“In Praise of Oxford’s Collegiate system”
This past week has been non-stop. But, as is so often the case at Oxford, I’ve met so many good people and seen so much positive work in progress, that I reach Sunday feeling more exhilarated than tired.
As I travelled between my various engagements, I was prompted to reflect on the complex, multi-layered nature of Oxford which makes all this possible. It’s an astonishing achievement when you think about it.
From its medieval origins, Oxford University has evolved to become a single insitution comprising countless moving parts. It has its colleges and faculties, its central administration, its research centres and laboratories, its museums and libraries, and all of these elements nonetheless share an identity and collective vision for the future.
One of the best ways we can see this shared vision in practice is in the work Oxford is doing on admissions. We recently saw advance numbers on the University’s admissions statistics for the academic year 2023-24. These statistics measure progress across a number of key criteria including ethnicity, gender, school type, Free School Meal students and regions of both socio-economic disadvantage and low progression to university.
The admissions stats for Colleges and Faculties slide up and down relative to one another with each year. But the important thing is that the progress is forwards, moving towards a goal in which Oxford’s domestic student intake more accurately reflects contemporary British society, with the same educational opportunity extended to all.
When this model of social mobility is brought into the College environment, it is very powerful. In 1st Week, for example, I attended a Freshers’ Formal at my own college of Somerville. Sitting to my left opposite each other were two students. One had gone to a state comprehensive, the other to Eton. By the end of the evening, they were getting on like a house on fire. Where else could we see the arbitrary divisions of socio-economic factors collapsed so swiftly and with such lasting effect?
Our Senior Tutor at Somerville, Dr Steve Rayner, often says that this is the beauty of the college environment: if you’re a student from the north, you’ll meet more people from the south than ever at your college; if you’re from a private school, you’ll meet more people from state schools.
The melting pot analogy is fruitful in other ways. In a small college environment, sitting together in Hall or meeting people socially, we are invited to a meeting of minds that brings people together across disciplines and across generations. Our Professorial Fellow Steve Roberts tells the story of being at lunch once, where he was talking about how, in physics, they can build computer models of how molecules might move under various forces. His neighbour asked if you could use the same algorithm to model the way chickens move for animal welfare, and this conversation in passing led to a fifteen-year project with one of the biology fellows.
Such mixing is the very essence of the collegiate system and its hidden strength. It is the same model we see at scale when our colleges and faculties come together to solve a problem, and it is this enduring collaborative model which makes me so proud to be a part of this great University.