Back to the Future
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Just a short walk north of Oxford city centre stands a relatively discreet new building, tucked behind the sleek glass curves of the more striking Blavatnik School of Government. Square and robust, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities is cloaked in pale stone intended to echo the university’s historic architecture. Yet this is no modest addition to Oxford’s built environment. Funded by a £185 million gift from US financier Stephen A. Schwarzman – the largest donation to the University of Oxford ‘since the Renaissance’ – the Centre represents one of the most ambitious investments in the humanities in recent memory. Housing seven faculties, a new library and a flagship Institute for Ethics in AI, it represents one possible vision for the future of the humanities.
The Centre is partly accessible to the public, pre-empting any accusations of academic elitism. A new ‘public street’ invites passersby into the ‘Great Hall’, where a striking dome and skylight belie the building’s subtle façade. At the heart is a vast open atrium, ringed by curved balconies leading to offices, seminar rooms and study spaces. The effect is impressive if slightly uncanny. Conversations drift across floors, footsteps echo through the void, and from up on high, the circular arrangement evokes a panopticon.
The Schwarzman Centre feels gently off-kilter, more corporate headquarters than university building. The north entrance gives way to a gravelled carpark, still under construction. Instead of lecture lists, students waiting between classes are presented with a series of adverts – and even a list of donors – on rotating digital displays. One hallucinatory screen bursting with technicolour pixels heralds the future of AI art, courtesy of Refik Anadol.
Schwarzman’s gift was, until very recently, the largest donation ever made to a UK university. In March 2026, it was narrowly surpassed by a £190 million donation from British hedge fund manager Chris Rokos to establish a new school of government at the University of Cambridge – a sign of the competitive nature of contemporary philanthropy. What is most striking, however, is that Schwarzman’s money was earmarked for the humanities at all, in a moment when many such departments across the UK face cuts, mergers or closure. But if the Schwarzman Centre represents the future of the humanities, what kind of vision does it offer?
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Schwarzman is not an alumnus of Oxford, nor does he seem to have any prior connections with the university. He is, however, an eager philanthropist, and founded the Schwarzman Scholars programme (modelled in part on Oxford’s Rhodes Scholarship), which funds a one-year master’s at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Schwarzman has donated to libraries, including the New York Public Library and the National Library of Israel, and several university buildings bear his name, such as the Schwarzman Center at his alma mater Yale, and the Schwarzman College of Computing at MIT. In 2020, shortly after announcing his donation to Oxford, he signed The Giving Pledge, an initiative started by Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett, for billionaires to donate the majority of their wealth.
The Oxford donation seems to reflect an Anglophile pivot. Schwarzman received an honorary knighthood in 2024 for ‘services to philanthropy’, and following his donation has forged closer ties with the UK. He has developed a passion for eighteenth-century British art, with the Financial Times reporting that Schwarzman paid record prices for masterpieces from the period, seemingly destined for the Wiltshire manor he is currently restoring. This patronage of the arts also extends to a portrait of Schwarzman that now hangs by the south entrance of the Centre, put up with little public fanfare.
Schwarzman has won praise – and literal honours – for his philanthropy, but the initial reaction to the donation was mixed. Schwarzman is the CEO of Blackstone, which an Oxford press release euphemistically describes as ‘the world’s largest alternative investment firm’. In practice, the firm manages over one trillion dollars’ worth of assets, much of this accumulated through the classic playbook of private equity: privatisation followed by asset-stripping for profit. Blackstone and the companies it owns have been linked to myriad controversies, including child labour, deforestation in the Amazon, tax avoidance, and handing over hotel guest lists to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without a warrant. Schwarzman himself has also attracted criticism for his close association with Donald Trump, having chaired the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum during Trump’s first term in office.
Schwarzman’s donation exposes the dilemma at the heart of philanthropy: is it possible to balance academic independence and ethical commitments with the priorities of a donor, especially when the funding itself is contingent on an individual’s goodwill? Schwarzman and Blackstone came under fire from students, staff and local residents, who launched the Oxford Against Schwarzman campaign. In an open letter from 2019, they wrote that the Centre would be built ‘with the proceeds of the exploitation and disenfranchisement of vulnerable people across the world’. Campaigners cited Oxford’s own ethical commitments to highlight concerns about transparency, and to ‘renew these calls for new transparent and democratic procedures governing the University’s decisions regarding donations.’ The Oxford branch of the University and College Union (UCU) released a similar statement early in 2020, arguing that the donation ‘contravenes the University’s professed aims regarding (1) equality and diversity and (2) climate change.’ The student newspaper Cherwell reported that the University failed to release vetting documents related to Schwarzman’s donation. In the face of these objections, Oxford instead accepted two further uplifts – £25m in 2022 and £10m in 2023 – to an initial donation of £150m.
