History of Oxford University (or "If I were you I wouldn't start from here")

well good afternoon everyone I have to confess that this is the third on my part to give this lecture two years ago I offered to do it and was away on holiday and the car broke down on the way back missed it last year I offered to do it and we crashed the car in Lyon in France on the way back and I missed that this time we've kept it well away from holidays and I've managed to to get here the idea is to look at Oxford and to try and explain it insofar as it can be explained by looking at its history because I always think that with institutions as with people if you know something of their background you've then begin to understand them that that little bit better so that that's the purpose of this session and I'm going to do it in what I hope will be a fairly light-hearted way which will amuse as well as can convey information and I always start by saying to people that if we were gathered today in this room to create the University of Oxford whatever we came up with would look nothing like the present day University because no one in their right minds would set up a university like this it's just what happens over a very long period of time let's face it none of us is going to look quite the same in another 900 years time and it's to say with institutions that they do change so the opening slide so to speak is Oxford now this is what we're familiar with what I'm going to do in a moment is go right back and show how we've come to this point it does look good doesn't it from that height you can't see the traffic you can't see the terrorists and so on it's the it's the very much the televisual image of the city but the the immediate impression you get at least I hope you get is of course that this is not a campus University it is a 38 campus university so there's the first ology and when I show visitors right Oxford I find invariably the first question they ask is what is the difference between the colleges and the university what's the relationship between they can't understand it not surprisingly and I find the best way of explaining it is actually to use the analogy of the United States now I know we have one American here do we have any others only the world okay Katherine will know what I'm talking about when I say that if you think federal then you can begin to get a grasp of Oxford Americans find this much easier than we Brits do because you do federal you're brought up with federal you have a federal system in the United States you have 50 separate independent organizations the states they are responsible for running their own affairs there is also a central federal authority the federal government and the two are quite separate and they have their own areas of responsibility and they argue with each other about who should do what but they are nevertheless perceived to be separate think of Oxford as being a little bit like that here we have 38 separate independent organizations the colleges like the states we also have a central federal authority which is the University and they argue with each other about who should do what but nevertheless they are separate with their own areas of responsibility and I find that there's a way of trying to get a handle on it to begin with that that that works for people so what I need to do now of course is explain how we've we've come to this point which means getting right back very briefly to the origins of universities certainly in the Western world do we have any Italians in the room and what a shame because you get the bragging rights if you're Italians because the is usually acknowledged that the first university to a word emerge in the Western world is Bologna which is under way by by 1088 needless to say early universities are not following a system there is no system they're making it up as they go along what's happening is that the Europe agenda is becoming rear Benoist and with the growth of new towns beginning in Italy what you get always interns are professions and professions need what we call continuing professional development so students developed a system in Bologna it's a it's the start of breaking away from the cathedral and monastic schools and providing a secular education and the system they devised is wrong that I'm prepared to tell you about providing you will promise to keep keep it in this room and not tell anybody else is that there's got to be a deal on you see is this a deal okay the reason I say that is because the Bologna system was a university run by the students the some in the room who might like this but most of us probably don't so the students form themselves into associations and they decide what courses they need and they basically they hire and fire the faculty to provide the courses they need and it's one way of running a university another model emerged courtesy of the University of Paris which is the second university to emerge and that was a university which was organized and run by the teaching masters not by the students so they decided policy and Oxford when it appeared possibly the third to appear is on the Paris model Oxford very much on the model whatever Paris had Oxford had to have because that's the model it was copying so Oxford was another university where the decisions were made by the teaching masters meeting together in a body called congregation and interestingly of course we still have that body called congregation it's there right at the start and it's still there and as far as I know people can correct me but far as I know Oxford and Cambridge are the only two universities which still retain that system where the final policymaking body is the teaching masters and the senior administrators of the University in most universities faculty letters say can put pressure on the hierarchy but it's the hierarchy president whatever body of Trustees you decide policy here any policy proposed by the vice-chancellor can be overturned by my congregation and one or two have been so it's very different it it's there in Opera because it's there in Paris one thing to bear in mind that in none of these early institutions is they're very much in the way of government involvement these are free enterprise institutions there's no such thing as an academic career there's no such thing as an academic salary structure basically as a teacher you get paid if