2. Commentary on universities, museums and the commemoration of benefactors
Jill Pellew
The commemoration of major donors to universities over the centuries has taken various forms. Sometimes the names of institutions themselves have preserved the memory of these donors, such as John Moores University, Liverpool, or the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The proverbial ‘man on the street’ may know nothing about John Moores or Thomas Bodley but thus knows their names as an institutional and geographical location. Sometimes, when donors are commemorated by statues – such as those of Lady Margaret Beaufort, high over the entrance to St. John’s College, Cambridge and the now notorious Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford – these may evoke greater interest from the visually inclined. Every so often, one of those men on the street might enquire about those names and those statues, become intrigued and ask why their names and images are attached to a great library, to ancient colleges or to a university. Such historical inquiry, followed by rational discussion, is an important aspect of a cultured society.
How, therefore, should historians react to a relatively new phenomenon, the movement to change the name of an institution or to pull down commemorative statues when these are found offensive to interest groups whose members may be descendants of those who were exploited by the individuals being celebrated and who regard such actions as an appropriate means of making reparations for actions and mores of a bygone era with very different ethical values? The practice of obliterating the name and memory of an individual – particularly one who was not only a significant benefactor but also a lauded figure in his/her lifetime – raises further fundamental issues for historians who work to understand the past and to convey it to the present. Denial of the past through obliteration of evidence is a serious impediment to historical understanding. Are there not other, more positive ways in which those who live now can demonstrate that they have different value systems from those of their forebears? From the point of view of a historian, does this not include his/her commitment to ascertain and set out the broad context of their subjects’ lives, customs, beliefs and motivation? Further than this, should historians not make ethical judgements about those past individuals, knowing – as Professor Cannadine has reminded us – that they too are ‘men of their time’ and need to be humble about the inevitable limitations of understanding of how they themselves will be judged by future generations?
These were the underlying issues of our day’s four sessions examining the history and ideology of universities and museums in the commemoration of their benefactors.
English university benefactors over time: changing issues in the context of today’s ethical standards
H. S. Jones, ‘The English civic universities: endowments and the commemoration of benefactors’
J. Pellew, ‘Donors to an imperial project: Randlords as benefactors to the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College of Science and Technology’
The story of English university benefactions has a long history, going back to the founding of colleges in Oxford and Cambridge in the thirteenth century. From then, for over seven centuries, colleges and the universities which they later became (or formed part of ) depended for their foundation and development on private endowment and financial contributions. Only after the Second World War, when the concept of a British welfare state included widening opportunities in higher education, were new universities founded and funded primarily through taxation administered by central government. That era over, when a weakened economy and then a different political philosophy returned universities to a new period of a ‘mixed economy’, private philanthropy was to return as a significant income stream for many universities.
This is a vast time frame within which to generalize about benefactors. But, hopefully, it is possible to make meaningful comparisons by focusing on three universal aspects of major benefaction: the context within which the wealth of benefactors was acquired; the motivation that stimulated this financial support; and the long-term value of the educational project. It is beyond the scope of the present volume to examine these aspects over the broad expanse of English history; and the focus of our contributions here is on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But, by way of a prelude it is important to touch on benefactors of the late medieval/early modern period in an attempt to illustrate these comparators.
