America because they are already deemed to be far too high at top-tier universities and colleges; in Britain because to do so would be politically very controversial, and it seems likely that fees may soon be reduced. And given the widespread recognition that universities are stronger if their sources of income are correspondingly varied, then the search for big, philanthropic money is going to intensify rather than diminish.
Yet it bears repeating that at the very same time that philanthropic income is becoming of ever greater significance in the world of higher education, the pursuit of such benefactions is becoming increasingly challenging: partly because in today’s anxious and competitive climate, more universities are aggressively pursuing what is in reality a finite number of major donors, both actual and potential; and partly because there is a growing divergence between the need to raise big sums from such sources, and the recognition that such funding may be deemed to be morally unacceptable, however financially welcome it might be – or would be. Some years ago, a major figure in the cultural world of London told me that the most important point to bear in mind, when it came to fundraising, was not so much where the money came from or how it had originally been made, but what good you could do with it if and when you got it. There is abundant historical evidence that this view has often been taken in the past, but is it sustainable or justifiable now? Would, for example, the University of Oxford today accept another monster and potentially transformative benefaction from a figure as controversial as we now regard Cecil Rhodes as having been? It seems highly unlikely, and maybe Oxford would be right to turn it down. Yet the Rhodes scholarships have undoubtedly changed the lives of many people from many parts of the world for the better, and this has often been to considerable public benefit, and greatly to Oxford’s benefit as well.
The fact that bad money can be put to good use means that this is far from being a wholly straightforward issue, and when it comes to fundraising today, it is not the only one. Here is another. On both sides of the Atlantic, universities repeatedly proclaim their commitment to equality, diversity, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, the pursuit of truth, the significance of evidence-based learning, and the importance of freedom of thought. These are undoubtedly admirable attitudes and attributes, especially in the strident, populist era of Brexit Britain and Trump’s America, where ‘fake news’ and xenophobia seem ominously on the rise. But today, as in the past, many rich people have inherited fortunes that were ill-gotten gains, or have made their own money by means that will not survive ethical scrutiny, and many more of them may not share the attitudes and beliefs enumerated earlier in this paragraph. Yet they are wealthy, and some of them are potentially generous – perhaps motivated by the wish for social acceptance, or by a genuine desire to do good (or to atone?) by giving money away. But they would be highly unlikely to pass the stringent tests of the ethics committees which most universities now have in place to evaluate the moral credentials of potential donors, in the hope of avoiding precisely the sort of difficulties and the negative publicity that Yale and Princeton, and Oxford and the L.S.E., have recently encountered.
Moreover, from a philanthropic perspective, it is not only those who seek to raise money who nowadays are more than ever concerned with ethical issues. For just as universities are increasingly eager to proclaim that they have an ethical acceptance policy, so many foundations, which exist to give money away, are equally keen to proclaim that they have an ethical investment policy. Some such bodies will no longer invest in companies concerned with (for example) armaments, fossil fuel, tobacco or gambling; while many universities will not accept money that comes from what are deemed to be such tainted sources. These are in many ways admirable positions to take up, and the pressure for those foundations and universities that have not yet adopted such ethical codes seems unrelenting (especially from undergraduates in the case of fossil fuels). But good intentions may not necessarily yield good results or the right results. On the one hand, the investment portfolios of many rich institutions (and individuals) are managed by so many different people at so many varied levels, and the world of global capitalism is so complex and multifarious in its many interconnections, that in reality such high-minded restrictions can be very hard to maintain, enforce and police. On the other hand, if universities make their ethical requirements too stringent and exacting, they may significantly limit and hamper their capacity to raise substantial sums of money, because potential donors will not be willing to subject themselves to such moral monitoring.
