University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England, a federation of colleges and departments governed as one institution. There is no clear date of foundation, but teaching existed at Oxford in some form in 1096, and the university describes itself as the oldest in the English-speaking world.¹ Its Future of Humanity Institute was closed on 16 April 2024 after nearly two decades as the academic base of Nick Bostrom's work on existential risk.² Stephen I. Abrams, director of the university's parapsychology laboratory, prepared a 1965 review of ESP research for the Central Intelligence Agency under Project ULTRA after technical project officers contacted him.³ The university also appears in the record through Rhodes Scholarships, the Oxford education of Ghislaine Maxwell, a group of doctoral students and staff tied to effective altruism, and a 2025 murder case in California.

Rhodes Scholarships and the Round Table group

The will of Cecil Rhodes, published after his death in 1902, set aside part of his estate for scholarships at Oxford under a section headed "The Scholarships at Oxford." The preamble to that section states that "the education of young Colonists at one of the Universities in the United Kingdom is of great advantage to them for giving breadth to their views," and links the scheme to "the retention of the unity of the Empire."⁴ Notes printed with the will quote Rhodes speaking to Iwan-Müller about the scholarships: "a very poor man can never get the full value of an Oxford training."⁴ The will also gave £100,000 to Oriel College, Oxford, Rhodes's old college.⁴ By a codicil executed in South Africa, Rhodes created fifteen scholarships at Oxford for students of German birth, five in each of the first three years after his death, worth 250 pounds a year for three years and to be nominated by the German Emperor, on the stated ground that a good understanding between England, Germany and the United States of America would secure the peace of the world.⁴ The will directed that elections regard the candidate's literary and scholastic attainments, his fondness for and success in manly outdoor sports, his qualities of manhood, truth, courage, devotion to duty and sympathy for the protection of the weak, and his exhibition during school days of moral force of character and of instincts to lead.⁴ The Rhodes Trust supports exceptional students worldwide with Oxford scholarships.⁵

The historian Carroll Quigley wrote in Tragedy and Hope (1966) that Rhodes left part of his fortune to found the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford in order to spread what Quigley called the English ruling class tradition throughout the English-speaking world, as John Ruskin had wanted.⁶ Quigley placed the origin of the scheme in a circle of Ruskin's disciples at Oxford, among them Alfred Milner, Arnold Toynbee, George Parkin and Philip Lyttelton Gell. On February 5, 1891, according to Quigley, Rhodes and the journalist William T. Stead organized a secret society with Milner and Reginald Brett on its executive committee, and an outer circle known as the Association of Helpers, which Milner later organized as the Round Table (Milner group).⁶ Quigley wrote that Milner was the chief Rhodes Trustee and that Parkin became Organizing Secretary of the Rhodes Trust after 1902.⁶

Quigley wrote that Milner, as governor-general and high commissioner of South Africa from 1897 to 1905, recruited young men chiefly from Oxford and from Toynbee Hall, known in South Africa as Milner's Kindergarten until 1910. He wrote that in 1909 to 1913 they organized semi-secret Round Table Groups in the chief British dependencies and the United States, and that the group's quarterly, The Round Table, was founded in 1910 and largely supported by Abe Bailey's money.⁶ In 1919, according to Quigley, the group founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs, whose chief financial supporters were Bailey and the Astor family, owners of The Times.⁶

Rhodes Scholars include Dean Rusk, who took an A.B. in political science at Davidson College in 1931 and then entered St. John's College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship; he was United States Secretary of State from January 21, 1961 to January 20, 1969.⁷ Lincoln Gordon received a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1936, joined the Harvard faculty and served as ambassador to Brazil.⁸ Stansfield Turner entered Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, studied at Exeter College, took a master's degree in philosophy, politics and economics, and was appointed Director of Central Intelligence by Jimmy Carter in 1977.⁹ Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar from 1968, studied at Oxford for two years.¹⁰ On June 8, 1994, at the Sheldonian Theatre, he received a Doctorate in Civil Law by diploma and an honorary fellowship from his college, and told the assembly that "once again at Oxford I was another Yank a half step behind."¹¹ Cory Booker attended The Queen's College as a Rhodes Scholar, received a graduate degree in 1994 and went on to Yale Law School.¹² Jim Himes took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he continued his studies of Latin America with research in El Salvador, and began his career at Goldman Sachs.¹³ James D. Theberge, later ambassador to Nicaragua, took an M.A. at Oxford in 1960 and was an instructor of economics there from 1969 to 1970.¹⁴

