3. The English civic universities: endowments and the commemoration of benefactors

H. S. Jones

Universities are by no means the only institutions caught up in current arguments about the commemoration and the de-commemoration of benefactors and former worthies, but they are central to these controversies.¹ That is partly for an obvious reason: universities educate students, and student political culture has long been an arena in which identity politics and culture wars have been vigorously fought. It is hardly surprising that student activists wanting to secure reparation for past injustice – most obviously, the injustice of slavery – should have turned their attention towards their own universities. Still, I think that is only a partial answer. The university as an institution is old, and so too are many of the world’s most celebrated universities. Clark Kerr of the University of California once calculated that about seventy of the eighty-five oldest institutions of the western world are universities, and more recent studies have shown the benefits relative antiquity continues to confer on universities.² So there are questions to be asked about why universities – more than other kinds of institutions – derive benefit from age, and why they have often chosen funding models that tend to privilege antiquity. This short paper begins with a historical consideration of these issues, before moving on to examine how universities in the past and present have deployed their heritage and continue to do so.

Endowments and the Victorians

The critique of endowments was a fundamental issue in Victorian politics, public policy and political thought.³ It was really central to what divided whigs and tories in the 1830s, and Liberals and Conservatives in the era of Gladstone and Disraeli and beyond. Municipal corporations, Irish bishoprics, the cathedral chapters, parochial charities, the major public schools, the endowed grammar schools, the City livery companies, and – of course – the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were all the subject of reformers’ attentions and in most cases were the subject of royal commissions and legislative action.⁴ Conservatives defended what Disraeli in 1873 termed ‘the sacredness of Endowments’, whereas Liberals lambasted endowments either as obstacles to a competitive market or as appropriations of what was properly considered public property for private or in any case arbitrary purposes.⁵

Still, the universities emerged unscathed from this assault, and in some ways they benefited from the reform of endowed institutions. Yes, the endowments of Oxford and Cambridge colleges were remodelled, in particular to open up their benefits to non-Anglicans, but also to free colleges from obligations to particular localities and thus to allow them to become more meritocratic.⁶ But there was no attempt to disendow these collegiate foundations which were in some cases very wealthy; nor was there any attempt to divert their endowments to newer universities and colleges. And universities gained in many other ways. Just as in the late middle ages and the Reformation the Oxford and Cambridge colleges often benefited from the appropriation of the property of suppressed religious houses, so in the nineteenth century universities were net gainers from the assault on historic endowments. This occurred in at least five distinct ways.

First, the revenues from suppressed Irish bishoprics were diverted in the 1830s to support education, especially higher education, in Ireland. This was a famously controversial measure which both split the whig cabinet and was the proximate cause of the formation of the Oxford Movement, since the defence of the property of the Irish church was the subject of John Keble’s famous Assize Sermon of 1833. This denounced the whig government’s Irish Church Temporalities Bill, which proposed to suppress ten bishoprics, as a breach of faith with donors and an act of ‘national apostasy’.⁷

Second, the extremely wealthy chapter of Durham cathedral supported the establishment of the University of Durham, primarily to ensure that the endowments, by being deployed to meet a clear public need, were retained for church purposes. The new university worked hard to ensure that its degrees were confined to Anglicans, but the whig government insisted that it should open its classes if not its degrees to dissenters, and secured a provision whereby non-conformist Durham students could qualify for London University degrees. The university thus became something more than a mere Anglican enclave, and indeed a recent study has shown that the familiar picture of Durham in its early decades as a reactionary failure does not do justice to the educational innovations it introduced.⁸

Third, some Oxford and Cambridge colleges, anticipating the late Victorian and Edwardian university extension movement, supported the development of new civic colleges. This practice was first advocated by the influential educational reformer, and later bishop, John Percival. His pamphlet, The Connection of the Universities and the Great Towns (1873), written when he was headmaster of Clifton College, Bristol, urged the suppression of college fellowships to provide for provincial chairs, and it was in Bristol that this policy came closest to fruition.⁹ University College, Bristol, founded in 1876, was funded in part from the endowments of two Oxford colleges, Balliol and New College, which each gave annual grants of £300 for five years to get the new college off the ground, in the absence of substantial local benefactors.¹⁰

