‘Their gods are not our gods, their people are not our people.’ The words reverberated like a bolt from the heaven depicted on the ceiling above the assembled congregation in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. They struck at the heart of a community of scholars whose raison d’être was to embrace not exclude ideas and lines of enquiry. There was an uncomfortable shuffling of bodies in the excruciatingly uncomfortable seats of the Sheldonian. The Vice-Chancellor sat slumped in his ornate chair, with his cap precariously perched on his head as if to hide the acute embarrassment on his ever-reddening face.
What brought the Scholars and Masters of Oxford University together in such large numbers for a rare meeting in this fine building designed by Christopher Wren, the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, was an offer of £20 million for the construction of a new department of the University—a business school. Why a seemingly generous gift should be the source of such controversy and gossip in the Senior Common Rooms was the fact that the building was to be erected on the most hallowed of English turf, a cricket pitch, and one that the University had previously promised would be preserved in perpetuity. At issue was whether the leadership of the oldest university in the English-speaking world had the right to claim that perpetuity would be terminated just thirty years after the promise was first made.
While this was superficially the subject at issue, it masked the real source of controversy. It was not the building or its location that were the cause for concern; it was what was going to happen inside it—the study of business. One might as well have proposed the creation of a brothel as a business school for the entertainment of the pinstriped, jet-setting, Porsche-driving wheeler-dealers who were going to occupy it in the name of management studies. Their gods were mammon, money, and mansions not maths, morality, or music, and their people were Maxwell, Murdoch, and Madoff, not Mill, Moses, or Mozart.
The debate concluded and the assembled congregation filed out through one of two doors marked yea or nay to register their support or opposition to the motion proposing the construction of the building. They returned to hear the result: 214 in favour of the motion; 259 against. The motion was defeated.
A muffled exclamation of surprise, indignation, and delight reverberated around the Sheldonian as those present began to comprehend the enormity of what they had just done. They had rejected a £20 million donation, torn up years of planning for a new department of the University, and sent a message to the world that Oxford was too precious for business. But above all, they had delivered a bloody nose to a university administration which many of them felt needed to be put in its place and made to realize that it was the rank and file of the university academics—the working dons—not the bureaucrats or a rich donor who were ultimately in charge.
As they dispersed along the damp, dark lanes of Oxford, the dons felt an inner sense of contentment with a job well done. And as they wended their way home to tell their families of this momentous occasion, they saw fireworks and bonfires illuminating the winter skies in celebration not just of their achievement but the attempted destruction of another great British institution—the Houses of Parliament. It was the fifth of November 1996—Guy Fawkes Night, a night indelibly printed on the minds of every British schoolchild with the words:
Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Dons? treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Congregation?s treason
Should ever be forgot!