students turn up to your lectures and pay fees it's very much payment by results there's almost of things that we as academics would not at all approve of one reason just going back very briefly bolonia one reason why it was a student driven university was because bolonia was predominant in the teaching and study of law and its students were predominantly lawyers that is to say people who were already in careers and you begin to see why they would want to set up an influence and organisation of their own and you see that I think with this rather nice early image of the bolonia students mature thoughtful individuals in stark contrast to this it's a rookery catcher self-portrait of an Oxford student I'm sorry to say an image this in on the manuscript in the bosnian library 15th century manuscript so this was done at the time and depict an oxford student by the 15th century if if this guy is going to get a degree and I have to say it's not looking very likely he's going to have to spend five years to obtain a bachelor's degree the gold standard is the master's degree DMA still is I suppose but it certainly was and that takes up to seven years of study what these students are basically is apprentices and they are serving an apprenticeship just as other young people do in society at that time so if you if you want to set up in trade the only way you can do so is by being the son of a free man or becoming an apprenticeship and achieving the freedom so to speak so that if you want to be a Mercer goldsmith shoemaker Brewer Baker whatever it is you have to serve your six or seven years apprenticeship at the end of that period you present your masterpiece and you are then declared a master baker brewer candlestick maker whatever it is and only at that point can you put your name up and trade under your own name think of the students as much the same they are serving seven year apprenticeship at the end of that period they will produce their masterpiece they will then be declared Masters of Arts and only then may they teach that's their trade so they can then teach but as I just said there is no academic profession so to speak only a tiny only a tiny handful actually and make their careers at the University you have to Roger Bacon's basically of this world the general pattern is that when you have achieved your master's degree you stay on at the University as a teacher for four or five years and then you move out and make a career almost nobody makes a career within the university what that means if you think about it is that the average age of people within the university was very much lower than it is today because students were about the same ages as they are now teachers however are leaving let's end their late twenties so it means the average age of the whole body is probably in the low twenties don't know what it is now probably the forties or something I think I just don't know but it's going to be a lot a lot older so it is a very different sort of institution it's much more open than it is today in that if you can persuade the university authorities that you have the basic knowledge required the grammar and Lodging some to begin if you can persuade them that you can cope with the Latin of the lectures then you are pretty much in another big difference I can't be certain about this but it's possible that as much as 50 percent of the student body did not proceed to a degree if you think about it five or seven years there's no there's no help here you've got to find your own finances for five or seven years that's very tough tough now let alone then and it seems possible that up to fifty percent didn't proceed to a degree and this is something we need to be aware of it's a way they thought differently from us we immediately begin to think failure rates and no institution with a fifty percent failure rate would survive very long today I wouldn't have thought they thought differently they thought it was better to go to university and take some courses and not to go and take now it's a different way of looking at it so another way in which it is a totally different world something else I could point out the rates different is the way people lived in Oxford at that time what you've got to bear in mind is that the university grew up in a town which was very much older than it Oxford was a well-established fairly prominent town in Oxford it was a major Centre for for Commerce and Industry administration and law courts met here as well and the university then grows up it didn't it it kind of small and insignificant into this flourishing town and in a way the story of the first four hundred years of serve the university is a story of a shift from that pattern of a university growing up as a minor element in a prosperous commercial center there is a shift to an Oxford that becomes a university town that also does marketing do you see did you see that shift so that it's there today Oxford is known very very widely ran the world it is known almost entirely as a university town good quick test how many people in this room know that the BMW mini car is made in Oxford more in this room only about half interestingly in most audiences I would speak to it now might only be one or two the point being that it is still an industrial and commercial center that people know it as the University turn so it's the university comes in late it comes in small and it gradually takes over and becomes the dominant partner and in fact if you speak to people in the town they very often will say something like always well in Oxford till the university arrived and its downhill ever since it's just a different way of looking at it so these students coming into Oxford they're not coming to live in colleges there are no colleges the first colleges don't emerge for probably 150 years after the university has been underway so students actually living out in town and just to give you one example of what's typical I don't know if you know this building here yeah this is High Street this is King Edward Street going down to Oriole Square just to locate ooh this used to be old bins but now isn't and I've forgotten what it is but sorry it's ready betty's thank you yes fashion unfortunate name it's a it's a fashion shop isn't it and this is a plan insurance so that's the one okay so we've got it marked as medieval housing now you will be saying to me but hold on a