The £155m donation to the University of Oxford by Vietnamese business woman Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao which will lead to the renaming of the University’s Linacre College in her honour places a spotlight on how many of the leading universities fundraise. This one was bound to cause a stir. Oxford is the jewel in the crown and the renaming of one its colleges – a rare event but not without precedence – would beg questions about the role of overseas money in influencing British higher education and fundamentally changing the character of one of the nation’s great institutions.

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