Fourth, the new civic colleges, and Oxford and Cambridge too, received grants from the City livery companies. The companies stepped up their charitable donations in response to growing public criticism from London radicals of their misuse of their endowments to support gluttonous dinners. Sometimes these grants were specifically tied to the development of departments of applied science: thus sustained funding from the Clothworkers’ Company enabled Yorkshire College, Leeds, to establish a department of tinctorial chemistry and dyeing and a department of textile industry. In total the University of Leeds had received well over half a million pounds from the Clothworkers by the 1950s.¹¹ At Oxford, the Drapers’ Company financed the Electrical Laboratory (now the Clarendon Laboratory), a new building for the Radcliffe Science Library, and the establishment of the department of social anthropology. Several livery companies also established exhibitions for poor non-collegiate students.¹² The companies – the Drapers and the Goldsmiths in particular – were also handsome donors (£33,000 out of a total of £150,000 raised) to the Oxford Re-endowment Fund. That fund, launched in 1907 by Lord Curzon as chancellor of the University, was itself testament to the resilience of the endowment principle at the start of the twentieth century.¹³

Fifth and finally, the City Parochial Charities Act of 1883 authorized commissioners to divert the endowments of many parochial charities to the support of the technical colleges of London, some of which later became polytechnics and in turn universities. The commissioners normally established schemes that required matching funding, and this helped leverage not only public subscription, but also substantial and ongoing commitments from livery companies, notably the Haberdashers and the Drapers.¹⁴ Institutions that were given financial stability by schemes of this kind included the Regent Street Polytechnic, ancestor of the University of Westminster, Goldsmiths’ Institute (later College, and now Goldsmiths University of London), and the People’s Palace, forerunner of Queen Mary University of London, which was generously supported by the Drapers’ Company.¹⁵ So the economy of higher education, even in the new institutions, was powerfully shaped by the legacy of ancient endowments.

The civic universities

Not only did universities and colleges old and new benefit from the redeployment of endowments both ecclesiastical and secular, but – crucially for the purposes of this volume – new endowments leveraged from private benefactors were critical to the political economy of the new civic colleges which in the early years of the twentieth century were transformed into civic universities. Think, in particular, of Manchester and Liverpool, of Leeds and Sheffield, of Birmingham and Bristol. It is a striking fact that the vigorous assault mounted on the misuse of historical endowments by Liberal and Radical reformers in Victorian England did not turn the business communities of such cities as Manchester and Liverpool against the idea of furnishing universities with permanent endowments. By 1890 Owens College, Manchester, derived 45 per cent of its income from endowments – more than it derived from student fees.¹⁶ The proportion diminished thereafter, as the colleges expanded into universities, their costs grew, and public support was at last forthcoming. But new endowments could still be extracted, certainly at the time of the conversion to university status in 1903–4. Civic pride was a crucial motive: indeed, university status was deemed necessary in part in order to increase the flow of new endowments. The very term ‘civic universities’, coined at this very time, is resonant of a rich intellectual and cultural context in which citizenship grounded in the city became a centrally important concept in British social thought. Civic universities were not just universities in the city, but universities of the city.¹⁷

It is worth identifying some of the largest benefactors. John Owens founded the college that was to bear his name at Manchester with a legacy of almost £100,000. One subsequent benefactor matched this: in 1876 the German-born engineer Charles Beyer left £100,000 in his will, establishing science chairs and funding a new science building, and overall between 1850 and 1914 the College and subsequently the University received in total almost £700,000 in substantial gifts (£10,000 or more).¹⁸ Particularly notable donors included the engineer and machine tool manufacturer, Sir Joseph Whitworth, who personally and through his residuary legatees gave Owens College a sum totalling around £150–160,000.¹⁹ One of the residuary legatees, Richard Copley Christie, not only used his share of the Whitworth estate to fund the construction of the Whitworth Hall for public ceremonies (£56,839), but also from his own resources built the first College library (£23,000). John Rylands and his widow Enriqueta gave a total of almost £96,000 between 1889 and 1909, quite apart from the vast sum – around £1 million – that Enriqueta spent on building, endowing and acquiring collections for the John Rylands Library, founded in 1900 in memory of her husband, the wealthiest manufacturer in Victorian Manchester. This was an endowed part of the library separate from the university, which did not acquire it until the 1970s, but it was a major component of the academic infrastructure of the city.²⁰

Manchester was the best endowed of the civic universities, but a similar pattern can be found elsewhere. In Birmingham, Sir Josiah Mason gave some £200,000 in 1875 to establish Mason Science College. In Bristol, H. O. Wills gave £100,000 to enable University College, Bristol, to establish itself as the University of Bristol; and his two sons gave the University a further £500,000 between 1913 and 1920. Liverpool had no donors of that magnitude, but was highly successful in mobilizing the business community to raise a large number of smaller donations: a gift of £10,000 was sufficient to endow a chair, as in the case of the chair of economic science founded by the radical Liberal M.P. Sir John Brunner, of the great chemical firm Brunner Mond.