Ghislaine Maxwell and the Maxwell companies

Robert Maxwell first appears in Oxford as a tenant. The city had bought Headington Hill Hall in 1953, and in 1959 he tendered to rent the whole site from Oxford City Council for 2,400 pounds a year, using it first for Pergamon Press business and later as the family home, with Pergamon moving into the old stables.¹⁵ A 1973 advertisement in the Oxford Times recruiting staff for Headington Hill Hall read "Too good to be true? Not if you join one of the Maxwell group of companies."¹⁶ In early 1982 he rescued Oxford United, then at Headington, from bankruptcy (The Times of January 8, 1982 had reported the club "a mere two weeks away from bankruptcy"), owned the club for ten years, was its chairman until May 1987 and passed it to his son Kevin Maxwell.¹⁶ When Oxford Polytechnic was to become a university he offered 1 million pounds if it would be named Oxford Maxwell University; it declined and became Oxford Brookes University in 1992, which later took the lease of his former home.¹⁶ Balliol College received a reported 60,000 pounds from him in the 1960s, his name (Ian Robert Maxwell) appears among the benefactors in the college's Bidding Prayer, and the college has a Robert Maxwell Fellowship in Politics; his sons Philip and Kevin studied at Balliol and his wife Elisabeth Maxwell took an Oxford doctorate.¹⁷

Ghislaine Maxwell was educated at Marlborough College and at Balliol College, Oxford.¹⁸ The 1983 Balliol College Record places her at the college in the early 1980s, a few years after Balliol began admitting women in 1979, and she graduated in 1985 in history and modern languages.¹⁷ The journalist Michael Crick, who tutored her before admission, said "her father was extremely keen for her to go to Oxford because several of her siblings had already gone to Oxford." The photographer Dafydd Jones said that "I knew of male students who everyone said that they got in because their fathers donated," and that he could not say whether that was how she was admitted.¹⁷ Her public-facing roles in her father's business empire included work connected to Oxford United and to the newspaper The European.¹⁸

Investigators from the Department of Trade and Industry who examined Maxwell's management of Pergamon in 1971 reported that he was not in their opinion a person who could be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company; he regained Pergamon in 1974 with borrowed money, sat as Labour member of Parliament from 1964 to 1970, and rented Headington Hill Hall from the city council, which he called the best council house in the country.¹⁹ At his death in 1991 the empire carried about 2 billion pounds of debt and around 460 million pounds had been taken from employee pension funds.¹⁹

The university's Global Capitalism Project issued a case study in February 2023 on Robert Maxwell, titled "Robert Maxwell's Expectations Gap: Regulation and Reputation in the British Communications Industry, 1981-91." The case study states that Goldman Sachs sold 25 million shares in Mirror Group Newspapers on Maxwell's instruction, shares that were clearly marked as owned by the pension fund, and that the pension scheme lost £55 million. It says the bank "committed stock fraud on Maxwell's instruction" and quotes the Department of Trade and Industry as saying later that Goldman Sachs "bear a substantial responsibility in respect of the manipulation that occurred in the market."¹⁹

Parapsychology in the Oxford laboratory

The university's connection to the CIA's psi research runs most directly through Abrams, director of the university's parapsychology laboratory in the Department of Biometry. In a 1977 article in Studies in Intelligence, Kenneth A. Kress wrote that one of the earliest US Government parapsychology investigations was prompted when the chief of the Office of Technical Service, then the Technical Services Division, became interested in claims of ESP. Technical project officers contacted Abrams, who under the auspices of Project ULTRA prepared a review article which, in Kress's words, claimed ESP was demonstrated but not understood or controllable. Kress wrote that the report was read with interest but produced no further action for another decade.³

Kress cited the review as Abrams's "Extrasensory Perception," a draft report dated December 14, 1965.²⁰ Kress opened his account with the 1952 Pentagon lecture given by Andrija Puharich, citing Puharich's paper "On the Possible Usefulness of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological Warfare."³

A typescript article titled "The World of the Supra-Sensory," held in the CIA Reading Room and catalogued under February 10, 1966, describes a grant-supported program at Oxford. Its author describes himself as a behavior scientist and says he does not intend to take a side on the existence of ESP.²¹ The article states that Oxford, through grants, supported the research of "a proverbial Yank at Oxford," that Abrams worked in the Biometry Department from 1960 to 1963, and that his interests were ESP and hypnosis. It says he worked with Mr. Shackleton, described as a well known English sensitive, on the transmission of drawings from an artist to a subject in another room, and that the data could not be analyzed by any valid or reliable method. It records that Abrams established good contact with Professor Vasiliev and visited Moscow and Leningrad to lecture. The same article names the Oxford biologist Alister Hardy and the Oxford philosopher H. H. Price among the prominent names in other fields who took part in ESP studies.²¹

