Alumni
dig deep as era of donation replaces funding from taxation
March
26,1999
Have
you been pestered by your old, hard-up university for
money? Well, so has Victoria Neumark, but she found
compelling reasons to give
If, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, you cannot go home again, can
you at least go back to college? What would you give to be
a bright young thing again? Failing that, what would you
give to help young people be bright in a similar way? Send
your money now to the alumni operation of your alma mater.
Go to the ball, sponsor a boat, buy a subscription for the
library, donate a fellowship. Leave, at the end, a bequest.
In lieu of adequate state funding, it seems the perfect
marriage of self-interest and altruism. In giving, you
revisit that potent time of early adulthood - and you
enable today's young adults to achieve their own potential.
It is practically 30 years since I crossed the red-brick
quadrangle of Lady Margaret Hall for the first time. I was
a bright young thing, entirely funded by state subsidy.
Though some things beside the finance have changed - a new
block or two, an omnipresent atmosphere of pop music - much
has remained the same.
Then LMH was all women, rules limited male visiting. Now
there are young men all over the place. But the spacious
gardens, sloping down to the river Cherwell, the library
open 24 hours a day to keen students, the Oxford tutorial
system demanding weekly essays from pairs of
undergraduates, remain the same.
LMH was one of the first two Oxford women's colleges.
Distinguished alumnae such as Eglentyne Jebb, founder of
Save the Children (entered 1895), and Gertrude Bell,
explorer (1886), set the LMH tone - both high-minded and
practical - just the tone that today is found in the
literature aimed at its alumni through the Development
Appeal. It is almost uncanny how Sheridan Gould, director
of the Development Office since its inception in 1995 but
not an Oxford graduate, sounds like most of the LMH people
I know: wryly humorous about the idiosyncrasies of past
academics and students, fervent in defence of the tutorial
system and incandescent about financial threats to its
survival.
For these are not good times for relatively impoverished
Oxbridge colleges. LMH, originally put together (in 1879)
by subscription, maintained by sponsorship as well as
student fees, has remained high up the university's league
table of results, particularly compared with older, heavily
endowed, once-male institutions. At present, the college
has 30 tutorial fellows, 407 undergraduates (equally male
and female) and 124 graduate students. Raising money to
keep up its academic standards (LMH says it needs a minimum
of an extra Pounds 500 per student per year, or Pounds
1,200 per year to bring it up to the average level of older
Oxford colleges) has now become a priority.
Why should an alumna, such as myself, help out? The reasons
lie deep. LMH graduates are known as senior members,
quaintly enough. The idea being, perhaps, that when you
matriculated, you made a life-long commitment. Gould
proudly reports: "We have contacted all 5,300 of them'.'
The ways in which the Development Office tries to cement a
sense of ex-LMH corporate identity - an annual London
dinner with such speakers as Dame Barbara Mills QC and
Barbara Roche MP, extending the "Gaudy'' or reunion dinner
from an evening to a weekend event including families,
publishing a newsletter - are all, as Gould points out,
"the kind of things older Oxford colleges have been doing
for centuries''. New, though, is the active involvement of
current students in this identity-building, most recently
in a phone canvass of alumnae over 35.
Students Andrew Radley, Sabina Pringelis, Vicky More and
Jane Parslow had been bashing the phones for three weeks
when I visited. Evenings spent ringing 950 alumnae to
extract support had created a faintly hysterical air of
good humour.
Unsurprisingly, senior members of LMH have been thrilled to
encounter these diligent, unassuming young people on the
phone. Over the age of 35, senior members are all female,
with strong views, on subjects such as the importance of
not relying on boyfriends and the value of the law library.
They bark out remarks such as "Cut the script and come to
the point" - and then dig out the chequebook for hefty
gifts. Or they inveigh fiercely about the injustice of
decades-old exam results and slam the phone down. Or they
try to feed the baby while juggling the phone and end up
explaining how distant seem the days of wine and roses with
a toddler being sick down your front.
Yet touchingly, at a time when government policy seems ever
more punitive to young people, senior members inquire
anxiously about the slashing of grants and the interest
rates on loans. As Radley says: "A lot had to pay for
themselves, and they don't want that to come full circle.''
Following a high-profile student suicide, some are
concerned about student welfare.
It is not rewriting history to recall that friendliness was
always part of LMH. Frances Lannon, tutor in modern
history, is compiling a history of the college.
"Thousands'' of senior members have replied to her
questionnaire. Hundreds more contribute to the annual
"brown book'', in which senior members catch up with each
other's news. Since 1890, births, marriages, deaths and
publications have been shared in this way, with entries
ranging from the tragic ("after a long illness, bravely
borne") to the comic ("has recently acquired part-shares in
two horses").
No one epitomises this constancy in change more than
Lannon. We were both students together: she was then a nun.
Now, with no religious belief, she applies her energy to
teaching history at LMH. She characterises the students as
"breezier'' than before and strong. The rewards, however,
are constant. "Seeing how people change when they are here:
it's always exciting when a student produces something
they've never done before - when they've broken through
into thought."
Do
you remember that? Your first piece of thought? Won't you
pay tribute to it? Appealing to that, to the memory of
first adulthood, as potent as the memory of first love, is
Gould's job. She loves it: she helps conjure futures out of
dreams. Just as well, since we seem to have given up on the
more mundane but so much more efficient mechanism of
building futures out of taxes.
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