The starting point for historians of benefaction and for professional fundraisers is the question: where are the great sources of wealth? The clear response for pre-Reformation England is that overwhelming wealth (and therefore power) lay with the Church, the principal inspiration in the founding of all educational institutions. Princes of the Church – both secular (bishops) and religious (abbots) – were great feudal magnates, with land, property and associated rents.1 Among the monarch’s senior advisers, they provided the administrative infrastructure of medieval power and politics. They held the moral and professional responsibility for providing different levels of education and in maintaining standards of literacy. They well understood that in much of Christendom universities were the training ground not only for those going into the Church but also for clerks in royal or baronial service. And they were not averse to promoting the interests of their wider families: a common feature of their benefactions was the provision of places in their colleges specifically for ‘founder’s kin’. The outstanding ecclesiastical benefactor was William of Wykeham whose foundation of New College, Oxford, set in train the founding, between 1379 and 1529, of seven major Oxford colleges by senior bishops from among the richest sees. Royalty also left collegiate legacies: Henry VI with King’s, Cambridge; Lady Margaret Beaufort with St. John’s and Christ’s, Cambridge; and Henry VIII with his completion of what became Christ Church, Oxford. These corporate collegiate institutions were based on the monastic model. This underpinned the strong personal motives of some of the founders for whom an important aspect of their benefaction was the commitment of the institution to pray for their souls in order to ease their way through purgatory.
Death and its aftermath were a constant preoccupation of most people, and a bad death came to a person who had not prepared. Preparation included … an investment of time and money in good works, and the setting up of arrangements for prayers after death.2
In the post-Reformation period new sources of wealth, in more secular contexts, led to a broader range of college founders at Oxford and Cambridge. Men in the service of the crown, such as Sir William Petre – re-founder of Exeter College, Oxford in 1566–8 – earned good fees and perquisites from international statesmanship. Thomas White – founder of St. John’s College, Oxford in 1555 – made his fortune in the City of London whence he was able to procure large-scale loans for the king. New foundations were partly inspired by broader social motives, such as a sense of obligation to provide educational opportunities not only for kin, but more generally for the young in a founder’s locality. Yet for much of the sixteenth century issues of religion and concomitant issues of faith and piety remained to the fore. Fear of purgatory still haunted some. The re-founder of Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1542, Sir Thomas Audley, and the founder of Trinity College, Oxford in 1555, Sir Thomas Pope, had made their fortunes working in Henry VIII’s court of augmentations, administering the massive transfer of land and property resulting from the dissolution of the monasteries. At a time when prices were rising, onward selling of such land was a lucrative business that enriched professional civil servants whose skills were required in the management of crown finances. These founders had effectively made their fortunes through land speculation. Moreover, Pope and Petre had lingering Catholic sympathies and might well have been impelled by a sense of Catholic guilt to found what were effectively chantries partly to pray for their souls. Certainly the statutes of the well-endowed Trinity College, Oxford show a strong leaning towards the purgatorial aspect of prayers for the founder (and his wife).3
Often these colleges were not called after their founder but rather reflected Christian affiliation (such as Magdalen and All Souls, Oxford; and St. Catherine’s and Christ’s, Cambridge). Nevertheless, they and subsequent Oxford and Cambridge benefactors were commemorated by ‘their’ institutions in more material ways than prayer, such as through the erection of statues and the commissioning of portraits – the ‘ancestor worship’ referred to by Professor Cannadine.4
As far as the final of our parameters for judging the value of major benefactions is concerned – the long-term value of the institutional object of benefaction – there has been little controversy. Few would deny that the creation of the universities mentioned has not been a public good.5 If good has come out of such benefactions, should the origin of the wealth that underpinned them and the motivation of the donors in making them be censured? Furthermore, how far back do sensitivities about such matters go? Does anyone today care how benefactors to Oxford colleges, Balliol (John de Balliol) or Christ Church (Cardinal Wolsey) came by their fortunes? It does not seem so. This is partly perhaps because most humans can better relate to a past within ancestral memory. But it is more to do with what underlies today’s objections to the source of particular wealth – the exploitation of human beings. Such objections focus less on what one might view as exploitation by northern industrialists – such as the Manchester textile producers – of vulnerable young child workers in their cotton factories than on those exploited in the production of the key element of their business, raw cotton produced by slaves across the Atlantic. For it is the outcome of British colonial-related trade and manufacture and its strong element of sometimes brutal racial exploitation, that underpinned the wealth of many nineteenth-century (particularly civic university) benefactors and is highlighted by their modern detractors. As far as ‘good coming out of bad’ is concerned, it is worth commenting on current staunch criticism of at least one major institution – the University of Oxford – for still being unrepresentative among its teaching staff of those races that suffered in the past from colonial practices, and also for its history courses being taught from a colonial perspective.6
The duty of an institution to uphold its reputation while acknowledging duties towards its benefactors: is there a conflict of interest?
