Whose Oxford?

INSIDE STORY; Twelve days ago dons rejected the development of a pounds 40m business school. Andy Beckett traces a very English row

Most mornings, Pam Twynam sets out for work an hour early. She beats the traffic, pulls on a jumper, and takes out her golf clubs. Pam is in her late fifties, slight and bespectacled, but as long as it's not snowing she manages a good 40 minutes' pitching and driving while the sun struggles blearily up over Oxford.

The field where she practisesdoesn't seem very special: just a muddied grass rectangle, 400 yards across, framed by goalposts and two roads of crawling cars. Yet as the river mist thins, other features appear. In the middle of the Mansfield Road sports ground is a cricket square, like a billiard table still in mid-November; along one edge, a Civil War earthwork; and, in a corner, the mound from which the besieged Charles I addressed his troops. Then there's the view. On three sides stand the spikes and slabs of the university, where Pam works as a receptionist, its ranks of new buildings crowding in; on the fourth, nothing but row upon row of silvery trees, disappearing east to Buckinghamshire.

It seems a piece of land worth arguing over. And Oxford, being a professionally argumentative place, is doing so. It all began in July, when the university abruptly announced that a Syrian businessman called Wafic Said was giving it pounds 20m for a new business school. The university would provide the land and a matching pounds 20m. Said, long needled by allegations that his wealth was derived from arms dealing (which he has always denied), would put his name to a sandstone rectangle of fine Modernist design and, it was hoped, international academic reputation. Oxford's new School of Management would be built right at the heart of the city, on the university staff sports ground at Mansfield Road.

The staff were less than delighted. For the receptionists and lab technicians and cleaners upon which Oxford and its dons (who have other, college-based sports facilities) depend, Mansfield Road is close to an oasis. It is used year round, free of charge, for football, cricket, tennis, squash and letting off fireworks.

Less predictably, some of the dons began objecting to the development, too. There were letters in the Oxford Magazine, lamenting lost green space; in the Times Higher Education Supplement, decrying business studies as philistine; in the national newspapers, challenging the secrecy with which the School of Management had been sprung on the university, midway through its mid-summer doze.

On 5 November all this fizzling produced an explosion. Oxford called a meeting of its Congregation, a parliament of all the dons which has voted on major matters of university policy since the 14th century, to debate the development. A week before, every don had been sent a letter, signed by many heads of colleges, warning that "a negative vote ... would convey a very unfortunate signal about the University's relation with the outside world and, in particular, potential donors to other projects".

Yet when Congregation gathered, the argument took its own, rebellious course. Banners outside shouted "We Don't Want Your Bloody Money" to the press photographers. Five hundred dons squeezed in - not just the university's establishment, but the radical rump which had enjoyed defying that establishment ever since refusing Margaret Thatcher an honorary degree in 1985. Only last summer, some of the same dons had driven another controversial donor, Dr Gert-Rudolf Flick, the grandson of a German war criminal, to withdraw his gift to the university.

The speeches against Wafic Said's development swamped those of its supporters. Alexander Murray, a medieval history professor from University College spoke in proud torrents. The proposers, he said, had "crept into the city under cover of night, so that when dawn broke their banner was already hoisted, trumpets sounding, in our green centre". He had less florid arguments too. In 1963, a previous vice-chancellor had promised to preserve Mansfield Road as open space "in perpetuity". And the Wafic Rida Said School of Management Studies would be a different kind of university department: the donor would appoint the director, and a majority of the trustees. The opponents won by 259 to 214.

Afterwards, many journalists knew immediately what to write: the saintly dons had seen the face of commerce, averted their gaze, and fled foolishly from the future back to their studies. John Kay, the director designate of the business school, puts it this way: "You either have something exciting in the university, or you worry about a sports ground, and what Oxford may or may not have said about it 30 years ago."

In the two weeks since Congregation, such views have echoed around the right-wing press in particular, alongside a concerted-looking series of interviews with an irritated Wafic Said, who has given the university until 1 February to accept his money. The criticism has been heard in Oxford: on Monday the university's Hebdomadal Council, or executive, announced that a postal ballot of all 3,000 dons about Mansfield Road would be held in January; meanwhile the council would "redouble its efforts" to find another site for the school in the centre of the city. As state funding tightens and the market widens, the university, famous for a certain kind of langour, wants to look businesslike.

Yet this otherworldly Oxford, however often invoked to explain the business school row, is a partial fiction. The city on which the university was imposed in the 13th century was a hectic, close-packed place already, at a crossing of the Thames, close to London. This century Oxford has acquired car factories, Labour MPs, and a substantial non-white population, in defiance of Evelyn Waugh.

The university is not an island in this sea of commerce. Gifts from centuries of money-makers dot its precincts, from the grand library Rhodes House to the Nissan Institute, a north Oxford mansion given over to the study of Japan. And just across the road from the Nissan, there stands a university institution to give pause to those who always see Oxford dreaming: an existing School of Management Studies.

The subject has been studied at the university since 1965. Beginning as an "affiliated" discipline, based outside the city's ring road, it has steadily worked its way inward to the centre of Oxford and its curriculum. Five weeks ago, the School of Management took on its first intake of pure MBA students. They are less than delighted with most coverage of the Mansfield Road row. "It is galling," says one of them, a clear-eyed future banker called John Davies, "to be told that we don't exist."

Actually, the school has 49 students and almost as many professors, briskly striding between a brand-new lecture hall, library and "break-out" meeting rooms in a refurbished wing of the Radcliffe Infirmary, central Oxford's ancient hospital. "We have Abstract canvases on the walls," says Professor Anthony Hopwood, the deputy director, "and the highest GMAT [standard management test] scores in Europe." In their crisp and undonnish way, staff are keen to move to Mansfeld Road as soon as possible. "It's very important to integrate the school symbolically into the university," says Richard Whittington, a lecturer in strategy. He used to be a management consultant; he does not blink.