Schwarzman is unusually involved in the projects funded by his philanthropy. In 2019, The Yale Daily News reported that, after receiving a list of projects that Yale wanted to fund, Schwarzman responded: ‘I don’t give a shit about this list.’ Instead, the Schwarzman Center at Yale is a student space, personally significant to the philanthropist, who described himself as a lonely first-year student. Philanthropy is often courted by university heads: The Guardian reported that Schwarzman was approached by former vice-chancellor Louise Richardson, although Richardson herself was apparently ‘surprised’ by the ambitions of Schwarzman’s proposal.
Schwarzman’s vision for Oxford, a city where he has never lived, was quite different to his plans for Yale. In the same The Guardian article from 2019, Schwarzman praised ‘the fit between what Oxford is doing and the values that they have been part of developing for western civilisation and the need to apply those core values to this rapidly growing area of technology.’ The humanities emerge, in Schwarzman’s conception, as ‘core values’ for ‘western civilisation’, urgently needed in the face of an AI boom that did in fact materialise in the years following his donation.
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Upon setting foot in the Schwarzman Centre, a specific vision of the humanities starts to crystallise under its prismatic roof. In one sense, the humanities are rendered spectacle through impressive architecture, innovative auditoriums and swirling screens of digital art. And in another, the humanities are commodified, their donor’s name carved above the door, and whose likeness greets all newcomers – the portrait of Schwarzman is hung at such a height that his gaze meets the eyes of passersby. The Centre’s physical existence reveals how questions of ideology shape student and staff experiences. It lays out a version of the humanities with three core elements: the increasing role of technology in the humanities; entertainment framed as ‘public engagement’; and interdisciplinarity as an excuse for shrinkage. The building mostly brings together existing faculties under one roof, but the addition of the Institute for Ethics in AI sheds light on a deeper priority. If the humanities are to be fundable, they must become useful to the world’s elites, anticipating the problems of technologies that the wealthy insist on advancing.
The creation of a dedicated Institute for Ethics in AI suggests that the humanities have a responsibility to be the moral conscience of the sciences. The Institute, nevertheless, has faced controversy, and it was widely reported that the former director of the Institute resigned in September 2025, following a lengthy investigation into allegations of sexual harassment. It could even be argued that ‘ethics in AI’ represents a fundamental contradiction in terms – with concerns ranging from the inherent plagiarism of large language models to the environmental harms associated with data centres.
Despite this rocky beginning, the creation of the Institute points to a techno-futurist vision of the humanities. The expansion of technology is often presented as a necessary strategy to solve today’s problems and build a better future. Variations on the theme tend to describe AI as being akin to Pandora’s Box: once unleashed, it is pointless to try and stop it. Instead, we must learn to live with it, with any downsides simply ‘necessary evils’ for the betterment of humankind. Some might argue that survival, for the humanities, entails accepting AI as an inevitable future, and pivoting research either to service or co-opt this techno-futurist attitude.
Another survival strategy for the humanities is to maximise their revenue. As such, the Schwarzman Centre’s website prioritises its role as events venue, leading with upcoming entertainment rather than research, and it appears their chosen model requires revenue alone to sustain the costs of future programming. This would explain the drive for ticket sales, with events promoted on seemingly every display screen in the building. So far, they have attracted impressive names – I overheard more than one student express their excitement upon hearing Cynthia Erivo was in the building.
Yet the humanities lose some of their potential when tasked with creating entertainment for a paying public. The critical thinking skills honed by the field – apparently desired for solving AI’s problems – fade into the background. By emptying the humanities of their critical potential, and focusing on pleasing a public, a hollow version of the humanities comes into view.
As the humanities become more palatable, they also shrink in size and become easier to digest. The Centre is now home to seven faculties under one roof, faculties that each had their own building until very recently. And while for some the new facilities are an upgrade – certainly, many students and staff enjoyed the climate control of the Passivhaus-certified building during this year’s record heatwaves – this is not without its problems. It reflects a growing tendency to centralise humanities departments, especially following large donations. The University of Warwick’s new Faculty of Arts opened in autumn 2021, and also decided to merge together a number of existing departments.
The decision to house faculties and departments together can encourage collaboration, interdisciplinarity or even playful ‘indisciplinarity’, challenging the structures that separate and isolate the humanities from each other. This desire for greater freedom can come with its own risks, however; open-mindedness can be reduced to a buzzword on funding applications, or used as an excuse to shrink the physical footprint of the humanities on campuses. It’s hard to imagine a university striving to have a single ‘sciences’ building: Oxford’s ‘Life and Mind’ building opened in September 2025, like the Schwarzman, but with a much more specific focus on biology and psychology.
