Description
When the Syrian businessman and philanthropist Wafic Rida Saïd first heard in 1992 that Oxford University needed a benefactor to build a new business school, he stepped forward with an offer of £20 million. Little did he realise how hard it would be to give that money away, or that the project would be hampered by a series of setbacks, not least the rejection four years later by the University's ruling body, Congregation, of the first site planned for the School. The road was longer and harder than anyone could have imagined and, whenever Saïd and his trustees triumphed over one obstacle, another seemed to rise up in its place.
Yet, supported by the University's Chancellors, Lord Jenkins and Lord Patten, and successive Vice-Chancellors, Saïd and his trustees never gave up battling the difficulties - from anti-business dons to apparently non-existent sites, from heritage bodies to eco-warriors who at one point occupied trees and buried themselves underground on the eventual site.
Saïd comes from a philanthropic family where education was paramount. His father founded the first university in Syria. Thanks to Saïd's determination, two award-winning buildings of distinction now stand on what was previously an ugly and unpromising patch of land opposite Oxford station.
This book tells the tortuous but ultimately successful story of the study of business at Oxford University from its beginnings in 1965, when the Oxford Centre for Management Studies - later Templeton College - was established. Since its first building was officially opened in 2002, the Saïd Business School has provided growing numbers of students with a great and ancient university's take on modern business around the world. Today the Saïd Business School is acknowledged as a world-class centre of excellence for moulding and inspiring business men and women of the future.
ISBN: 9781781253731