Can these universities, or their successors, be proud of their benefactors? Is there anything in the suggestion that the universities of Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol are built on the profits of slavery? It is certainly true that some and quite possibly many of the big donors to these incipient universities made their fortunes from trade in tobacco, sugar and cotton – the three main products of the slave plantations of the American South and Cuba. In the case of Manchester – Cottonopolis – we know that manufacturing was highly dependent on the produce of the plantations of the American South: hence the famous Lancashire cotton famine, caused by the blockade of Southern ports by the federal navy during the American Civil War. Owens and Rylands, among other major donors (but not Beyer and Whitworth), made their fortunes largely or wholly through cotton manufacture and overseas trade in cotton goods. How we should interpret this fact is open to debate, since the cotton industry in particular and trades associated with it were, of course, hugely important to the nineteenth-century British economy, and modern Britain is shaped in so many ways by the wealth generated by Victorian trade and industry.

The ethics of buying slave-produced goods, for consumption or for trade or manufacture, are also complex. Whether a cotton manufacturer, for instance, could be said to have profited from slavery, depends in part upon assumptions about the economic consequences of slave labour. Was slavery an economically rational system driven by the dictates of capitalism? Or, to the contrary, was slave labour in fact inefficient, as many proponents of abolition and many economic historians have argued?²¹ This empirical question is clearly relevant to the kind of moral judgement we make. If slave labour was inefficient, then those who traded in slave-produced cotton, sugar or tobacco were certainly implicated in the political economy of slavery, but it is not clear that they profited from it, since their raw materials might have been cheaper in the absence of slavery. Clearly there are degrees of culpability, and there were groups in early Victorian Britain – in particular, the Quaker free-produce movement – who argued that trading in or even consuming the produce of slave labour was morally equivalent to trading in slaves or owning slaves.²² But the contrary view was held by many morally serious people, including abolitionists, and in the case of cotton in particular, there was hardly any free produce to compete with slave produce.²³

This is a question which will no doubt continue to generate debate as the ethical consumption movement gains pace. It is significant that attention has so far focused more on those such as the Wills family who made their fortunes from tobacco – perhaps because it is now seen as ethically dubious because of modern medical knowledge – and those, such as the Tate family, who traded in sugar, another product of central importance to the ethical consumption movement. There has been less attention to those who made their fortunes from cotton, a product which is less significant to that movement. That points to the complexity of the issues at stake, and to the deployment of considerations that could not have been available to the historical agents, as well as considerations that were available to them. On the whole I remain to be convinced that the Wills family, Sir Henry Tate, John Owens, Edward Langworthy and the rest were the moral equivalents of Cecil Rhodes.

Universities and heritage

For me, there is an important issue here about why universities – certainly private universities in the U.S.A., but U.K. universities too – use endowments in particular (rather than benefactions more generally) as a key feature of their business model.²⁴ Of course, a substantial proportion of university endowments today – unlike in the nineteenth century – are not endowments in the strict sense: they are quasi-endowments, since the capital is expendable if the universities so choose.²⁵ But they seek as a matter of policy to build up their permanent capital to a level where it produces a substantial income from interest. That is obviously a very different kind of choice from that which would be involved if they chose to spend major gifts over a fixed period (say five to ten years). This choice clearly has a lot to do with an aspiration to institutional permanence, indeed immortality, and that in turn stems from a distinctive (though not unique) characteristic of universities: that they derive great reputational benefit from being old. Long-term commemoration of benefactors is bound up with the quest for durability. Universities perceive a need for endowments to underpin their permanence, while that permanence reinforces their appeal to prospective benefactors. The benefits of permanence and antiquity remain strong. We live in an age of ‘neo-liberal’ management which privileges the new and innovative, but at the same time universities’ marketing departments have become increasingly conscious of the benefits that they can derive from their heritage, and often this involves tenuous claims to age. Liverpool John Moores University, for instance, was established in 1823, Leeds Beckett in 1824, the University of Central Lancashire in 1828, and Cardiff Metropolitan University in 1865.²⁶

