Finance: The Well-Endowed Corporation?

Abstract

Collegiality costs money. Indirectly because dons spend time being involved in college governance and college administration and also because of the inevitable diseconomies of scale compared with a large centrally structured university. Or directly in terms of providing and maintaining buildings, library stock, sports facilities, common rooms, catering, tutorial teaching and even choirs (e.g. Magdalen, Christ Church and New College as choral colleges). This chapter is about the extent of that cost, about criticisms of that spending, about how colleges generate the income to cover their costs and about the sustainability of that expenditure, without which collegiality in its iconic and present Oxford form just cannot survive.