University Laundries

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Can Oxford University Redeem a Fascist Dynasty?

Max Mosley never really disavowed his father’s pre- and post-war fascist activism. Should Oxford be taking his bequest?

By Martin Ivens (Bloomberg)
November 13, 2021, 4:00 PM GMT+7


Max Mosley (left) with his parents, Diana Mitford, and Oswald Mosley, the British Fascist leader, in 1962. Photographer: George W. Hales/Hulton ArchiveMartin Ivens was editor of the Sunday Times from 2013 to 2020 and was formerly its chief political commentator. He is a director of the Times Newspapers board.

For centuries, rich, ruthless men have funded centers of learning as a form of spiritual money laundering and to perpetuate the glory of their name. In death as in life, they drove hard bargains.
Oxford and Cambridge, the U.K.’s ancient universities, have done well out of such bequests by comparison with their British and European rivals. But the era of scrutiny-free donations has drawn to an end; the universities face a new and testing environment when it comes to defending decisions to stash the cash and plant a prominent name plate on a new library or graduate center.

Last week, Oxford — ranked number one in world university league tables — was accused of “moral failure” after it accepted millions of pounds from a charitable trust set up by the Mosley family, a clan tainted by its links to the British fascist party of the 1930s. The rules governing donations are not hard and fast, although the moral calculus of accepting large philanthropic sums is usually overseen by institutional ethics committees. A short-term squall or reputational hit can be factored in, so long as the money was legally earned and brings benefit to educational, charitable (and more comfortable) facilities.

A bequest from the Mosley family is, however, particularly freighted with difficulties. Outside the U.K., Max Mosley, who died in May, is best remembered as the businessman who helped steer Formula One motor racing to worldwide success. But at home, he never shook off his association with his father Oswald, the leader of the British Union of Fascists that terrorized Jews in London’s East End in the 1930s. Hitler attended his second marriage to Diana Mitford.

Post-war, Oswald Mosley’s targets were no longer Jews but non-white immigrants from the former British empire. At the end of the 1950s, his son Max set up a branch of his father’s Union Movement in London’s Notting Hill and distributed a race-baiting election leaflet in Manchester blaming “coloured immigrants” for the spread of tuberculosis, venereal disease and leprosy.


Unlike his half-brother Nicholas, a distinguished novelist who engineered “an antagonistic confrontation” with Oswald and broke off relations with him for years, Max never truly disavowed his father — claiming he was “misunderstood.” Later he flirted with a career in the Conservative party but eventually became a donor to Labour under Tony Blair (political parties, it turns out, are as elastic as academic outfits in their willingness to accept funds from strange sources).

Some of Oswald’s family money was passed to Oxford and London universities, with more to two of Oxford’s constituent colleges (I graduated from one of them, St Peter’s). The money derives from the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust, which Max Mosley set up in the name of his son who studied at the college and later died of a drug overdose.

Oxford will use its 6 million pound ($8 million) donation to set up the Alexander Mosley Professor of Biophysics Fund; St Peter’s College will build a new apartment block to house students. Another beneficiary college is using the funds to support low-income students from diverse backgrounds.

These explanations, however, can sound too pat, even modish. But Max Mosley is dead, so cannot bask in reflected glory.

The perpetuation of the Mosley name by the university, however, seems even more questionable. Professor Lawrence Goldman, an historian and former vice-master of St Peter’s, accused the university of “vast hypocrisy,” saying the donations are part of a broader moral decline in ethics by schools linked to criticism of “Woke” curriculum changes. He makes a trenchant point in highlighting the slippery moral compromises of university authorities: it is always easier to apologize for past errors of judgment than to act well and decisively in the present.

But named university endowments by British and American robber barons haven’t cleaned up their reputations. Under the law of unintended consequences, the statue of the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford and the famous scholarships that bear his name, have sustained the memory of his dubious dealings in Africa and acted as a spur to the movement to decolonize the curriculum.

A more serious charge against some donors and their greedy recipients is that they may result in warping academic freedom. At my old newspaper, The Sunday Times, we revealed, for instance, that the London School of Economics had conferred an academic doctorate on the son of the former Libyan dictator Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, despite his Ph.D being ghost written. In return the Gaddafi Foundation pledged 1.5 million pounds over five years to an LSE research center and gave a college affiliate another 2.2 million pounds to train Libyan officials. In a bizarre video link-up with the LSE, the Colonel was hailed as “Brother Leader” and given an LSE cap previously conferred on Nelson Mandela. Unsurprisingly, the LSE director was forced to resign.

Other universities have accepted money from authoritarian states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait to establish Middle Eastern or Islamic study centers. Jesus College, Cambridge pocketed 200,000 pounds from China’s government and 155,000 pounds from Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company.

Tainted family dynasties seek to whitewash grubby reputations and underline that new generations can make fresh starts. Opportunistic authoritarian players, however, pose a sterner threat because they often want more than their name bestowed on a building. They want to create chairs or study centers that fit their world view — or to blunt the tougher end of debates on human rights.

Beware all donors bearing gifts. It’s not always the plaque with the disgraced family name that brings most dishonor to the dreaming spires of Oxford and beyond.

[Bonecollector]

I shit you not myself and my then girl friend were pissing around in Soho one night (We were about 17). We went into this random bar in a basement and who did we see but none other than Max Mosley dressed in green Dr's scrubs with a chain around his neck being led around my a midget in a corset. Needless to say, we stayed for a few drinks and caught some serious jokes. This midget lass started doing some cabaret on the bar, she even did a rendition of New York New York.

I know OT but it is a great story.