Oxford today

36 The Money Question
The Oxford University
Endowment Management
(OUEM) team, including
Sandra Robertson,
Chief Investment Officer
(far left) and Chloe Beeby,
investment analyst and
alumna (Exeter, 2005)
from a college perspective, OUEM “gives the
College a relatively cost-efficient means of investing
in a wide spectrum of asset classes.”
OUEM has not yet been a springboard to
Trinity-like levels of wealth. Over such a short span
of time, it could not have been. Yet the Endowment
Fund paid out a £41million dividend in 2011,
allowing increased drawdown by the University (see
p25), and thus a valuable contribution to the
University’s activities. These matters of investment
might seem terribly remote from educational
opportunity and the provision of hardship funds,
student scholarships, and the like, but actually they
stand in direct relation to each other.
Seen historically, one of the reasons why OUEM
was set up only in 2007 was because until then the
University’s own endowment, as distinct from that
of the colleges, had remained relatively small.
This is why Neild’s history of Cambridge’s finances
begins in the mid-nineteenth century. Before then,
he notes early on, it scarcely had a financial history
– the University was the sum of its colleges and
little more. Oxford was much the same.
Oxbridge had become a “quasi-monastic
backwater”, says Neild, and was in grave danger of
sliding into indifference, lacking the departmental
focus and capital intensive equipment needed to
compete in all manner of subjects already being
avidly pursued by other nations (and indeed other
universities in the UK).
But the other reason for OUEM’s inception
in 2007, rather than 1950 or 1975, concerns the
jealously guarded independence of individual
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‘The Endowment Fund
paid out £41 million
in 2011, allowing increased
drawdown by the University’
colleges and their wealth, which was serially
attacked and defended by different government
commissions over the past century. As if this wasn’t
reason enough to be wary of centralised wealth
management initiatives, there was in the 1960s and
1970s a centralised OUEM-type forebear offered by
Nuffield College, a unit trust. Its investments were,
writes JPD Dunbabin in The History of the University
of Oxford, “heavily geared and were therefore hit
particularly hard by the collapse of the market in
the mid-1970s.” It was abandoned.
Dunbabin qualifies this narrative by noting that
Nuffield’s own investments did very well over the
long term. In this simple sense all investment
philosophies have strengths and weaknesses
bounded by time horizons.
The premise of our original question, meanwhile,
that Oxbridge could have done brilliantly instead
of adequately in its management of its wealth, runs
headfirst into two conundrums: humanity and
tradition. Both fused seamlessly in that bedrock of
all investments until the advent of equities: land.
It is unwise to be judgemental of past generations of
bursars wedded to poorly performing agricultural
land investments that brought about the basis of
the financial crisis that landed Oxbridge in the ➺
ROB JUDGES