Why has Oxford killed off a much-loved Catholic college?

Few institutions can match the global prestige of Oxford University. Just look at the gifts lavished on it, like offerings brought to some mighty emperor of the ancient world. There’s the Saïd Business School, controversially funded with £50 million from Wafic Saïd, who helped to broker the British-Saudi arms deal. There’s the carbuncular Blavatnik School of Government, criticised by Russian dissidents for how the funder made his millions. There’s the new student housing at St Peter’s College, partly paid for with a donation whose original source was the mid-20th-century fascist demagogue Oswald Mosley. Yes, people do sometimes ask whether there’s any cash the university won’t accept.

And now they have an answer. The one thing you can’t do with your money in Oxford is keep alive a small struggling Catholic college. Try to do that, and every door will slam in your face.

In May, Oxford’s officials put on grave expressions and announced that St Benet’s Hall, an institution with about 130 students which was described by the students’ union as ‘probably the friendliest place in Oxford’, would be closing its doors. The reason, according to the university’s statement, was the ‘ongoing financial uncertainty’. For the academics and administrators who lost their jobs, and for the wider community, it was a devastating blow. There was something unique about St Benet’s: its quietly Christian identity and familial atmosphere – unlike other colleges, there was no High Table for fellows, but a single table where everyone sat together – felt to many academics like the last link with old Oxford.

‘The closure of the hall feels akin to losing a friend,’ the Tory MP Alexander Stafford, who went to St Benet’s, tells me. ‘It nourished me, forming who I am as a person. It is hard to believe that the Hall will no longer be there waiting for me – it was a truly wonderful place.’

But St Benet’s did not merely die off. It was killed. There was no ‘financial uncertainty’: St Benet’s had signed a letter of intent (a provisional deal) for a £40 million donation – enough to sort out its existing issues, grant the Hall a solid endowment, introduce some scholarships for poorer students and give everyone a pay rise. I have seen the document, signed by the potential donor, the American businessman John Barry, and the Master of the Hall, Professor Richard Cooper.

Barry is the CEO of the $8.4 billion investment company Prospect Capital, and a prolific philanthropist who has funded elementary schools in New York, community organisations for low-income areas, cancer care for military veterans – and a scholarship programme at Oxford itself, the Barry Scholarship. St Benet’s struck him as another worthy cause.

Yet the university trod on the deal. The staff were sacked, students were hastily redistributed into other colleges, the buildings put up for sale. For Stafford, the situation is ‘remarkable’. ‘The university should have permitted the Hall to continue operating with its newly secured financial support,’ he says, ‘and there needs to be a thorough and urgent examination of the reasons why this was not allowed to happen.’

Small wonder that in the dark corners of Oxford’s pubs, people are muttering about the secularising trends in the university. For St Benet’s, though scarcely a Catholic madrasa, was officially linked to the Benedictine order; it was technically not a college but a ‘hall’, a smaller type of institution with a Christian connection. ‘Increasingly, the people who put themselves forward for Oxford’s committees dislike traditional Oxford and religious halls,’ one former St Benet’s fellow tells me. ‘These people tend to be more aggressively secular.’

Jonathan Price, a fellow of St Cross College and Pusey House, says the secularisation of Oxford goes hand-in-hand with ‘centralisation and modernisation’, the replacement of traditions with procedures. College chapels, the famous teaching system based on small tutorials, and the independence of the colleges could all yet come under threat. Roger Scruton, Price says, used to remark that ‘the only reason Oxford has not yet been abolished is because no one has yet understood it. If they can understand it, they can dismantle it’.

Oxford does sometimes reject donations because it doesn’t like the look of where they have come from: there is a whole committee devoted to reviewing donors. But John Barry, who offered the £40 million, was investigated by that committee when he made the offer – and, according to multiple sources involved with the negotiations, he passed the committee’s scrutiny unusually well – ‘with flying colours’, one said.

It’s clear that from the beginning, some people were trying to sabotage the Barry deal. I spoke to Robert George, a Princeton professor and well-known public intellectual in the States, who originally contacted Barry about the situation at St Benet’s. ‘The day this all began,’ George recalls, ‘I said to my wife, “I’m going to try to get this done with no Oxford intrigue.” What an idiot I was.’ By the end, George says, with a nod to Oxford’s association with detective stories: ‘I just wanted to get through this without the discovery of a dead body.’

When St Benet’s and Barry signed the deal, Professor George assumed that the whole thing was in the bag. A new board would replace the old one – George had put together some distinguished Oxford academics who agreed to serve. The university would give a thumbs-up, and the much-needed funds would arrive. But when George arrived in Oxford in March, he found someone was spreading rumours about him. At a meeting with two senior officials – Gillian Aitken, the registrar, and Martin Williams, the pro-vice-chancellor for education – George was asked whether he was an employee of John Barry, and thus potentially compromised. They were ‘reassured’, he says, when he explained that this was completely untrue.

A few senior figures tried to help the deal: George singles out for praise Henry Woudhuysen – ‘a hero of this story’ – then head of the committee which represents colleges to the university. Woudhuysen, George says, thought the Barry proposal ‘was more than appropriate, something that would really benefit the university’. But it dawned on George that there were also a lot of people in Oxford ‘who would like to see St Benet’s fail’.

The demise of this cherished institution, at the heart of one of Britain’s most successful brands, has naturally enough attracted attention from parliament. Sir Edward Leigh MP wrote to Oxford’s vice-chancellor, Louise Richardson, asking for an explanation; she replied that the attempts to save St Benet’s failed thanks to ‘financial sustainability’ – and also how ‘donors sought to influence aspects of the student experience, nature and ethos of the Hall’. Implicitly, this seems to allege that Barry was seeking too much influence.

That was, for some reason, a concern of the university: Robert George says that, in his meeting with the officials involved in mediating the negotiations, they wanted to know: ‘How do we ensure this board will stay independent?’ George told them that Barry was only involving himself with the Hall’s finances: he did not want to influence any ‘governance issues and issues having to do with education, teaching and scholarship’. Although Barry wanted to know the names of the future board members to whom he was handing over £40 million, the only one he had previously heard of was George.

Barry, for his part, says: ‘I was prepared to provide funding on terms that should have been acceptable to St Benet’s leadership and to the leadership of the university. These terms did not involve “control” by me or “undue influence” of any type.’

Three sources involved with the negotiations, including George, say that the university was so nervous about Barry’s supposed ‘influence’ that they refused to countenance the original board. So the Master, Richard Cooper, put together a whole new proposed board to ensure there was no question of undue influence. The university Registrar, Gillian Aitken, emailed Cooper to say: ‘Well done on all the hard work that I know such things entail.’ A few days later, at a University Council meeting on 9 May, even this proposal was rejected. Richard Cooper, according to multiple sources involved with the negotiations, was ‘shocked’.

Cooper, Aitken and Williams all declined to be interviewed for this piece. Barry says: ‘To this day, I have been given no reason for the rejection of my offer.’ When I put the claims in this article to the press office, I was first given a statement about an ‘absence of adequate finance’. After further pressing, a spokesman told me: ‘The university did not feel that the offers provided sufficient assurance of the long-term sustainability and independence of the Hall.’ But the university declined to explain why it thought the Barry offer was a threat to the Hall’s independence.

Professor George, however, has hope that the truth will out: he expects to get the full story, he says, ‘in a future episode of Inspector Morse’.