Your article on the transatlantic "endowment gap" surely misses the point. Most of the heavily endowed US universities mentioned are 19th-century private institutions that live or die by the success of their fundraising. In contrast, UK universities (with one dubious exception) are almost entirely publicly funded and have tended not to indulge in the money-grabbing endowment/alumnus culture until very recently. So we have over a century worth of eleemosynary endeavours to catch up on before we can emulate our more advanced transatlantic colleagues.
Denis Murphy
University of Glamorgan