University donations

Why should the Government play any part in telling our universities not to take money from fascists? That should be the immediate response from Westminster and Whitehall to the cri de coeur from Prof Lawrence Goldman, emeritus professor of history at St Peter’s College, Oxford.

It followed the revelation by this newspaper that his college and Lady Margaret Hall had accepted £12 million in donations from a trust fund set up as a result of an inheritance from Sir Oswald Mosley.

The donations were given to the colleges by the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust, set up by the late motor-racing tycoon Max Mosley with the inheritance he received from his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, whose supporters were notorious for their antisemitism and violence against Jews and Left-wing groups. Max Mosley took up his father’s fascist cause in London in the 1950s and 1960s.

It is worth comparing this donation, along with others to UCL and Imperial College, with the bitter dispute over whether Oxford should have accepted donations related to Cecil Rhodes. Yet this money came Oxford’s way long before the British colonial administrator and mining magnate was at all controversial, as he has subsequently become.

Mr Mosley has never been anything other than controversial. Yet Prof Goldman says that if universities can’t govern themselves, “according to the moral principles I think most British people would expect of great universities, then there may be a role for the state”. It is easy to understand the professor’s concern but it should surely be no part of ministers’ responsibilities to teach our senior academics right from wrong.