The Cambridge University library is innominate. It is the Library With No Name. Oxford’s Library is called the Bodleian, and Harvard’s the Widener, but Cambridge’s is known only as the University Library — and it feels forlorn. It wants a proper name, and though Anne Jarvis, the librarian, is being coy, it is suspected that she feels that the Bill and Melissa Gates Library has a good ring to it, as would the Warren Buffett Learning and Support Centre.

Yup, I’m afraid so. For all her reverence for the purest of learning, Ms Jarvis has admitted that she’d like to find a donor after whom to name her library. And, my dear, the fuss! Gill Evans, a professor of medieval theology, has protested that: “People get very angry about name changes ... one might set off for the university library one morning to find it turned into a branch of Tesco . . .” Cambridge should be so lucky.

Sir Terry Leahy’s company has deep pockets, and if it were to endow the library the dons on the Cam would not want for books. So, of course, the library should look for sponsors, and of course it should acknowledge their generosity with a renaming. Is the National Gallery diminished by its Sainsbury Wing, or Imperial College by its Anthony de Rothschild Lecture Theatre?

But academics can be particular over whose money to accept. The Said Business School in Oxford is superb, thanks in large part to a £23 million benefaction from Wafic Said. However, the benefaction was resisted by a vocal minority because Said had made his money from Saudi defence contracts. Yet Oxford has generally done well by taking controversial money. Balliol College (which boasts a Robert Maxwell Fellowship in Politics) was founded to expiate a sin (John Balliol’s kidnapping of the Bishop of Durham) while Christ Church was endowed with the wealth of 29 suppressed monasteries.

And name changes are hardly rare. The Oxford college Rewley House was renamed Kellogg College, while New Hall, Cambridge, has recently been renamed Murray Edwards College.

Obviously some proffered gifts should be treated sceptically — British American Tobacco, for example, is always trying to endow university professorships. But BAT’s real offence is that it offers such small sums of money, just a million or two, for its naming rights.

So if a respectable company or individual were to offer to endow Cambridge’s library, let the money be embraced, but nothing conceded for less than £50 million. Go for the big money, Ms Jarvis!

Terence Kealey is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham

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