A (very) brief history of Oxford Uni!!

hi everyone my name is matt williams i'm the access fellow here at jesus college the university of oxford i'm going to give you a brief history of the city and the university now it's going to have to be very brief because the university is about 900 years old there's some evidence of undergraduate education going back to 1096 making it not quite the oldest university in continuous operation in the world that title is held by the university of bologna in northern italy but it is the oldest university in the english-speaking world so old in fact that it's been educating undergraduates since before the time they were even human beings on the islands of new zealand so before the maori set foot on new zealand oxford university has been partaking in university education and some things of course have transformed over that 900 years but some aspects are actually quite similar to the founding and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to romp my way through this long complicated history i'm not going to be ducking some of the difficult matters some of them may be more embarrassing stories but hopefully it'll give you a bit of a better sense of what our present at the university is and what our future may entail okay so an important place to start i guess is to move away from jesus college and actually go back to the earliest founding college which is usually credited although there's some dispute uh to this college which is university college now first question might be why are there even colleges why is the university of oxford split into 39 colleges and six what are known as private halls well the colleges are a little bit like states of the united states of america they are semi-autonomous entities autonomous in the sense that they govern themselves they make their own policies they admit their own students but they're also under the rubric of the university of oxford and the university is the one that administers the degrees and and organizes exams and lectures and all the rest of it so there's a relationship a little bit like between the federal government and the us and the independent states that comprise it and similar to the us through time little communities have been tacked on to the larger entity so just as the states of hawaii and alaska joined the united states of america in the mid 20th century so colleges have been joining the university of oxford through time and the oldest dates back to the 1200s and that's this one university college so there was teaching prior to that typically done in smaller halls colleges emerged in about the 13th century the most recent college which i'll talk about a little bit later was actually founded in 2020 so colleges are being added all the time anyway so let's have a have a look inside uh unit uh so you can have it have a look now why was oxford founded why where does it even come from well as with lots of things in medieval english history part of the origin story is to do with a war with france in those days the kings of england claimed dominion over parts of france so they felt that they were kings of france as well as kings of england and during one of the perennial spats between our continental neighbors the english king henry ii got particularly fed up with france and he forbade people from going to france and therefore that meant that scholars wishing to attend the then most prestigious university in the continent the university of paris were incapable of doing so and so they needed to find somewhere else to do their studies those were typically studies of theology religion and for about 700 or so years that was the dominant function of the university of oxford was to train theologians and religious leaders and so without somewhere to go in the continent the scholars decided well we're not going to stick around in london because london is a bit dangerous and a bit dirty so we'll go to a little city to the north west of london a bit cleaner a little bit further out it was called oxford because it was a place on the river thames where the oxen could forward the river in other words where cattle could be could be easily transported across the river because it's quite a narrow sort of choke point in the river thames the same river that ends up in london and so the scholars ended up there so this was a city before it was a university so there was already city folk there was already at city walls it was relatively well established and this led to some tension between the city folk and the students who had various different privileges indeed the students were actually subject to different laws which really upset some of the townsfolk to the extent that there was occasionally running battles between the lots of them and for some of the scholars this was just intolerable they couldn't take it and they ran off to found a new university where there were no city people and that became the university of cambridge so cambridge was founded by oxford academics and students that basically got fed up of oxford and founded a university where there was no uh no city now the development of the university from this initial foundation from this sort of stat with france from the sort of small cluster of scholars coming together exploded as a result of plague as a result of the black death and this college new college has an important part to play in that particular story uh because despite its name it's not new by modern terms but it was new at the time in the 1300s when it was founded and there was a great need for new theological education because so many priests and vicars were dying as a result of administering the last rites and spreading the word of god to people who were dying of plague and so there was a need to massively expand the university so the black death sadly has an important part to play in the story and we know this is important for this particular college new college because you can see here the original city walls so these are the best preserved parts of the oxford city walls that are actually in the grounds of new college and if you try trace them all the way along you can see here next to the new college bell tower there's a little pub you might not quite be able to make it out but there's a pub in in the midst of these buildings here called the turf tavern and the turf table is very very old it's a 13th 14th century uh hostile rape and the pub within the last decade tried to build a little sort of permanent structure in its gardens to keep the rain off the customers heads and they dug down just a little way and they found quite a lot of human skull fragments and basically what had happened after the archaeologists and the police had