John Shakeshaft, ‘The expectations of benefactors and a responsibility to endow’
Victoria Harrison, ‘The funder’s perspective’
Universities well understand the imperative to raise funds from private philanthropic sources that are an important element in providing flexibility and a modicum of autonomy. Dependency on any single source of income can be dangerous, for every major funder has its imperative. Central government can require unacceptable political compliance. Major benefactors may try to impose controversial conditions. Research income from the corporate sector could move a university towards becoming a business. Reliance on fee income without adequate scholarship funding can disadvantage poor families. (We are today only too aware of all these concerns.) As a result, any institution that is able to raise money through philanthropy in a cost-effective manner is almost duty-bound – if it is concerned for the common good – to do so. For it is a significant element in income diversity. Moreover, there will be many projects that can only be realized through philanthropic funding.
It is the university’s lead fundraiser who bears the brunt of managing the relationship between it and its benefactors. He or she must be janus-faced. On the one hand s/he must face outward to explain the university and its needs to those in the external world whose interest and involvement could be advantageous for the institution. On the other hand, the fundraiser must face inwards, diplomatically explaining and introducing appropriate prospective donors to individuals within the university where the potential personal chemistry seems most suitable for benefactor involvement. As the institution’s employee, it is his or her role to secure as much private funding as possible for agreed projects without in any way embarrassing the university. This latter caveat is a golden rule.
Stories of where this has gone wrong are legion. Back in the relatively early days of the involvement of professionals in British university fundraising, as a newly arrived director of development at Oxford, I found a highly anxious senior management of the University faced with public criticism for having accepted a major donation for a named academic post from the grandson of an individual who had been a prominent Nazi and made his fortune through the exploitation of Jewish slave labour. A Jewish alumnus of the university had exposed the issue to the press, thereby causing the donor – who had thought he was helping to right a past family wrong through his benefaction – to rescind his financial commitment, causing not only embarrassment but also a considerable funding problem for the university.7 Lessons were learned from this painful incident – principally the need for more stringent mechanisms for scrutinizing the nature of donor prospects and their potential gifts. The development office was required to investigate the nature of a prospect’s source of wealth ahead of the acceptance of a major donation, with recourse to a distinguished academic standing committee where there were any doubts. This is now standard practice in respected universities as John Shakeshaft’s essay makes clear, as is also the transparency of institutional investment policy.
Yet it cannot be a foolproof system. First, it can be tricky for development officers if elements of their institution pressurize them to ignore ethical issues in the interests of accepting funding for a favourite project. (Sometimes – against professional best practice – these officials are financially rewarded on the basis of funding they secure.) Second – as soon became clear to that Oxford team of fundraisers – there are few, if any, fortunes that have been made in ways that are wholly ethical by contemporary standards and cannot be challenged by some identity group or other. Third, any authority making judgements about sources of wealth can only do so on the basis of contemporary ethical imperatives. They cannot speak for the next generation that may take a different view about the morality of past benefactors. Furthermore, senior fundraisers have a loyalty and, to some extent, duty to the institution’s benefactors. Their duty to protect their institution should not mask this responsibility if they wish to encourage further major donations and to keep in good faith with former stakeholders such as alumni. Above all, the institutional leadership needs to agree, and commit publicly to the kind of community and society the university aims to be. Its public value system should be a touchstone for its relationship with its benefactors.