Abrams's own papers, held by the Wellcome Collection as the Stephen Abrams (1938-2012) archive, give a fuller chronology. He began corresponding with Carl Jung in 1957 on synchronicity, and the correspondence continued until Jung's death in 1961. He moved to England in 1960 to work on an ESP doctoral thesis at Oxford and headed the university's parapsychology laboratory in the Department of Biometry. In 1961 he visited Duke University for LSD experiments with J. B. Rhine, and in 1962 he visited the Soviet Union. Oxford closed the Parapsychology Laboratory in 1964, and he was never awarded a doctorate.²² A typed letter signed by Jung to Abrams, dated October 21, 1957, was later sold at auction by Christie's.²³ Jung's letters to him of June 28, 1957, October 21, 1957 and March 5, 1959 are listed in Parapsychology Abstracts International, reproduced in a CIA Reading Room file, under the name Stephen J. Abrams.²⁴

Hardy appears in a compilation of parapsychology research submitted by Captain Edgar Mitchell, USN, as "Sir Alister Hardy, F.R.S., Biologist and Founder-Director of the Religious Experience Unit at Manchester College, Oxford," who "earned his several degrees at Oxford University." The compilation states that he returned to Oxford in 1945 as Linacre Professor of Zoology, that he had long been interested in parapsychological phenomena and that he was a past president of the Society for Psychical Research.²⁵ The Society's list of presidents shows Hardy for 1965 to 1969, Price (Henry Habberley Price, philosopher) for 1939 to 1941 and 1960 to 1961, E. R. Dodds (Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford) for 1960 to 1963, the philosopher F. C. S. Schiller for 1914, Gilbert Murray for 1915 to 1916 and 1952, and the psychologist William McDougall for 1920 to 1921.²⁶

A CIA report on government-sponsored research in psychoenergetics, dated February 1989, gives a different chronology. It states that the CIA's work began in 1961, when the Office of Technical Service, then the Technical Services Division, became interested in ESP claims. It says that under the auspices of Project ULTRA, Abrams, then described as director of the parapsychological laboratory at Oxford University, reviewed the research and prepared an article, after which the field lay dormant at the CIA for ten years.²⁷

In a thesis submitted to the Defense Intelligence College in November 1992, Captain Michael E. Zarbo of the US Army states that the Office of Technical Service commissioned the director of the parapsychological laboratory at Oxford University to review the validity of ESP. The thesis is titled "Remote Viewing: Parapsychological Potential for Intelligence Collection?"²⁸

The Parapsychological Association, formed in 1957, elected a founding council of seven. Its councilmen included W. G. Roll of Oxford University, Karlis Osis and Margaret Anderson. Gertrude Schmeidler was its vice-president.²⁹

Effective altruism, the Future of Humanity Institute and the Global Priorities Institute

The Future of Humanity Institute was founded in 2005 by Bostrom, and it sat within the university's Faculty of Philosophy and the Oxford Martin School. Bostrom held an Oxford professorship from 2008 to 2024, and he later founded the Macrostrategy Research Initiative.³⁰ The institute's website states that it closed on 16 April 2024, and that research in the fields where it was active may continue elsewhere within the university and in many external organizations that have sprung up.² The Oxford Student reported that the Faculty of Philosophy shut the institute down on April 16. Bostrom, in an emailed statement to The Guardian quoted in that report, said there had been "a death by bureaucracy." Anders Sandberg, a former senior research fellow, said the institute had been "affected by a gradual suffocation by Faculty bureaucracy."³¹ The institute's own account of the closure stated that the Faculty of Philosophy imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring in 2020 and decided not to renew staff contracts in late 2023. The institute received 1 million pounds from Musk in 2015 for research on the threat of artificial intelligence, and its largest team, the Governance of AI Program, became an independent organization in 2021. An Oxford spokesperson said the decision to close the institute followed consideration of the best structures for the university's academic research, and that researchers elsewhere in the university were likely to continue its work.³¹ A retrospective in Asterisk covers the institute's 2005 founding, its nineteen-year run, the 2020 fundraising and hiring freeze, the late-2023 contract decision and the April 16, 2024 closure statement.³²

Elon Musk funded AI-safety work at the institute, and Jaan Tallinn gave to it as one of its donors.

The Centre for Effective Altruism appears in the same record. The charity's trustees' report for the year to June 30, 2021 says it is affiliated with both the Future of Humanity Institute and the Global Priorities Institute of the university, and states that it shares office space with them. The same report records that both institutes' funds held by the charity were in deficit after their move to Trajan House.³³ The Companies House register lists Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) under company number 07962181.³⁴ The Charity Commission for England and Wales published an inquiry into Effective Ventures Foundation UK on May 22, 2024.³⁵