done some investigation they worked out that it was bodies that were being chucked over the city walls during the plague um so big grim but you know you can't get away from these sorts of stories in medieval england uh new college perhaps more recently is quite well known uh for its starring role in various films so you might recognize these cloisters from harry potter and the goblet of fire it was also used for the mamma mia 2 film in fact when they were filming mamma mia they played i kissed the teacher over and over to the extent that the students and fellows of the college got really fed up of abba and i think abba's now probably banned from new college forever anyway so that was the the expansion of the university was in part precipitated by by plague now one thing that i've already mentioned is that a key early theme of the university of oxford was religious education and indeed a lot of the colleges retain a religious name in in recognition of that past so this is modeling college maudlin is the old english way of pronouncing magdalen as in mary magdalene and this college epitomizes some of the early ideals of the university which is to do with christian education and charitable education although morden college is is magnificently grand and looks like a very very well-heeled boarding school for extremely privileged people in line with the christian ethic it has always always been intent on educating all people regardless of rank and in in line with the with the principles of christian charity and that's still important to us today i think it's often associated uh thought that oxford is this place where people who have had uh extremely privileged lives will go to finish their education and certainly that has always been true but it has also always been true that the those from the poorest backgrounds have also been readily admitted to the university because that was considered to be essential to obtain the christian mission of education these days the the university and its colleges are secular so they don't have a specific religious mission anymore but they still retain that ethic that education is something that anyone can aspire to it doesn't matter whether or not you're the son or daughter of a prince or the son or daughter of a you still have the same basic hardware the same neural capabilities and you therefore have just as much a right as anyone else so although it can be difficult to imagine these buildings are genuinely here for everyone and always have it so this notion that oxford is is socially exclusive i'm afraid has never been the case and it's certainly not the case today so even though modern college is ground as it as it is and it's got a deer park in its gardens for goodness sake which is perhaps a little bit sort of excessive in these massive fields they've got deer that roam around um it's genuinely there for for anyone provided they are willing to work hard study hard and do the best that they can to spread knowledge because that's ultimately what the universe is all about anyway uh leaping forward in time a little bit we need to get to the enlightenment so the the dawn of science in um in europe is coincident with a particular development which is the importation of coffee now there's some lively debate as to whether or not coffee in fact caused the enlightenment in other words the the uh the spread of scientific learning and knowledge in to replace religious dogma it does seem remarkably coincident that when people started moving away from drinking beer most of the time in order to hydrate themselves to drinking coffee that suddenly there was this big leap in productivity uh and work uh in the sciences and the reason i'm showing you this little building on the corner is because it claims to be the oldest coffee shop in england and was therefore an important hangout for academics in the early 17th century and science became a hugely important part of the university's story of course and if we if we shift over just to the north of the city this is wadham college modern college was founded in 1610 and in the fairly large gardens that you can see here next to the college there were scientific experiments that went on uh in the early 17th century just before the civil war and they were conducted by academics and students and this became the royal society so what we now know is the royal society and the journal and the fellows of the royal society which is the preeminent scientific body of the united kingdom began in these gardens here and some of its earliest members includes christopher wren who was an undergraduate student here at wadden and he would come and do these experiments with people like robert hook of hooke's law robert hook was an academic based at christchurch college and hook uh perhaps one of his uh lesser known uh claims to fame is that he he rejected isaac newton's first paper for publication uh isaac newton was a cambridge academic hook uh was based in oxford and hook rejected his paper newton was so crushed by this rejection that he didn't even attempt to publish something for another 20 years and as i understand it the next thing he published was his principia mathematica so he's a man he sort of you know knew how to kick back at his uh his uh critics but anyway so the the um the scientific um enlightenment really kicked off here in oxford and these days you can see all of the science buildings are just north of warden so this is where the science departments are all located uh and they're clustered around here and oxford uh has i mean it's quite difficult to measure the scientific output of the university but one slightly clumsy measure but nonetheless the measure is uh the number of monogamous prize winners and the university of oxford has no more nobel prize winners in science uh than france and belgium combined so it's a real sort of quite heavyweight when it comes to the sciences and it's still working in this regard so i mentioned that the most recent college was founded this year in 2020. that's this college on the corner so they've they've repurposed some of the old uh radcliffe science buildings so these are called the ranking science library and they've made this into a new college it's called reuben college founded in 2020 it's going to be focused for postgraduate research into climate change uh and artificial intelligence in particular so it's really at the cutting edge of sciences which you'd expect from from oxford okay so what about uh some of the more recent developments with regards to the recognition of minority rights now actually when we start we should start by talking about women and women of course are not minorities so how did oxford finally come to recognize women