OXFORD college bursars have dismissed a report claiming they are getting a poor return on their investments.

The report was published on the Internet by Andrew Malcolm, who in 2002 hired a bookshop opposite Balliol College and covered the windows with posters criticising the university and its publishing arm Oxford University Press. In this week's Times Higher Education Supplement, he quoted a report from an unnamed accountant that the 36 colleges earned on average just 3.8 per cent on their combined assets of more than £1.6 billion at the start of 2002-03.

But Oxford college bursars have hit back, describing the report as "codswallop" because it recorded only income, not the value of capital assets such as property, which increased by 6.7 per cent last year. Frank Marshall, bursar of University College, said: "To analyse this in terms of income completely misses the point that, if you are going to say anything serious about investment, you have to look at total return - captal growth as well as income. Assessment of investment performance is never done like this."

Mr Malcolm's accountant claimed in his report that many colleges were trying to bail themselves out of investment blunders by building ever-bigger portfolios of lucrative student housing.