Calum Murray

Billionaire hedge fund manager Chris Rokos’s record-breaking donation to Cambridge has brought the role of philanthropy in University funding into view. It came less than a month after outgoing Russell Group chief Tim Bradshaw called on wealthy alumni to help UK universities out by donating more. A US-style donor culture might raise eyebrows, but I wouldn’t dismiss it immediately.

The role of donations in the sector is relatively small – only 2% of universities’ income came from donations and endowments in 2024-25. However, gifts from wealthy individuals threaten to become increasingly prevalent, particularly at Oxford and Cambridge. Rokos’s donation, the largest ever in the UK, follows the opening of Oxford’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, funded by a £150m donation from its Blackstone CEO namesake. Schwarzman’s donation was heralded as Oxford’s single biggest gift “since the Renaissance”.

“Regardless of your views on Rokos, his donation could be transformative”

Some students might feel uncomfortable about Rokos, a former Tory donor and hedge fund manager who made his fortune betting on interest rate hikes and financial downturns, having an entire new department named after him. Rokos even toyed with giving Peter Mandelson a job after he was sacked from his role as ambassador to the US – it’s easy to feel like the University is selling out. Still, Rokos was a relatively tame pick: Oxford received much fiercer criticism for taking money from a major Trump donor, and Blackstone’s business practices have been identified as responsible for the global housing crisis.

It’s hard to disagree with Oxford’s vice-chancellor Louise Richardson’s defence of the Schwarzman centre: “Do you really think we should turn down the biggest gift in modern times, which will enable hundreds of academics, thousands of students to do cutting-edge work in the humanities?”

The Rokos centre promises to bring cutting-edge research that could genuinely benefit policymaking. The large financial gift has given the University space to really invest in creating a new tool that will allow for deep and considered reflection on complex policy challenges – the kind of thing limited public research funding could not pull off at the same scale. The only price to pay is allowing the centre to bear Rokos’s name.

“The only price to pay is allowing the centre to bear Rokos’s name”

Where these donations become problematic is when they come at the cost of integrity. In donation-riddled Ivy Leagues, questions have been raised over the influence donors have. In 2023, influential Harvard donors threatened to cut the institution off in response to alleged anti-Israel speech and antisemitism. Its student paper, the Crimson, revealed that the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Penny Pritzker, had a personal call with hedge fund magnate Kenneth Griffin, who had donated $300m to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Griffin had urged Harvard to issue a statement forcefully defending Israel. Donors have privileged access to decisionmakers, and while Harvard maintains its independence, the way its leadership changed its tune on the issue suggests a susceptibility to donor pressure. With UPenn having suffered similarly from donor backlash, the Ivy League model of philanthropy reliance does carry significant threats to institutional independence.

However, there is no evidence that the research carried out by the Schwarzman and Rokos centres will be tainted by the views of the donors. Schwarzman’s donation, for one, has opened up a publicly-accessible work space, provided funds for cutting-edge humanities research, and given a £185m boost to the local music scene with a 500-seat concert hall.

“Creating a new tool that will allow for deep and considered reflection on complex policy challenges”

Rokos has publicly committed the project to impartiality. In a promotional video, he quipped that: “if this school were populated only with people with centrist, socially liberal views like me, then the school will have failed.” His decision to appoint Girton master Elizabeth Kendall to its board of trustees suggests he is serious about this. Kendall’s work on Islamic terrorism has contributed massively to policy responses to the issue. The value of the research the Rokos centre could bring completely outweighs the fact it has a billionaire’s name attached to it.

So, calls for a stronger donor culture in UK universities should not be dismissed. With international student numbers down, and government finances stretched, it could be a lifeline. Financial constraints are driving universities to scale back research, while the publicly-funded UK Research and Innovation is seeing real-terms cuts in “curiosity-driven” research. Regardless of your views on Rokos, his donation could be transformative.

Duncan Paterson

My disagreement with the record-breaking donation from Chris Rokos should not be misinterpreted as ungratefulness or entitlement; he has, unlike many British billionaires, a strong track record of philanthropy, mostly focusing on scholarships for state-educated students in secondary and higher education. However, it is this previous generosity that makes me question the very decision to set up the Rokos School of Government.

Cambridge is already a world-leading institution, with relatively healthy finances compared to the rest of the UK higher education sector. Last year, MPs were told that fifty higher education providers were at risk of having to stop offering degrees under severe financial pressure, following a report from the Office for Students that nearly half of universities were going to be running at a deficit this year. So why does Cambridge, of all places, need £190 million? While the donation will contribute to impactful research, that impact would be greater if it were given to an institution more in need.

“Why does Cambridge, of all places, need £190 million?”

It might be useful to look at an equivalent School offering MPhil’s and Masters’ degrees in Cambridge: the Judge Business School. It holds the top-ranked one-year MBA in the UK, the top-ranked Business and Management Studies degree, and the second best Masters of Finance degree globally. However, it also has some eye-watering degree costs – that MFin degree costs £60,000, and that MBA would set you back £80,000 (with an additional application fee of £165). Naturally, if the Rokos School of Government is offering what it says on the tin: “to prepare future leaders to be able to navigate the ever-more-challenging demands of both domestic and international politics,” I can’t imagine they will be offering a lower price tag. To me, this seems remarkably at odds with Chris Rokos’s previous philanthropic efforts.

Social stratification as a consequence of massive financial barriers to entry will mean that these “future leaders” won’t be from a natural cross-section of society, and the School of Government will not turn out as the shrine to meritocracy that the “centrist” and “socially liberal” Rokos aspires for it to be. Instead, it will create a social echo chamber; if the School’s pupils do go onto prominent roles in national and international governance in private and public sectors, I struggle to see how they could come to represent the “broad diversity of thought” that Rokos claims the school is looking for.

“There will always be the suspicion lingering in the back of my mind as to the ulterior motivations of these large philanthropic donations”

Similarly, the University must be wary of informal obligations and external influences acting on what is fundamentally an educational, not a political, institution. It would be naive to say that donating such a large amount of money to a place does not come with the implicit assumption of some sort of influence or control over the direction of the School. While Rokos does not strike me as a malevolent force, and I’m sure the university has done its due diligence, there will always be the suspicion lingering in the back of my mind as to the ulterior motivations of these large philanthropic donations.

I suppose this criticism comes all the way back around to the question, is this what Cambridge, and the UK in general, really needs right now? Do we need another elite institution nestled inside the already elite university? I almost guarantee you that this will not benefit the town of Cambridge itself, or its inhabitants. Instead, it will become even more insular, students of the School of Government swinging by for a year or two and paying vast sums of money to the university in exchange for a line on the CV which will get them into some even higher-paying policy consultant job.

Of course, it is easy to argue that this money was never intended for solving the short-term issues that I have described, and rather that it is a long term investment in Britain. But this should not be the priority of academic institutions with social responsbilities, because the country is not in the position to be anticipating the problems of the future when we aren’t confronting the issues of the present. Increasingly partisan and unstable politics, disinformation and distrust in the media, widening socio-economic division, and the accelerating decline of the state education system are the issues undermining Britain right now, and donating almost £200 million to another academic institution that provides highly specialised degrees behind a steep price tag is not the way to solve them.

I would have liked to support the Rokos donation, but I fundamentally believe that the way to solve the UK’s policy problems must come from local movements focused on change, not spectacular donations intended to create headlines.