David and Simon Reuben, India-born, London-raised brothers who built a fortune partly from metals trading in the “Wild East” of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, have donated £80 million to Oxford to open its 39th college for graduates. The opening of the college is subject to confirmation by the university’s governing Congregation body later this month.
Reuben College, which was provisionally named Parks College after its establishment was formally approved in 2019, will be interdisciplinary and focus on applied research in subjects such as environmental change, artificial intelligence and cellular life.
It has already recruited 29 academic staff, or fellows, headed by Lionel Tarassenko, an engineer, and will have an initial intake in the 2021 academic year of 100 graduates, building to several hundred students and at least 50 fellows in the next few years.
It will be located just north of the city centre on the Radcliffe science library site, which is being refurbished. Louise Richardson, Oxford’s vice-chancellor, said: “We’re absolutely thrilled. Colleges don’t want to get too big to not disrupt their sense of community. We had a demand for graduate places from students and faculty that couldn’t be met.”
The Reuben family did not study at Oxford but began donating to the university a decade ago via their foundation by giving scholarships for students from lower income backgrounds, and £17mn of their new bequest will endow that previous programme.
Oxford’s largest donation in recent history was £150mn given last year by Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder of Blackstone, the world's largest private equity firm, to support a new building to bring together the humanities faculties in one place, plus an institute focused on the ethical questions around artificial intelligence.
The last college to be created after a bequest was the all-graduate Kellogg College, previously known as Rewley House. It was established in 1990 and renamed two years later after its original benefactor, the US-based W K Kellogg Foundation.
The 2020 Sunday Times rich list named the Reuben brothers as the second richest people in Britain with a fortune of £16bn, just behind James Dyson, and jointly with Sri and Gopi Hinduja. They rank just ahead of Len Blavatnik, who also made much of his money in Russia and has endowed Oxford’s school of government.