Open Philanthropy recommended a gift of 20,000 pounds, 26,086 dollars at the conversion used, to the university "to support the research of the Mathematical Ecology Research Group and the research costs of Andrew Snyder-Beattie," who had recently served as the institute's Director of Research.³⁶ Other archived Open Philanthropy grant records list £323,646 (429,769 dollars at the conversion used) to the university for research on the global politics of advanced artificial intelligence, $41,800 to the university for animal welfare research, £5,217 (6,683 dollars at the conversion used) to the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics for a workshop on animal sentience, £14,500 (about 18,309 dollars) to the Oxford AI Safety Initiative for access fees on a shared office space in Oxford, and $35,000 to the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative to support research at the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative.³⁷

Effective Ventures acquired Wytham Abbey, a manor house near Oxford, in 2022, and Civil Society published a story on April 3, 2024 under the headline "Crypto-backed charity plans closure and £17m Oxford property sale."³⁸

The Giving What We Can pledge society was launched at Oxford in November 2009 by Toby Ord, with William MacAskill. Ord was a senior research fellow at the institute, and wrote The Precipice in 2020.³⁹ MacAskill is an associate professor at the university and one of the originators of effective altruism. Derek Parfit was a fellow of All Souls College, and his work on future generations is cited as foundational by Bostrom, Ord and MacAskill.

Other figures with Oxford records include Julian Savulescu, who held the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics and founded the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and who trained under Peter Singer and Parfit.⁴⁰ Singer took a BPhil at Oxford in 1971 under R. M. Hare.⁴¹ Amanda Askell took a BPhil in philosophy at Oxford in 2011 before her doctorate at New York University.⁴² Carla Cremer appears among the alumni of the Human Information Processing Lab, which lists her among its PhD students and research assistants.⁴³ Max More read philosophy, politics and economics at St Anne's College, Oxford, graduating in 1987.⁴⁴ Jason Matheny worked for the university before joining the intelligence community. Helen Toner was a research affiliate of the Center for the Governance of AI at the university.

Maximilian Snyder and the Zizian case

Maximilian Snyder studied philosophy and computer science at the university from 2020 to 2024.⁴⁵ Prosecutors in Solano County, California charged him with the January 17, 2025 murder of Curtis Lind, an 82-year-old landlord in Vallejo. They alleged the killing was carried out to stop Lind testifying against other members of the Zizian group.⁴⁶ Open Vallejo reported on June 20, 2025 that a federal grand jury indicted the group's namesake with Vallejo ties.⁴⁷

Intelligence and Cold War figures

Frederick A. Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, was an Oxford scientist who became Winston Churchill's chief science adviser in the years before the Second World War. According to Seymour Hersh's account in The Samson Option, Lindemann came to know Ernst David Bergmann and Chaim Weizmann during this period.⁴⁸

Lincoln Gordon, the Rhodes Scholar, was United States ambassador to Brazil in 1964. A top secret telegram from Gordon to the State Department, dated March 28, 1964, is printed in the Foreign Relations of the United States series.⁴⁹ The same day McGeorge Bundy sent a telegram to Lyndon B. Johnson, who was then in Texas.⁵⁰ The National Security Archive's Electronic Briefing Book No. 118 reproduces a top secret cable from Gordon dated March 29, 1964.⁵¹ A State Department telegram to the embassy in Brazil, drafted and approved by Dean Rusk, is dated March 30, 1964.⁵² In Thy Will Be Done, Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett record Gordon's sworn denial that the American Embassy or he personally played any part in the 1964 military coup in Brazil.⁵³

Richard Aldrich wrote in a 1997 article that a 1962 Oxford thesis by F. X. Rebattet confirmed that most funds of the American Committee on United Europe originated with the CIA.⁵⁴ David Barnby, in a self-published account, cites the same thesis, titled "The European Movement 1945-1953," as held in the Bodleian Library, and gives the committee's membership as 380 in 1950.⁵⁵ The committee's officers include Allen Dulles, its vice-chairman, and Max Ascoli is listed among its media figures.

Michael Gibson, the author of the 1517 Fund blog, wrote in a July 22, 2018 post that he had dropped out of the university, where he was working toward a doctorate in philosophy, before MIT's Technology Review hired him as a writer. In the same post he describes interviewing with the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2006 after applying for a political analyst role.⁵⁶

Other alumni and dons

Margaret Thatcher studied chemistry at Oxford before qualifying as a barrister, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.⁵⁷ Benazir Bhutto was educated at Harvard and at Oxford, according to the BBC's report of her death in 2007.⁵⁸ Jed Rakoff took an M.Phil. at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1966 before a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1969.⁵⁹ Ian Smart was described in a 1982 volume's contributor note as educated at Oxford and Leeds universities.⁶⁰ Walt Rostow's memorial record lists professorships at Oxford, MIT and Columbia University.⁶¹ Frank Meyer joined the British Communist Party in 1931 as a student at Oxford, and became a senior editor of National Review in 1957.⁶² Jim Schnabel is linked to Lincoln College, Oxford in the context of a 1991 recording, a connection the college said in early 1992 no longer existed.