University museums and their benefactions
Laura N. K. Van Broekhoven, ‘Calibrating relevance at the Pitt Rivers Museum’
Tiffany Jenkins, ‘From objects of enlightenment to objects of apology: why you can’t make amends for the past by plundering the present’
Benefactions to universities are not only monetary. They can be collections of books for libraries. They can be artefacts, housed in museums. University museums, whose directors and curators are university officers, are particularly connected with aspects of academic study and scholarship. They may have laboratories for research and analysis; they may display artefacts in order to teach; they may publish their research and findings. The Ashmolean Museum’s cast gallery, for example, displays plaster casts of classical statues as working models of the ‘real thing’, located in Greece. Such museums usually welcome public access and involvement in their displays and work. Indeed, they require public engagement for community support, publicity and funding.
In recent years some donated collections to both university and national museums have presented ethical challenges linked to the politics of identity and anti-colonialism. These have also developed from late twentieth-century protests by, or on behalf of, historically underprivileged – often oppressed – elements in human society. Minority social groups, including African tribes and Native Americans, together with those that have taken up their cause, have objected to the way in which museums have displayed artefacts given by, and believed to be of interest to, archaeologists, anthropologists and collectors. Criticism includes a sense of patronization in the labelling. Another is a perceived lack of respect for human remains where these have been publicly displayed. Underlying the alleged distress has been a sense that dominant races, especially in a colonial era, have given no thought in these cases to very different cultural beliefs and patterns of minority human groups. The United States government’s 1990 Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, in addressing this problem, has had the effect of encouraging today’s Native Americans to enforce their indigenous rights by demanding the return of human remains relating to their ancestors. Museums such as the Denver Museum of Nature and Science subsequently returned nearly all such artefacts. The argument against this practice revolves around the removal of valuable evidence for scientists researching evolution, population movements and historic social structures and lifestyles.8
Concerns about disrespect arising from the exhibition of human remains have been an issue in the U.K. – for example, in connection with Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum’s shrunken heads or ‘tsantas’ from Latin America collected between 1871 and 1936, donated by various collectors, some of whom regarded them as ‘exotic curiosities’, others of whom found them a useful tool for archaeological or anthropological study.9 As a result of such concerns, the museum community has worked hard, over the past decades, to ensure that educational and cultural information is communicated sensitively and that the displays are respectful both to visitors and to the dead.10 As Laura Van Broekhoven illustrates, the Pitt Rivers Museum constantly undergoes ‘critical introspection’ about such sensitivities.11
In Britain the perception of patronization and disrespect tends to have been associated with the nation’s colonial past and racial exploitation exhibited by colonial officials. As such there have also been strong and ongoing accusations of theft where artefacts were brought back to Britain at the whim of colonial rulers – notoriously, for example, in the case of the Benin bronzes from modern-day Nigeria, now displayed in the British Museum. Such museum displays have become a focus of past injustices in the same way that many commemorative statues have become symbols in identity politics.
Broader issues: viewing and judging the past from the perspective of the present
Nicholas Draper, ‘British universities and Caribbean slavery’
Anna Eavis and Howard Spencer, ‘Risk and reputation: the London blue plaques scheme’
Brian Young, ‘“A dreary record of wickedness”: moral judgement in history
Physical memorials – statues of individuals, named buildings – are an important aspect of western culture that goes beyond historical symbolism. In a civic context, streets, squares and buildings are named after battles, dates and heroes in towns and cities all over Europe, from a rue Napoléon in even the smallest French village to ubiquitous statues of Garibaldi and Cavour throughout Italy. In English towns suburban development at the turn of the twentieth century often recalls a period of colonial history with a Mafeking Street or a Kimberley Avenue. These tangible images and constructions have become significant aspects of urban art and architecture, part of the street-scene, even sometimes regarded affectionately and comfortingly by regular passers-by who may not consider their historical significance.