well it's embarrassingly late in the day and there's really no getting away from the fact that it's one of the stupidest things i can even think of from a city that claims to be so intelligent to not admit women for hundreds and hundreds of years is completely indefensible these days we actually admit more women than men as undergraduates so women are coming through and will soon be the majority which in numerical terms makes sense because women are majority in society but anyway for a long time there was a there was just a plain misogyny that barred women from education and that started to change in the 19th century when this college lady margaret hall was founded solely for the education of women these days lady margaret hall or lmhs it's usually shortened to is mixed all of the colleges are now mixed there used to be a few colleges that were for women only and a few for men only but now they're all mixed the first male only college to admit women was jesus college in fact and it was led by our principal uh sir john habercook who also encouraged four other colleges at the same time in 1974 to admit women but 1974 is still magnificently late in the day anyway lady margaret hall started educating women in the 19th century they were only allowed to take degrees at the university of oxford from 1922 onwards so still less than 100 years which is truly shocking but uh to an extent the university has been trying to make up for lost time it can never do so properly but you know we can we can always hope and one of the most important developments with regards to the rights of women was established here at somerville college now summerville was another women's only college and one of their most notable alumna is um dorothy hodgkin now she was a chemist chemistry fellow here fellow just means tutor and she taught here um before the second world war and during it and her great contribution to science was working out the chemical structure of penicillin a vitamin b12 and of insulin and she did so by using a painstaking technique called x-ray crystallography whereby x-rays are put through a crystal of penicillin for example and the way the light that well the way the x-rays bounce out of the crystal can give you a sense of the internal molecular structure of that of that molecule and so she did all the mathematics to work out how penicillin was actually put together there were various theories as to what penicillin was from a chemical basis but it wasn't confirmed until hodgkin did the painstaking work during the second world war now the reason that that is significant for the rights of women is that once it was known what penicillin was made of so of course it was understood that penicillin was a mold but how you could actually recreate it and synthesize it and mass-produce it wasn't known until hodgkin did her work and so once she'd worked that out then right next door what used to be the radcliff infirmary which is this sort of former hospital on the corner is now part of the humanities institute uh it was possible to mass produce a chemical synthesis of penicillin and that has transformed the world so people used to die quite often of infections which these days we would treat quite readily with with antibiotics and one of the most easily procured and mass-produced antibiotics has been of course penicillin and this transformed the role of women because in one of its effects was to improve maternal health and improve infant health and lower infant mortality so all of a sudden you didn't necessarily need to have eight nine children in order to ensure that some would make it to maturity you could have a smaller number of children with greater confidence that they would survive and it's the nexus of these two buildings somerville college and the neighboring uh racket in infirmary that produced that change and its effects are global in scale and honestly i think these two buildings are perhaps amongst the most important in the entirety of the of england i really cannot get over how important these buildings are um also in terms of women's rights although perhaps a bit more of a mixed picture uh with regard to somerville college is that one of the chemistry undergraduates that came to study here with dorothy hodgkin was a lady called margaret roberts who is better known to history as margaret thatcher she's the only science uh graduate of the university uh that went on to become prime minister um but nonetheless uh that's where she studied chemistry and her first job was in making ice creams so that's not what he known about the iron lady but she helped produce ice creams um so what about true minorities so women are not a numerical minority but have been underrepresented at oxford for many years until today what about people of color well the story there again is is embarrassing and we're working to rectify it these days the undergraduates we admit 22 percent are b.a.m.e black asian and minority ethnic um that's still within that 22 the representation of specific uh groups is is mixed so for example black british students are still underrepresented and therefore more work needs to be done about that and the university has had a difficult uh time in recognizing some of its uh some of its role in say the transatlantic slave trade and other imperial ventures which of course has have affected the uh the rights of black people and people of color throughout the world now this college for example this is all souls college all souls college is an unusual college in that it's for fellows only so it's only for tutors and this is the it's library over here this is called the cod ringtone library and codrington was a man who made his fortune from transatlantic slavery and so the college and the university have been taking steps to try and make it absolutely clear that the past practices of these individuals is utterly reprehensible that doesn't necessarily resolve the historic injustices that took place but at least there's some finally some consciousness of it of its significance uh perhaps more widely known is the roads must fall campaign uh oh no just jumped into a short thanksgiving uh rhodes must fall refers to a statue of cecil rhodes cecil rhodes was a an imperial adventurer uh and uh diamond merchant who made a fortune creating the de beers diamond company and here he is uh on a pedestal in the middle of the high street and that's the problem is that he's literally on a pedestal and yet he's a man who stole land and exploited um black africans in a way that wasn't literally legal servitude uh sorry slavery but was in many cases tantamount to it uh and was just utterly reprehensible by modern moral standards and so finally the colleges decided to take