Portal:University of Oxford

The University of Oxford portal

The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating university globally. It expanded rapidly from 1167, when Henry II prohibited English students from attending the University of Paris. When disputes erupted between students and the Oxford townspeople, some Oxford academics fled northeast to Cambridge, where they established the University of Cambridge in 1209. The two English ancient universities share many common features and are jointly referred to as Oxbridge.

The University of Oxford comprises 43 constituent colleges, consisting of 36 semi-autonomous colleges, four permanent private halls and three societies (colleges that are departments of the university, without their own royal charter). and a range of academic departments that are organised into four divisions. Each college is a self-governing institution within the university that controls its own membership and has its own internal structure and activities. All students are members of a college. Oxford does not have a main campus. Its buildings and facilities are scattered throughout the city centre and around the town. Undergraduate teaching at the university consists of lectures, small-group tutorials at the colleges and halls, seminars, laboratory work and tutorials provided by the central university faculties and departments. Postgraduate teaching is provided in a predominantly centralised fashion.

Oxford operates the Ashmolean Museum, the world's oldest university museum; Oxford University Press, the largest university press in the world; and the largest academic library system nationwide. In the fiscal year ending 31 July 2024, the university had a total consolidated income of £3.05 billion, of which £778.9 million was from research grants and contracts. In 2024, Oxford ranked first nationally for undergraduate education.

Oxford has educated a wide range of notable alumni, including 31 prime ministers of the United Kingdom and many heads of state and government around the world. As of October 2022,^[update] 73 Nobel Prize laureates, 4 Fields Medalists, and 6 Turing Award winners have matriculated, worked, or held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford. Its alumni have won 160 Olympic medals. Oxford is home to a number of scholarships, including the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the oldest international graduate scholarship programmes in the world. (Full article...)

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The alumni of Jesus College include two Prime Ministers (Harold Wilson of Britain (pictured) and Norman Manley of Jamaica), a Speaker of the House of Commons of England (Sir William Williams), a co-founder of Plaid Cymru (D. J. Williams) and a co-founder of the African National Congress (Pixley ka Isaka Seme). Politicians from Australia (Neal Blewett), New Zealand (Harold Rushworth), Sri Lanka (Lalith Athulathmudali) and the United States (Heather Wilson) also studied at the college. Lawyers include a Lord Chancellor (Lord Sankey) and a Law Lord (Lord du Parcq). Clergy include three Archbishops of Wales (A. G. Edwards, Glyn Simon and Gwilym Owen Williams). Celticists include Sir John Morris-Jones, and historians include David Powel, who published the first printed history of Wales in 1584. The list includes Angus Buchanan (who won the Victoria Cross) and T. E. Lawrence, better known as "Lawrence of Arabia." Record-breaking quadriplegic solo sailor Hilary Lister was a student, as were Magnus Magnusson (presenter of Mastermind), Welsh poet Gwyn Thomas and television weather presenters Kirsty McCabe and Siân Lloyd. (Full article...)

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Bill Clinton (born 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Born and raised in Arkansas, he studied at Georgetown University before earning a Rhodes Scholarship to attend University College, Oxford. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, before leaving for Yale Law School, where he met his future wife, Hillary Clinton, who has served as the United States Secretary of State since 2009. Clinton was elected president in 1992, and presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. After a failed health care reform attempt, Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, for the first time in forty years. Two years later, Clinton became the first member of the Democratic Party since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second full term as president. He successfully passed welfare reform and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, providing health coverage for millions of children. Later, he was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice in a scandal involving a White House intern, but was acquitted by the U.S. Senate and served his complete term of office. Clinton left office with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any U.S. president since World War II. Since then, he has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work. (more...)

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Wycliffe Hall is one of the Permanent Private Halls (PPHs) of the University of Oxford. Unlike the colleges, which are run by their Fellows, PPHs are run by an outside institution – in the case of Wycliffe Hall, the Church of England. Founded in 1877, it became a PPH in 1996. It provides theological training for candidates for ordained and lay ministry; it also admits other students to study theology. It is named after John Wycliffe, a 14th-century theologian, and its buildings are in North Oxford, on Banbury Road. It is rooted in the evangelical tradition of the Church of England, although it admits students from all Christian denominations. Its Victorian trust deed upholds the Thirty-Nine Articles, part of the English Reformation heritage of the Church of England, Since the 19th century the college has had close links with the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union and the Oxford Pastorate, two evangelical organisations working with Oxford students. Alumni include Donald Coggan (Archbishop of Canterbury), Tom Wright (Bishop of Durham), Nicky Gumbel (developer of the Alpha Course), and Wilbert Awdry (priest and creator of the Thomas the Tank stories). (Full article...)

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Credit: Godot13

The hall of Pembroke College (1848), designed by the architect John Hayward.

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Did you know

Articles from Wikipedia's "Did You Know" archives about the university and people associated with it:

... that John Weston (pictured) became a published poet after retiring from his post as Ambassador to the United Nations?
... that Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, having lost his position on the Historic Churches Preservation Trust (for which he denounced the Archbishop of Canterbury as having "held a pistol to my face while the Dean of Gloucester plunged his dagger into my back"), founded his own, more intransigent, committee, the Friends of Friendless Churches?
... that archaeologist Francis Turville-Petre, discoverer of Neanderthal remains in Israel, was portrayed in works by authors W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood?
... that the highly influential jurist Sir Matthew Hale once said that lawyers were "a barbarous set of people unfit for anything but their own trade"?
... that Richard Cordray, the first Director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion and carried the Olympic Torch in 1996?

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“

You think they would advertise this place, to let people know it was on the map.

”

— Laurel and Hardy, in A Chump at Oxford (1940)

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Credit: Dbmag9

The main quadrangle of Worcester College; on the left are the medieval buildings known as "the cottages", the most substantial surviving part of Gloucester College, Worcester's predecessor on the same site.

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