My own institution, The University of Manchester, provides a fascinating case in point. It was the product of a merger in 2004 of the old University of Manchester (formally named the Victoria University of Manchester) and U.M.I.S.T., the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. The resulting university was self-consciously new, driven by a vision of a radical culture shift, and hence a step-change in performance, achieved in part through the erasure of old institutional structures. Its novelty was signalled by the aggressively capitalized definite article in the name, and by the appointment of a pugnacious Australian president and vice-chancellor, who dropped the national anthem from degree ceremonies, since it was regarded as out of line with the ethos of a global university. This was the academic equivalent of France in 1790, except that whereas the French revolutionaries swept provinces from the map in favour of departments, the academic revolutionaries swept departments away, to be replaced by huge interdisciplinary schools. This self-conscious modernity sat oddly with the new logo, which signalled the university’s origins in 1824 – a date whose significance had escaped the notice of historians of universities, but which was, in fact, the date of the formation of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute, a forerunner of U.M.I.S.T. And a few years later the University, discovering the reputational benefits of heritage, created the post of University historian and heritage manager – the first post of its kind in a British university, and held by Dr. James Hopkins.²⁷

The Manchester case is an extreme one, but it exemplifies an important point. In spite of the apparent triumph of neo-liberal managerialism, universities are institutional palimpsests, whose curricular structures, built environments, and traditions bear the imprint of the academic politics of the past. That is not an argument for preserving the entire legacy of the past, but it does constitute an argument for a presumption in favour of the preservation of that legacy. Universities, I suggest, are stronger and more interesting for having distinctive individual identities shaped by their pasts. The survival of names commemorating benefactors and worthies of the past also signals something of the moral complexity of institutional histories.

I conclude with a comment about commemoration and naming practices.²⁸ There are many ways in which benefactors may be commemorated, but naming universities after them did not become part of the British practice until the ending of the binary divide in 1992: Heriot-Watt in 1966 is the only example – actually half an example – before John Moores University and Robert Gordon University in 1992. Colleges were different – although naming colleges after founders did not become common in Oxford and Cambridge until the twentieth century. The civic colleges of the Victorian period were quite often named after benefactors – Owens College, Mason College, Firth College – but, interestingly, when they acquired university status they eschewed that kind of identification with a founder. One reason for this was that the new universities aspired to be coterminous with higher education and learning in the cities in which they were located: not a university in Manchester or Birmingham or Sheffield, but the University of Manchester, of Birmingham, of Sheffield. Prior to 1992, the only city with more than one university was London, where City University and (out at Uxbridge) Brunel coexisted with the University of London.

There is a stark contrast between British naming practices prior to 1992 and American practice. Named universities are common in the U.S.A., where founders such as John Harvard, Elihu Yale, Ezra Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Leland Stanford, James Buchanan Duke, John Purdue, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and many others are commemorated in the names of the universities they founded. It should be added, however, that another common practice in the U.S.A. is for universities to be named after a famous person rather than a benefactor: examples include Brown, Rutgers, George Washington, George Mason and Emory. Even this practice was unknown in England before the former Leicester Polytechnic chose to name itself after Simon de Montfort. De Montfort was not an uncontroversial choice of name, however, since the great proto-parliamentarian was also deeply implicated in the persecution of the Jews. That raises a further point by way of conclusion. The reputations of ‘great men’ (and women) are open to historical revision and re-evaluation, just as much as those of wealthy benefactors are, but there is this difference. When we name a building, a chair, or a university after a great man or woman, we assert their worthiness, whereas when we name one after a wealthy benefactor we acknowledge the gift, and recognize a wise decision, but (I suggest) do not necessarily assert the personal worthiness of the benefactor.

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¹ D. G. Faust, ‘Recognizing slavery at Harvard’, in The Harvard Crimson <http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/3/30/faust-harvard-slavery/> [accessed 25 Feb. 2018].

² A. Geuna, ‘The internationalisation of European universities: a return to medieval roots’, Minerva, xxxvi (1998), 253–70.

³ A key work here is L. Goldman, ‘The defection of the middle class: the Endowed Schools Act, the Liberal party, and the 1874 general election’, in Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew, ed. P. Ghosh and L. Goldman (Oxford, 2006), pp. 118–35.

⁴ The classic source is D. Owen, English Philanthropy 1660–1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), pt. 3.