down the statue after after months of pressure from from people around the world and also from insane students and from other students around the university because it's understandably uncomfortable to walk down a high street and see a man celebrated who was who was so overtly racist so you know the history of the university is not all pretty and we are finally taking steps to address that i'd say that we could probably go further and faster but at least some acknowledgement is beginning to take place okay what about sort of power more generally so the university of oxford is associated with a number of things and one of them is is producing politicians so if we go up here to sin john's college for example uh this is produced prime ministers of thailand of sudan and indeed of the united kingdom in the form of tony blair um and in fact half of all prime ministers that have ruled uh the uk have been students at oxford university so of the 56 prime ministers that we've had in this country 28 of them were students at oxford four of whom were students here at baillio uh college and they have an interesting story to tell with regards to brexit so the first of the baylor prime ministers was a man called h.h askwith he was the prime minister in the first world war and during his government continental europe tore itself apart in one of the first truly mechanized industrial wars and its bloody consequences which of course is a prelude to the creation of the european union as a as a measure to ensure the security of continental europe the second prime minister was harold macmillan harold macmillan uh was one of the soldiers in that war in the first world war and he was the only young man to come back alive from the western front so he'd gone from baleal with his fellow student soldiers well over 100 of them and he was the only one to come back alive which is just an astonishing thing to consider i can imagine the psychological impact that would have on someone a young man to know that all of his friends had died except for himself when he became prime minister he had an almost messianic seal to join what was then known as the common market we now know it's the european union this was back in the 1960s and part of his ambition was because of the horrors of war he had seen firsthand and his desire to obtain security the third prime minister to have come out of belial was edward heath and he was similarly interested in promoting peace he had been as an undergraduate active in the oxford union which is a debating society and he traveled to germany and he'd met joseph goebbels and adolf hitler and seen adolf hitler speak at the nuremberg rally before the second world war started and he was so appalled at what he'd seen that he committed the oxford union to ending appeasement and he then spent the rest of his adult life fighting for the security of europe and he was the the prime minister who was finally successful in obtaining britain's membership of the common market and what we now call the european union on new year's day first of january 1973 and then the fourth prime minister to have come out of belial college was the current one boris johnson who of course is in many uh cases credited or blamed depending on your perspective for hiking britain out of the european union so two of the men that basically got us in and the one man that got us out all attended the same college just here on the corner of broad street it's quite bizarre uh history but power is an important part of the story of oxford another sort of college to be considered in that narrative is christchurch christ church is let me just find it where have we gone oh i've lost myself here we go so christchurch is down here uh of the 28 oxford prime ministers 13 of them were educated at this college alone meaning that this college has produced more prime ministers than any educational institute in the uk and there's an interesting story with regards to this statue this is a statue of mercury and this has been stolen from its plinth four times in the college's history and the story goes that three of the four people that stole mercury became prime minister so it's almost like sword in the stone if you can sort of steal mercury you might become the prime minister of britain i don't think it has a sort of quite clear causal connection but anyway um the key thing to note of course is that you don't need to have those ambitions today if you want to become an oxford student we're not looking for people who are going to become the next prime minister president et cetera we're looking for people that want to work hard and study hard and are interested in the universe and the world around them so for example at this college merton college uh one of their former students is now emperor naruhito of of japan um so you might sort of think crikey well i'm not going to become improved japan so how on earth could i be admitted to the university but remember what i said earlier right university is and always has been for everyone in fact that's why we we insist on people wearing academic dress so students when they go for exams exams take place here in what's known as exam schools they have to wear a gown and what's known as sub fuss which is uh which is a modest clothing um and they do so because they the university wants to make sure that everyone looks and feels equal in the eyes of the university because as far as the universe is concerned they are equal everyone is equally ignorant of the complexities of the universe and we're all groping our way to some sort of truth and just because someone's got huge amounts of power and money doesn't make them any more sort of capable of discerning reality so that's uh an important thing to bear in mind if your ambition in the future is to become a full-time carer for a loved one good for you that's great we're not concerned with with what you intend to do with your life all we're concerned about is what you intend to do while you're at the university okay so please don't sort of think oh crikey i can only apply if i'm planning on becoming the next leader of the world not at all so what about culture and recreation well um perhaps one of the most uh well-known aspects of the university's recreational interests is rowing and rowing takes place here these are this is called boathouse island so you can't quite discern it here but this is a little island and each of these are boat houses for the colleges this huge one on this side of the river is for university college they got given a huge grant by some rich alumnus who who gave them money and this is the river thames so if you row far enough down here you'll end up in london um and what the what the colleges do