Linacre College will become Thao College, named after Nguyen Thi Phuong
Thao, a budget airline magnate who is Vietnam’s first self-made female
billionaire.
The graduate college, which was founded in 1962, is currently named after
the distinguished humanist and physician Thomas Linacre, who was born in
Canterbury in the mid-fifteenth century.
The college was named after Linacre to commemorate him as “an
outstanding Renaissance figure” whose accomplishments “established him as
one of the great scholars of his time”.
Another reason for the college to take Linacre’s name was because it hoped
to reflect his “breadth of learning in its own multi-disciplinary purpose and
ideals”.
But the college announced this week that it would change its name in
exchange for a “landmark gift” of £155 million from Ms Thao’s company,
Sovico Group.
Maria Kawthar Daouda, a lecturer in French literature at Oxford University,
said that college names should not be altered simply because “a major gift
has been made”.
Ms Thao was born in 1970 in Hanoi, north Vietnam. She began to build her
fortune at age 21 while studying at Plekhanov Russian University of
Economics in Moscow, where she began importing fax machines, plastic and
rubber into the then Soviet Union.
In 2007, she launched VietJet Air as the first privately run low-cost airline in
Vietnam which became known as the “bikini airline” after it ran an
advertising campaign featuring bikini-clad flight attendants.
“I believe that Oxford is the right place to make my long-time desire to
contribute to humanity through education, training and research come true,”
she said.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...e-billionaire/