The power of giving

The British are said to be among the most generous people on earth. When it comes to ordinary people scraping together pennies to give to children’s hospitals or donkey sanctuaries, this is unquestionably true. Yet when it comes to wealthy individuals using large slices of their fortunes to make transformative donations to institutions such as universities and schools, we are a long way behind America.

Where are the Carnegies, the Rockefellers? We do have wealthy donors, but they are generally on a much smaller scale, and quite often feel inclined to make their donations anonymously, as if it were an embarrassment to be seen to be acting with generosity.

The donation of £100 million to Cambridge University by one of its Natural Sciences graduates, David Harding, will hopefully prove to be a watershed. The single biggest donation ever made by a British citizen to the university, it will be used to fund 100 PhD students at a time, drawn from around the world and with the emphasis on under-represented groups. More PhDs will lead to more innovation and business start-ups. It allows Cambridge to take a huge leap towards widening participation — something which it has tried hard to achieve but has struggled with.

David Harding is not a household name, though his profession is sufficient in itself to have earned him a little notoriety. He made his fortune from managing hedge funds, setting up the investment house Winton. He represents, in other words, one of the chief bogeymen of our age. Since the financial crash of a decade ago, the very words ‘hedge fund’ have been enough to provoke a curl of the lip in many people. Those who run hedge funds stand accused — not unreasonably in some cases — of profiting from economic misery, and running off with the proceeds to palm-fringed tax havens.