Furthermore, some of the legitimate criticisms that can be levelled at the humanities, especially at more traditional institutions such as Oxford – like biased canons and outdated curricula – are hardly helped by these changes. Structural issues are exacerbated by limited space, as well as the obligation to share finite resources and funding with an ever-larger pool of researchers. Space is at a premium in the Centre, with the faculties effectively paying rent to the university for their place in the building.
The challenge of sharing teaching rooms across seven faculties has led to capacity issues and other headaches. At least two administrators have resigned in the Centre’s first year. What Hakan Topal calls ‘administrification’ – or growing numbers of non-academic staff – demonstrates the increasing admin required to make the contemporary university function, while teaching is outsourced to increasingly precarious workers. In 2024, The Guardian reported that Oxford relied on young academics on fixed-term contracts to fulfil a substantial amount of undergraduate teaching.
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What alternatives might there be to Schwarzman’s vision of the humanities? Is there a way to reject the co-option of the humanities into the service of technology, profit and optimisation? The picture might be bleak, but even in the Schwarzman Centre itself, there are signs of ideas worth pursuing. Public engagement that democratises the university, without a profit-driven model or motive, would be a way to open up a city like Oxford, where residents are shut out from the vast majority of university-owned buildings in the city centre. Interdisciplinarity and cross-subject collaboration challenge the colonial foundations of universities, and the drive to divide and classify kinds of knowledge; some problems require all of us to put our heads together. However, this drive for exchange should create more possibility and abundance, rather than forcing us to compete for increasingly limited funding and scarce resources.
An alternative model for the future of the humanities lies outside the Schwarzman Centre, outside the walls of any university. In 2024, student encampments were established in solidarity with Palestine on university campuses across the world. In Oxford, two encampments were founded: first outside the Museum of Natural History, and then on the lawns of the Radcliffe Camera. University figures generally condemned the encampments, accusing them of intimidation, and activists were vilified by the press. Only recently, it emerged that a number of British universities paid a private security company, Horus, to ‘spy’ on pro-Palestine students, as reported by Al Jazeera.
Despite the hostile institutional response, the encampments were – and remain – a model for thinking about how the humanities might move beyond the walls of the university. The Oxford encampments, like many other student camps, organised a daily programme of public events, ranging from workshops and teach-outs to cultural events and community potlucks. A teach-out, as the name suggests, brings the teaching that typically takes place in the classroom into a more public space. Students and city residents alike contributed ideas and readings from geography, history, politics, the visual arts, and literature, as well as perspectives from across the Arab world and every continent.
The rigid structures of universities can risk restricting diversity of thought. They couldn’t handle, in any meaningful way, what the encampment was trying to teach them, and this is one reason why it was shut down. The encampment was a lesson and model in bringing together those who wish to support and learn from each other. It traversed disciplinary boundaries and engaged wider audiences by leaving the university, and occupying public space. It is a model for the humanities that goes beyond the marketisation of higher education, beyond a reliance on billionaire philanthropy. After all, the university is not the only place where knowledge can be produced in response to the crises that face us. The teach-out provides a model for the kind of teaching and learning that could be possible in the future, in a world where humanities have a home both in the university and beyond it.
And if the Schwarzman Centre risks co-opting the humanities into a techno-futurist dream, who’s to say that such facilities cannot be co-opted in turn? Higher education is a sector in crisis, marked by funding cuts, but also by apathy and nihilism. A 2025 UCU ballot voted in favour of strike action over pay stagnation and job cuts, but lacked the voter turnout to proceed. In future, if the sector rallies around the prospect of industrial action, the Centre could provide a base. Oxford has a challenging relationship with strike action, because only university-level teaching (in departments or faculties) is protected by the union – any teaching in one of Oxford’s constituent colleges is treated as independent from that collective agreement, and therefore cannot technically be subject to a strike. During previous strikes, pickets were dispersed throughout the city at different faculty locations, with colleagues often picketing a different faculty to their own to create strength in numbers.
But, as one lecturer mentioned to me, the attempt to diminish the scale of the humanities might make strike action more powerful. All seven faculties – scattered across the city centre – now share one home. This time, the picket could be taken to the Schwarzman Centre, across all four floors. Strike action might meaningfully halt teaching, enough to strengthen the union’s negotiating position. It is possible to subvert the Centre, to make it a genuine home for the humanities in all its strange and radical forms. A different kind of future shimmers on the horizon, in reach if we want it.
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Georgie Fooks writes about literature and culture, and translates from Spanish. Her work has appeared in World Poetry Review, Asymptote, Hopscotch and The Oxonian Review. She has recently completed a PhD in Latin American literature.
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