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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 world's second-oldest university in continuous operation. It grew rapidly from 1167, when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. After disputes between students and Oxford townsfolk in 1209, some academics fled north-east to Cambridge where they established what became the University of Cambridge. The two English ancient universities share many common features and are jointly referred to as Oxbridge.

The University of Oxford is made up of thirty-nine semi-autonomous constituent colleges, four permanent private halls, and a range of academic departments which are organised into four divisions. Each college is a self-governing institution within the university, controlling its own membership and having its own internal structure and activities. All students are members of a college.

It does not have a main campus, but its buildings and facilities are scattered throughout the city centre. Undergraduate teaching at Oxford consists of lectures, small-group tutorials at the colleges and halls, seminars, laboratory work and occasionally further 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 2023, the university had a total consolidated income of £2.92 billion, of which £789 million was from research grants and contracts.

Oxford has educated a wide range of notable alumni, including 30 prime ministers of the United Kingdom and many heads of state and government around the world. 73 Nobel Prize laureates, 4 Fields Medalists, and 6 Turing Award winners have matriculated, worked, or held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford, while its alumni have won 160 Olympic medals. Oxford is the home of numerous scholarships, including the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the oldest international graduate scholarship programmes. (Full article...)

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The Neda Agha-Soltan Graduate Scholarship is a scholarship for post-graduate philosophy students at The Queen's College (pictured), with preference given to students of Iranian citizenship or heritage. It was established in 2009 following the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian philosophy student, in the street protests that followed the disputed Iranian presidential election. The college received offers from two anonymous donors to establish a scholarship, followed by many individual donations from members of the public and former students of Queen's. The Iranian embassy in London told the college that the university was involved in a "politically motivated campaign... in sharp contract with its academic objectives". In response, The Times praised the scholarship, saying that the establishment of the scholarship was indeed politically motivated, "and admirably so", given the regime's reaction to her death and continuing problems in Iran. The college has denied that it took a political decision in establishing the scholarship, arguing that refusing the donations would itself have been a political act. Anonymous British diplomatic sources were reported as saying that the scholarship put "another nail into the coffin" of relations between Britain and Iran. (Full article...)

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Sir Adrian Boult (1889–1983) was an English conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family he followed musical studies at Christ Church, Oxford and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1924. When the British Broadcasting Corporation appointed him director of music in 1930, he established the BBC Symphony Orchestra and became its chief conductor. Forced to leave the BBC in 1950 on reaching retirement age, Boult took on the chief conductorship of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO). The orchestra had declined from its peak of the 1930s, but under his guidance its fortunes were revived. Although in the latter part of his career he worked with other orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and his former orchestra, the BBC Symphony, it was the LPO with which he was primarily associated, conducting it in concerts and recordings until 1978. Known for his championing of British music, he gave the first performance of Holst's The Planets, and introduced new works by, among others, Bliss, Britten, Delius, Tippett, Vaughan Williams and Walton. In his BBC years he introduced works by foreign composers, including Bartók, Berg, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Webern. As well as a series of recordings that have remained in the catalogue for three or four decades, Boult's legacy includes his influence on prominent conductors of later generations, including Colin Davis and Vernon Handley. (more...)

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St Hugh's College was established in 1886 as a college for women by Elizabeth Wordsworth, great-niece of the poet William Wordsworth. She used money inherited from her father, who had been Bishop of Lincoln, and named the college after St Hugh, a 13th-century Bishop of Lincoln. Men were first admitted in 1986. It is based in north Oxford, between Banbury Road on the east and Woodstock Road on the west, and has large grounds. There are about 370 undergraduates and 225 postgraduates; the college is able to house all undergraduates and many of the postgraduates in buildings on the main college site for the duration of their studies. Two large lawns are used by students all year round, and the gardens are also the venue for croquet and tennis. St Hugh's is the only Oxford college with its own basketball courts. Alumni include the politicians Barbara Castle and Theresa May, the Burmese activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, the suffragette Emily Davison and the child-prodigy mathematician Ruth Lawrence. The Principal, appointed in 2007, is the Scottish lawyer Elish Angiolini. (Full article...)

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Credit: Winky

A men's crew from Keble College training for Eights Week (the main inter-college rowing races). Rowing is a popular student sport at Oxford, even though most students will not have rowed before starting at Oxford.

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Did you know

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

... that Lord Nuffield rejected the first designs for the buildings of Nuffield College, Oxford (tower as later designed pictured) by the architect Austen Harrison, saying that they were "un-English"?
... that George West, the Lord Bishop of Rangoon 1935–54, became for two months the Bishop of Atlanta, Georgia, while the Japanese occupied Burma?
... that the financial endowment by Edmund Meyrick, a Welsh cleric and philanthropist who died in 1713, is still awarding scholarships to students at Jesus College three centuries later?
... that William Hayter was secretary of the UK delegation to the Potsdam Conference, later Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and then Warden of New College?
... that Lancelot Blackburne was thought to have spent time in the Caribbean as a buccaneer as a young man, and lived openly with his mistress whilst Archbishop of York?

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Selected quotation

“

The clever men at Oxford
Know all that there is to be knowed.
But they none of them know one half as much
As intelligent Mr Toad!

”

— Kenneth Grahame, in The Wind in the Willows

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Selected panorama

Credit: David Iliff

A 360-degree view of the main quadrangle of Keble College. Designed by the 19th-century architect William Butterfield, the buildings have attracted considerable praise and criticism for their use of bricks in various colours and patterns, in contrast to the older stone-clad colleges elsewhere in the city.

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