⁵ Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, cciv (20 March 1873), col. 1944. Conversely, Gladstone aroused fierce controversy with his 1863 budget speech, in which he announced a proposal to tax charities’ endowment income, a proposal he was obliged to withdraw (M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: the Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 211–13, 232–3).

⁶ There is an accessible account in L. W. B. Brockliss, The University of Oxford: a History (Oxford, 2016), ch. 9, to supplement the authoritative study The History of the University of Oxford, vii: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, ed. M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (Oxford, 1997), especially ch. 23.

⁷ B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 468, 496; also R. Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion, and Reform 1830–1841 (Oxford, 1987), ch. 2.

⁸ M. P. Andrews, ‘Durham University: the last of the ancient universities and the first of the new’ (unpublished University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 2016).

⁹ Owen, English Philanthropy, p. 366; J. Sadler, ‘Percival, John (1834–1918)’, in O.D.N.B. <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35471> [accessed 2 Oct. 2017].

¹⁰ K. Vernon, Universities and the State in England, 1850–1939 (Abingdon, 2004), p. 104.

¹¹ Owen, English Philanthropy, p. 367.

¹² The History of the University of Oxford, vii: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2, ed. M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (Oxford, 2000), pp. 461, 486, 503, 640, 196.

¹³ Owen, English Philanthropy, p. 355. But the fund itself fell short of its target of £250,000.

¹⁴ D. Owen, ‘The City parochial charities: the “Dead Hand” in late Victorian London’, Jour. British Studies, i (1962), 115–35.

¹⁵ S. Webb, London Education (1904), ch. 4.

¹⁶ W. Whyte, Redbrick: a Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities (Oxford, 2015), p. 139.

¹⁷ A powerful and influential statement of this position can be found in R. Muir, Plea for a Liverpool University (Liverpool, 1901).

¹⁸ Owen, English Philanthropy, p. 364.

¹⁹ E. Fiddes, Chapters in the History of Owens College and of Manchester University 1851 – 1914 (Manchester, 1937), p. 126 n. 1.

²⁰ Notable benefactions to Owens College and the Victoria University of Manchester are listed in H. B. Charlton, Portrait of a University 1851–1951: to Commemorate the Centenary of Manchester University (Manchester, 1951), Appendix III, pp. 143–7.

²¹ This is a long-standing controversy among economists and economic historians, stretching back to the work of the Victorian economist John Elliott Cairnes, who argued that slavery inhibited economic growth in the American South. Consensus is elusive.

²² See, for example, L. Billington, ‘British humanitarians and American cotton, 1840– 1860’, Jour. Amer. Studies, xi (1977), 313–34; R. Huzzey, ‘The moral geography of British anti-slavery responsibilities’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., xxii (2012), 111–39. The latter draws out effectively why most anti-slavery campaigners did not feel moral revulsion at traded goods originating with slave labour.

²³ Interestingly, campaigners for the renaming of the Wills Tower at Bristol University have conflated the difference between trading in slaves and trading in the produce of slave labour: e.g., ‘Bristol university Wills Memorial Building keeps “slave trade” name’, B.B.C. News, 4 July 2017 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-40497882> [accessed 30 Sept. 2017]. Likewise, ‘Students inspired by Rhodes Must Fall campaign demand Bristol University change name of Wills Tower over “slave trade” links’, Daily Telegraph, 28 March 2017 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/03/28/students-inspired-rhodes-must-fall-campaign-demand-bristol-university/> [accessed 28 March 2017] and ‘Ghosts of Bristol’s shameful slave past haunt its graceful landmarks’, The Observer, 2 Apr. 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/apr/02/bristol-slave-trade-ties-wills-building-colston-hall-rename-petition> [accessed 2 Apr. 2017]. The Wills family were certainly not slave traders.

²⁴ This question is raised by H. Hansmann, ‘Why do universities have endowments?’, Jour. Legal Studies, xix (1990), 3–42.

²⁵ This point is made by Hansmann, pp. 8–9.

²⁶ All from the United Kingdom Education Advisory Service website <http://www.ukeas.com> [accessed 8 Oct. 2017].

²⁷ <http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/history-heritage/contact-about/> [accessed 8 Oct. 2017].

²⁸ Since this paper was drafted in March 2017 for the conference at the Institute of Historical Research, I have had the opportunity to listen to an illuminating presentation on university naming practices by Keith Vernon of the University of Central Lancashire.