A great university boasts great brains. And great brains, one might have thought, could agree that the best way out of a funding crisis is to raise more funds. But it ain't necessarily so. Three years ago Oxford's Vice-Chancellor, John Hood, found that even though the university faced a shortfall of £6,000 per undergraduate per year, its colleges were loath to pool information on their alumni for a university appeal for fear that their own appeals might suffer.

Localism dies hard when its roots are 900 years old. But Dr Hood, a New Zealander and the first non-don to hold the post in those nine centuries, appears to have uprooted at least some of it. At a press conference yesterday to announce efforts to raise £1.25 billion for bursaries, professorships and capital projects across the university, he emphasised repeatedly that “all the colleges” were involved.

If so, £1.25 billion is realistic. In fact, nearly half that has been raised already, semi-secretly, since 2004. If the target is reached it will still look trivial next to Harvard's £36 billion endowment, and Oxford's intention to compete with the Ivy League on all fronts will still look fanciful. But fanciful is better than defeatist. When Dr Hood first made it clear that he felt it a duty to modernise Oxford, not just preserve it as an assemblage of medieval quads, his more militant critics argued that raising funds to compete as an international research powerhouse would jeopardise the one-to-one undergraduate tutorials that they held dear. Well, they were wrong. Without an endowment, Oxford cannot lure great brains. And without great brains it can't claim to be great.