AND ANOTHER THING
A painful poke in the eye for some nasty left-wing Oxford dons
PAUL JOHNSON
The donation of £20 million by Wafic Said to Oxford University to expand — in effect to transform — its infant business school is one of the most generous gifts ever bestowed on the university, indeed on Britain, by a foreign-born admirer of our ways. Said is an ultra-Anglophile, who has married one of us, makes his principal home among us, has dug himself into our national and village life, cherishes his many English friendships and has marked every stage of his love affair with our country by acts of thoughtful munificence. He is that rare bird — a very rich man who gives, not in search of power, honours or position but out of enthusiasm. And the object of his love is our time-worn, battered, sometimes threadbare-looking and weary but still, in its own way, upright and honourable little island.
It is also an island where envious and nasty people occupy coigns of vantage and are able to utter their spiteful thoughts from platforms which get them a wide hearing. Oxford in particular seems to abound in such individuals. They voted down the perfectly proper and entirely unpolitical proposal to award an honorary degree to Margaret Thatcher who, as a prime ministerial alumna and the first woman to achieve this status, had a special claim on Oxford's gratitude. That was not only churlish but expensive, and deterred many potential donors. Then there was the miserable affair of 'Muck' Flick, who with- drew his spontaneous and much-needed gift in response to an outburst of anti-Ger- man sentiment.
Said's huge endowment has, happily, been much better received. The official response from the university at all levels has been enthusiastic and most of the media comment has rightly praised this amiable and warm man. All the same, grub- by little left-wing dons, of whom there are still plenty in the home of lost causes, have been muttering about the very idea of training in capitalism getting such a high profile in the university, and one or two newspapers have adopted a sneering and condescending tone towards the donor.
There are two points to be made here. First, it is time our supposedly liberal and progressive papers dropped their racial stereotypes of the Arabs. They tend to pro- mote a simplistic and offensive division of Arabs into two categories: teeming, illiter- ate and down-trodden masses, for whom a vague and indiscriminate sympathy is 'expressed; and disgustingly rich 'sheikhs', who get their undeserved riches either by sitting on oil wells or by arms trading, and spend them in tasteless exhibitions of unspeakable vulgarity. These stereotypes never bore much relation to the truth, for the Arabs are an old people or peoples, with infinite gradations of sensibility, wealth and learning. Moreover, whatever validity the conventional images possessed has long since gone. I have been visiting the Arab world since the early 19508 and have watched a total transformation of its soci- ety. There is now an enormous, thriving and well-educated middle class, and a mul- tiplicity of successful businessmen who run concerns which have nothing to do with oil or arms but export high-quality goods and services all over the world. That some Arab states have cruel and dictatorial regimes is undeniable; others are run by well-meaning but highly conservative monarchies; and there is a distressing level of corruption in many places. But the Arab world is also crowded with idealists and scholars, writers, artists, scientists and philosophers, and not least thousands of honest, enterprising and innovative businessmen. Let us recognise these facts and drop the wounding old clichés.
Second, Oxford needs a business school of world class. I used to have my doubts about whether business skills could be taught as it were in the abstract, as opposed to acquired on the job. (I still have my doubts about schools of journalism.) But We got a terrible write-up from Trevor Nunn.' any reservations I had did not survive actu- al contact with these academies. I have lec- tured in several of them and, in particular, taught geopolitics for a spell to the senior executives class at a famous establishment in Geneva. I found them serious places which could teach most Oxbridge fellows a thing or two about how to organise and conduct courses in higher education. And all the business people I met at them, whether tyros or managing directors of major corporations, were unanimous about their value.
Britain has been dangerously slow in accepting the importance of professional business training and in providing it. That is one reason why our post-war manufactur- ing performance was relatively so poor until the 1980s, and why our export market- ing is still so deficient in many ways. We now have a number of good commercial business schools, one of which, Cranfield, is outstanding and comparable with the best anywhere. More and more of our business executives have professional qualifications, profit from them and top them up with retraining and refresher courses as they go up the corporate ladder. The old ama- teurism is slowly disappearing.
But business studies have yet to establish a secure place at the heart of our university system and especially at Oxbridge. These two ancient universities get the best of our bright young people, but they both (and especially Oxford) generate an anti-busi- ness culture. A number of influential dons deliberately discourage their ablest pupils from contemplating a career in business, especially manufacturing industry, on the grounds that capitalism is immoral, anti- social and spiritually degrading. The last point is ironic since the anti-business tutors tend to be militant atheists. They are also the people who practise reverse discrimina- tion against clever university entrants from public schools. Naturally, they do not want a well-endowed and flourishing practical school of enterprise as prestigious as the Harvard model in the centre of Oxford, attracting students from all over the world. But that is exactly what they are now going to get, thanks to Wafic Said, and all honour to him. He has administered a painful poke in the eye to exactly the people who deserve it and, far more important, provid- ed a boost to the long-term future of the British economy. In my view, nothing is too good for this benefactor.
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