But his ambitions are being blocked by another side of Oxford's psyche. An anti-commercial impulse does exist, has always existed, alongside the deal-making of men like Whittington. It is there in the university's landscape of arcadian corners competing with stacked-up halls, and in the city's politics: central Oxford has a rare Green councillor, Mike Woodin. Mansfield Road is simply the latest arena for the clash of the university's two tendencies.

The playing fields were acquired by Merton College in 1294, and preserved for their sports and vistas until the early 1960s. By then the university was hunting for new sites for its rapidly expanding science campus immediately to the north. In 1962 the university asked Sir William Holford, the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, to report on the suitability of Mansfield Road for development. Holford decided that while the northern edge of the fields could be used for new laboratories, the rest -"an inner lung", as he put it - should remain as open space "in perpetuity".

The following year Merton sold Mansfield Road to the university. The labs went up; the staff sports club moved in. Then, very quickly, planners began eyeing the green yards left over. An underground car park was only blocked in 1966 on the intervention of the Warden of Merton: "It would be an act of cynicism unparalleled even in academic history," ARW Harrison wrote in the Oxford Magazine, "for the university to go back on an undertaking given less than three years ago."

By the early Nineties, the university judged that such passions had faded. In 1990 Congregation had agreed unanimously (albeit with scarcely any dons present) to give business studies the status of a full subject. A search began for a prestigious location. Wafic Said was already donating pounds 100,000 a year, and had been admitted to the Court of Benefactors in 1992; contact was made and explorations of possible sites began. One seemed perfect.

Until last July, nothing was said publicly. Even Merton College did not know. The business school's supporters say this secrecy was essential: Wafic Said demanded it, citing his son's studies at the university, which ended in June. But Oxford was not Saudi Arabia, where Said had made most of his money. Many dons expected discussion, democracy even, and the July announcement lacked either - providing an immediate rallying point for the development's inevitable opponents. The editorial in this week's Oxford Magazine shows the affront still flaring: "An outside observer ... could be forgiven for thinking things were pressed so far so quietly in order precisely to build up the force of the accomplished fact."

Oxford is mightily fond of, in the Magazine's phrase, "the usual procedures". Merton's current Warden, Dr Jessica Rawson, supports the business school in principle but says: "The college would expect considered arguments [in favour]. They haven't been produced." The university's other staff, too, have a 1,000-signature petition. Four days before Congregation made its fuss, they voted 116 to 2 against the business school at an emergency general meeting of their University Club. Oxford officers there to put Said's case, and promise alternative, more scattered and distant staff facilities, were "laughed at".

Relations between these staff and the university are often strained, and Mansfield Road has worsened them. Bill Baker, keeper of Mansfield Road's cricket square, uses the word "disgusted". And he has power. He is a Labour city councillor, a former council leader; and his colleagues' views are just as negative. "This was the least preferable of all the sites," says Stef Spencer, chair of the planning committee. Oxford's new city plan, intended to free it from its ever-closing vice of traffic, requires built-on playing fields to be replaced with green space that is equally central. With Mansfield Road, Spencer says, this would be "impossible ... It's a complete PR cock-up".

Besieged by these objectors, Wafic Said's business school may be undergoing modifications. Said's ultimatum of 1 Feb has softened to a "target date". Alexander Murray scents a partial victory: "I hear on the grapevine - and the grapevine is always operating in Oxford - that they realise there's a real problem with this site."

Some more fundamental criticisms of the business school remain: Woodin says that Said has "allegedly facilitated" the sale of arms; Shirley McCready, a senior research scientist, questions the underlying generosity of the donation: "It's almost like the university giving pounds 20m to the Said foundation, not the other way round." But both sides think a compromise site, a demolished car park perhaps, is the best solution - provided Said can be persuaded. According to the student union, this chimes with the opinion of most undergraduates, when they have one.

Away from the shouting, the existing business school's philosophy is already a kind of compromise. There is firm talk of removing the "pap" that puffs up many other MBA courses and replacing it with the solid Oxford stuff of essays and tutorials. Indeed, many dons regard the whole Mansfield Road row as a vindication of their ways, not an embarrassment: robust debate, they think, makes the university look intelligently sceptical of the world outside books as well as within. And perhaps Wafic Said - another Charles I, roughed up by an unruly parliament - will have learnt that the "very special cachet" he sought from Oxford derives from spiky thinking as much as spiky buildings.

But this is too comfortable a lesson. More likely, Oxford's schemers and dreamers will settle for a while, then get back to grappling for control of the university. Each side will suggest a different Englishness - one utopian, one mercantilist - and never give in. Pam Twynam should practise her golf while she can.

Some previous benefactors

John de Balliol

Oxford college founded in 1263 by his widow. Balliol previously escaped punishment for kidnapping the Bishop of Durham by agreeing to pay for 16 scholars at Oxford.

Antonin Besse

Mysterious French merchant founded St Antony's College, Oxford, on the proceeds, it was rumoured, of French brothels.

Rupert Murdoch

Chair of Communications at Worcester College, Oxford, named after the press magnate following a pounds 3m donation.

Sir Phil Harris

Manchester College, Oxford, renamed Manchester College and Harris Academy after the carpet manufacturer and Conservative Party deputy treasurer gave pounds 3.5m in 1994.

Sir Patrick Sheehy

After fierce debate Cambridge accepted pounds 1.6m to name a Chair after the former chairman of the tobacco giant BAT earlier this year.