is that in preparing for competitions against universities like cambridge they row along here against each other so all of the colleges have their own boat clubs and they do what's known as bumps racing so bumps racing is rather than rowing side by side as you would probably have seen in most rowing competitions you row in a single fire line and the idea is that you're supposed to try and bump into the boat in front of you before you get bumped by the one behind there's a line of 13 of these boats that try to smack into each other and it's it does sound quite dangerous but it's a lot of fun and it's been going on for about 200 years so you can go all the way back and see the ups and downs and the ebbs and flows of this competition going way back into the past so that's one of the things that oxford is perhaps best renowned for and the oxford colours the dark blue of oxford uh comes from uh the dark blue of christchurch college and one of the students there basically determined that the whole university's colors would be the colors of his college anyway right next to the river is this the italy sports ground and this also has another sort of famous part of the university's history which is that this was the first place that the four minute mile was broken uh one of the academics of the university sir roger bannister he wasn't sir roger then he is now he hypothesized that it was possible for a human being to run faster to run a mile in less than four minutes this had previously been thought to be impossible uh that it was just beyond our physiological capabilities but banister not only came out with the theory and hypothesis that it was possible he then like a good scientist should prove to himself by running it right here um and breaking the four minute mile and apart from um apart from sport the university has also been prominent his regards uh um drama uh literature music and all sorts of other things so with regards to literature you can go back to christchurch where uh all sorts of important uh authors and poets were students uh lewis carroll for example of handsome wonderland fame uh w.h orden as well the the poet he head over to merton you can see the tree that inspired uh j.r.r tolkien to write about the ants in the lord of the rings because he was a fellow here at merton college uh iris murdoch was was a student up at somerville college up to the north the university so literature is important uh acting and drama is important so here at queen's college is where mr bean was a student rowan atkinson and he took part in a comedy troupe along with richard curtis the man he wrote and directed for weddings in the funeral back at new college is where kate beckinsale was a student and just up and across the street is wadham college where rosamund pike and felicity jones were students so oxford isn't just a place where as is often uncharitably said fun goes to die oxford is also a place where people play hard and also produce skills other than academic skills such as acting music direction and so on okay so what about the future well i've already mentioned that reuben colleges has been founded and is going to be looking at artificial intelligence and climate change we've also got this exciting development that is taking place here so you can see a big patch of just empty space and this is going to become what's known as the radcliff observatory quarter so that you can see the right clip observatory is here and this space here will be filled fairly soon with a building called the schwarzman center for the study of the ethics of artificial intelligence so it's going to become a huge part of the humanities infrastructure of the university it will um be having a an investment of 150 million pounds so a huge investment into the development of ai ethics and philosophy which is going to be absolutely fundamental and it's being surrounded by some other important new additions to the university this is the new maths institute here and on the other side this is the blavatnik school of government and just across the road is a slightly older part of the university this is the oxford university press where the famous oxford english dictionaries are written and published so as i was trying to to say the university has a very long history it's got some old buildings as a result but it's always been at the cutting edge so there's a slight ironic tension in the university which is that people assume that because the university is so old it must be somehow very conservative it must be stuck in the past it must be wedded to tradition and the past and i can certainly understand how you could get that impression but actually academics and students are always pushing the boundaries so it's a remarkably vibrant progressive place because that's how knowledge is is is produced is by pushing against received wisdom and trying to come up with some new answers to long-standing problems so this is not a university that's stuck in the past it's had some indefensible uh policies over the years not least of which is the failure and refusal to educate women until until very recently uh the failure to recognize people of different uh skin colors as equal to white people totally indefensible completely stupid for a university that's supposed to be intelligent there's there's just no other word for it than utter gopping idiocy for those sorts of uh prejudiced policies but these days that's well behind us uh and we are taking steps to try and rectify some of the past uh horrors that oxford has been conflicted there's still a lot to be done but we're getting there and the future for the university is bright it's had 900 years so far and it's developed a great reputation around the world for producing knowledge and helping to make the lives of people better and i think one of the most fantastic examples of that is penicillin this is a concrete case where the university of oxford has shaped people's lives and made them stronger and better and we hope to continue to do so for another 900 plus years and hopefully you can be a part of that story as well so if you would like any more information do by all means get in touch with me at matthew.williams at jesus.ox.ac.uk if i can help you work out more about the university and how you can maybe make a strong application then i'd love to help you try so thank you so much for watching if you could give us a like and a share and a subscribe that would be amazing and i hope to meet you all soon thank you so much goodbye

Channel: Jesus College Oxford

Views: 32,384

Keywords: Oxford, University, Oxford University, History, Jesus, England

Id: RnU7usnZR_k

Length: 34min 20sec (2060 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020