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Birkbeck, University of London
‘If it were given £100m, Birkbeck could fund its bursaries to low-income students countless times over.’ Photograph: Birkbeck University
‘If it were given £100m, Birkbeck could fund its bursaries to low-income students countless times over.’ Photograph: Birkbeck University

£100m for Cambridge? Give it to universities that need the money

This article is more than 5 years old
Benefactors such as David Harding put their alma maters first – but their gifts could be transformational elsewhere

The announcement that the University of Cambridge is receiving a £100m gift from the billionaire financier David Harding left me perplexed: why on earth does the wealthiest university in the country need a donation of this size?

As a recent graduate, I can confirm that Cambridge can be very generous. The university famously doesn’t allow its students to have jobs during term-time, instead offering financial support to anyone who may be struggling. There are numerous hardship funds, college bursaries, and university-wide grants on offer – most of which I made use of during my three years as an undergraduate.

That isn’t simple praise for Cambridge in helping its poorer students – this should absolutely be expected from any institution with £11.8bn in assets. But most universities don’t have funds anywhere near that level, so could never come close to matching the financial support both Oxford and Cambridge can provide. The Harding donation only furthers the monetary gap between Oxbridge and other universities, exacerbating the divide within British higher education.

News of Harding’s donation comes in the same week as Sir Nicholas Serota, head of Arts Council England, stated that “social pressure” should be used to encourage the wealthy to be more charitable, adopting a more American approach to altruism. Harding’s gift is certainly closer to the American style of educational philanthropy, where it is common for people to regularly donate substantial sums to their former universities. In 2015, John Paulson gifted $400m (about £300m) to Harvard, a year later Phil Knight gave the same amount to Stanford – and last year, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg handed over $1.8bn (£1.38bn) to Johns Hopkins University.

‘David Harding’s gift is closer to the American style of educational philanthropy, where it is common for people to donate substantial sums to their former universities.’ Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA

The writer Malcolm Gladwell has railed against donations being made to institutions that already have substantial wealth, branding it a “moral crime” to choose to donate to a richer university over one with significantly fewer assets. An episode of Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History looked at the late Hank Rowan, an American philanthropist who, in 1992, donated $100m to Glassboro State College, a small public college in New Jersey, instead of the private universities he attended. The money was enough to allow the institution to survive and advance to university status (it’s now called Rowan University).

Yet Rowan’s legacy failed to set any sort of precedent within the wider field of philanthropy. Instead, wealthy benefactors, such as Harding, continue to prioritise their alma maters over institutions where the money could be put to tangible, transformational use.

There are also many higher education providers currently in financial difficulty, for whom £100m would be revolutionary. Take my other alma mater, Birkbeck College, which specialises in night courses. Birkbeck opens up higher education to a truly diverse body of students, allowing people to study alongside employment or family commitments. More than half of its undergraduates come from households with an income of less than £25k, the majority are over 30, and 42% come from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. It is an institution which prioritises widening access, and embodies those values to its core.

Birkbeck gives £1,000 bursaries to all its undergraduate students from low-income backgrounds. It also runs a refugee scholarship programme, offering full tuition and further monetary support to 20 asylum seekers each year, allowing forced migrants to pursue higher education without burdening themselves financially. When I think about Cambridge’s £100m gift, I wonder what somewhere like Birkbeck could do with that money. These schemes could have been funded countless times over, offering life-changing educational opportunities to many more disadvantaged students.

It is hard to quibble with philanthropy, but organisational needs should be considered thoroughly. If this money was given with the sole aim of recruiting disadvantaged students and diversifying Cambridge’s student body, it would be less of a problem. Stormzy’s new scholarship, for example, aimed at supporting black students at Cambridge, is a great example of high profile giving to drive diversity at the university. As it stands, however, only 1% of Harding’s donation is going towards this end.

Birkbeck, meanwhile, went into deficit last year, alongside a number of other universities, and is one of a handful of higher education providers looking at making staff redundancies. Harding’s donation, split across these establishments, could save hundreds of jobs, while considerably strengthening the sector overall. Instead it is going towards recruitment drives at one of the most oversubscribed universities in the world. As we become increasingly aware of the divide between rich and poor in society, we also need to look at the widening gaps between our public institutions.

As Serota suggests, wealthy people should be socially pressured into making large charitable donations – but those donations should be grounded in a wider sense of social responsibility. Donors need to consider whether they are contributing towards improving higher education as a whole, or simply exacerbating divisions within an already polarised sector.

Marthe de Ferrer is a freelance journalist and school governor based in Manchester

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