In the long history of university funding in Britain, this is in many ways an unprecedented state of affairs: where the need for philanthropic largesse and support for higher education has never been greater, but where anxieties over the sources and motivations of such funding on the part of universities have never been greater, either. And, given that some dubious donors undoubtedly seek to gain respectability or influence by such means, these concerns are not wholly unreasonable. This in turn means that universities seeking philanthropic funding increasingly find themselves in a position that is at once high-minded but restricting, as they attempt to obtain more money from foundations and rich individuals, even as they also wish, via their recently established ethics committees, to sit in judgement on the very philanthropies and the very people whose largesse they seek to secure in unprecedented amounts. For any development office, tasked with raising more money than ever before, this is a very difficult position in which to be put: trying to attract and engage potential donors, while in the process also warning them that their business and investment practices may be subject to rigorous investigation, as a result of which any impending benefaction may be refused for fear of offending ethical guidelines (and/or undergraduate opinion).
How many potential donors, eager to do altruistic good, or to acquire respectability and social recognition, or to atone for earlier misdoings and misdeeds, or for whatever other motives, will in future be willing to submit themselves to such increased scrutiny, from the very organization to which they wish to give, thereby running the risk of being rebuffed, humiliated, and losing face and reputation? Moreover, in philanthropy, as in so much else in life, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. For if would-be donors are willing to persevere, and if their gifts are eventually accepted, then it will be scarcely surprising if enhanced vigilance and concern on the part of those seeking gifts is paralleled by increased determination on the part of those who give for much more rigorous impact assessments, and a growing insistence on the meeting of agreed performance targets, than has generally been the case in the past. No individual or institution is likely to submit themselves to the sort of rigorous ethical vetting that is becoming the norm without in turn imposing their own increasingly stringent requirements on those to whom they have eventually been allowed to give their money. At just the time when there is a greater need than ever before for philanthropic support for higher education, those seeking such gifts, and those who might be minded to make them, are both becoming more demanding and hard-nosed in their negotiations and in the processes and procedures they want to see followed. Will there be more philanthropy or less as a result? Will fundraising get easier or become more difficult? Only time will tell.
One final point. According to Owen Chadwick, one of the prime purposes of studying history has always been to free us from what he called ‘the tyranny of present-day opinion’. For it is the besetting weakness of every generation to presuppose that it is the wisest, the most sophisticated, the most moral and the most high-minded of any that has ever lived, and that all of history had been leading up to this most admirable state of affairs. But what history actually shows, to the contrary, is that there is no parochialism as easy or as pervasive as the temporal parochialism of the present. Like many generations that have gone before, we may think ourselves superior to our forebears, which helps explain why some people are hostile to previous philanthropies based on very different and less admirable values; but that being so, should we not at least entertain the possibility that future generations may take an equivalently disapproving view of us? This might, in turn, suggest that it is unwise to draw up ethical guidelines regarding potential donors that are too precise, and too difficult to change. No doubt universities need some essential basic criteria for determining whether potential gifts are acceptable or not; but they will also need to be flexible, as circumstances and values and student opinion continue to develop and to evolve. Here is one potential straw in the wind. Undergraduate hostility to fossil fuels is also accompanied by an increasing preference for vegetarian meals. Might this mean that at some future date, universities will be ill-advised to accept money from foundations associated with the sale of meat, poultry and game, or from individuals who like their filet mignon or their beef wellington, and enjoy hunting and shooting? Once again, only time will tell ...
IV
All of this is but another way of saying that, like many other facets of human existence and experience, philanthropic practices and fundraising endeavours are simultaneously timeless yet also time-bound. They extend at least as far back in history to the three wise men presenting their Christmas gifts to the baby Jesus in the stable at Bethlehem; yet they also take particular forms at specific times which in our own day are in significant ways different from earlier practices, and which are becoming even and ever more so. From one perspective, philanthropy has never been more necessary or important to the work, health and future of higher education than it is now; from another angle, giving away money to universities has never been an activity more controversial or more fraught with risk than it is now; and from yet a third vantage point, there has never been a greater demand, or a greater need, for rules and guidelines for the giving and the receiving of grants and benefactions than there is now. Against this challenging and changing background, the essays that follow seek to offer new historical perspectives on philanthropy and fundraising in British universities and other cultural institutions, to explore and examine some famous and controversial instances of giving and getting, and to describe some recent attempts to engage with contemporary ethical concerns. They make for salutary and stimulating reading.