But we are coming up against the unavoidable fact that practices that may generally have been judged morally acceptable in one society, at one particular moment in history, may well be considered differently at another. Twenty years ago it might have been said: ‘but no-one would want to see a monument commemorating Hitler’. Now a different aspect of man’s inhumanity to man, associated with inhumane and racist aspects of the long period of colonialism, has led to equal offence being given by monuments of erstwhile heroes of that era. And what complicates the discussion are issues of ethical relativism one of which is assessing the extent to which those who have benefitted from slavery are tainted.
At one end of the scale come the slave traders and slave owners whose whole way of life – business, living arrangements, position in colonial society – was based on ownership of slaves. A now notorious example of one who was a notable university benefactor is Christopher Codrington, whose wealth enabled his old college, All Souls, Oxford to found its magnificent library. At the other end of the scale come individuals who have – even unwittingly – benefitted indirectly as descendants of those who were compensated in the years following the Slavery Abolition Act, 1833. In between come traders in commodities produced as the result of slave labour, such as coffee, tea, sugar and cotton, on plantations owned by others; and transatlantic shippers whose cargo included such commodities probably among many others. Some of the founders of what became the universities of Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol come into this category. It is hard to believe that individuals in all these categories are equally guilty of complicity in slavery.
This in itself is a historical judgement. It touches on the issue of the extent to which historians should make moral judgements about those whom they study and write. It is the historian’s role to explain the context in which past individuals lived and acted. But to what extent should they make moral judgements about their subjects rather than hiding behind the view of them as ‘men of their times’? Contemporary historians have varying views about this. Eamon Duffy, Cambridge Professor of the History of Christianity, writing about the killing of protestant martyrs in a pre-Enlightenment age, has argued that
The historian’s task is to explore that other country, the past, and to bring back news of how its people differed from, as well as resembled ourselves … indignation at the motives and actions of the long dead is a poor aid to understanding. I have tried to set it aside in dealing with the dauntingly different values of those times.12
On the other hand, Denis Mack Smith, historian of a more recent era, nineteenth-and twentieth-century Italy, felt that ‘he is a coward or a dullard who does not risk some interim judgements on the course of history’.13
There is no temporal gold standard – certainly not our current era – in terms of ethical judgements about benefactors who endow universities. Our own descendants will have their own, very likely differing, views about the ways in which the benefactors of our age have acquired their fortunes. In the circumstances of fifty or one hundred years time, they may well feel dubious about the basis of current wealth. Hopefully, they will continue to feel that private investment in universities is important as a public good.
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1 The see of Winchester, whose estate included some 60 manors, brought its 14th-century incumbents an income that made them some of the richest in western Christendom.
2 M. Rubin, The Hollow Crown (2005), p. 293.
3 C. Hopkins, Trinity: 450 Years of an Oxford College Community (Oxford, 2005), p. 25. See also J. Pellew, ‘Philanthropists who left a lasting legacy’, Oxford Today, xx (2008), 20
4 See above, p. 1.
5 The great majority of those English universities mentioned are in today’s prestigious ‘Russell Group’.
6 This has been one of the major criticisms of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Common Ground’ movements in Oxford.
7 See also Cannadine above, p. 3.
8 See, for example, T. Jenkins, ‘Making amends to Native Americans may be endangering their history’, Spectator, 15 Apr. 2017.
9 ‘Human remains in the Pitt Rivers Museum’ <http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk> [accessed 16 Apr. 2018]. Public museums have usually formulated procedures for returning human remains of this kind when requested; for example, the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow has returned some Maori heads to a tribe in New Zealand.
10 See also M. O’Hanlon, The Pitt Rivers Museum: a World Within (London and Oxford, 2014), pp. 91ff.
11 See below, p. 73.
12 Interview with Michael Berkeley, B.B.C. 3 programme, Private Passions, 14 Dec. 2014. Here he was particularly referring to the large-scale burning of Protestants in the 16th century by Mary Tudor.
13 Quoted in his obituary by J. Foot, The Guardian, 8 Aug. 2017, referring to Mack Smith’s book, Cavour and Garibaldi 1860: a Study in Political Conflict (Cambridge, 1954).