minute that clearly is a building of about 1800 you were saying that right of course you were yes oh yeah playing playing stock over front and so on but the nice thing about a lot of houses in Oxford is they're very much older at the back than the front because if people have money to spend they tend to spend it on the front doing it up where it'll be seen and if you go to the back of that house what you find is this so the back is 500 years older than the front which is very convenient for me because this is one of the few houses left in Oxford that we know it's documented this is a house used by students this is typical student accommodation numbers we're unsure are 1,300 let's say maybe 1500 students in Oxford as I say not living in colleges there are three or four colleges in existence by this date but they don't take undergraduates there are tiny institutions for the support of a president or whatever a head of college plus a handful of fellows and maybe one or two graduate students certainly now under students the undergrads are all living out in town in establishments like this so these 1500 students are scattered in little groups of ten or twelve in a building like this the pattern is that a teaching master will rent this house he will sublet rooms to students who come and stay with him in that house he will give them classes they will pay in fees and so on and this is the basic unit within the University and it's one reason why there is so much trouble in the early days of the university if you think about it what you've got is 1,500 young energetic high-spirited more or less active control young men wandering the streets of Oxford gettin into trouble all medieval towns were violent places Oxford and Ross notorious even by the standards of the age there were there were several men run multiple riots the greatest of them all probably have heard of it the st. Scholastica's day riot of 1355 left 62 people dead now this is serious stuff it's not just a scuffle in the street that's pitch battles and the next slide I'm going to show you and it's the one you really must pay most attention to because this is what you're going to be examined on at the end of the session this is the settlement of one of these disputes it's a settlement of 1214 it's the oldest document in the University Archives not very impressive it's it's not remotely as big as it looks on screen it's not that sort of size and as always despite not looking that impressive pressin has always been carefully preserved by the university because it sets out university privileges and this is what happens the basic pattern when there's a dispute is that the town wins the fight and the university wins the peace that follows the university and the final analysis will always have the backing of the crown and the church that is to say government in all shapes and forms because government needs it's an endless supply of young bureaucrats coming through and that's what Oxford Cambridge will provide so the general pattern is that after each dispute the university gets more and more privileges which is how eventually it ends up as the dominant partner and you find this beginning to be set out here so you find various University it's felt that the university needs to be better organized if it's to be protected and to survive so it is given an organization the basic university organization derives from disputes with the time and it gets it gets given a chance for a vice-chancellor it gets to disciplinary offices there's got to be some discipline within the student body to disciplinary officers are appointed Proctor's an Assessor they're all here and they storm with us it's that is the basic it's the basic paraphernalia and enshrined in this document and successive documents all the university's privileges and the university that the town is compelled to agree to uphold the university privileges and in the case of this particular document it was ordered that when the new mayor each year when the new mayor of Oxford was elected the first thing he had to do which go in a procession to the University Church and swear an oath to uphold the university's privileges and that continued would you believe it until 1858 the town was forced to swell annual oath to uphold the university's privileges so get the sense of the university rising to dominance now I want to say something quickly about the rise of coloured colleges because this is so important I'm just going to look at one new college not because it's the earliest which it wasn't by any means it was new in 1379 when it was founded but they're already several colleges there but this is significant for a number of reasons first of all its sheer size it's difficult to convey this to you now because Oxford is full of these and so it doesn't really register but when it went up it's the first on this scale and its enormous Merton College which is an earlier establishment was already beginning to put up big buildings not rather differently from this mertens big buildings are scattered it has an early quadrangle but it doesn't have everything the college needs within that quadrangle the chapel isn't in it the hall isn't in it for instance this takes all the elements that a college might need Chapel hall accommodation teaching library and so on and puts them into a quadrangle which in origin is basically a monastic cloister and as an architectural model it just works from now on this is what a college will look like this is the archetype and they do from now on colleges for a long long time will be on this model same happens at Cambridge they pick up the model do the same thing they call them courts there but it's the same thing and and it does work it travels the world even that think of the American Ivy League schools that very often on this platter the other thing to point out about this college is that it is the first one that accepts undergraduates that's a big breakthrough if you think about it from now on undergraduates can live in a college parents are much happier sending their sons to a place like this where they can be locked in and looked after and so on you've basically got a much better chance of getting your son back in one piece if he can be locked up in a place like this rather than a living action in town and just before new college opens its doors there are effectively no undergraduate living in college by 1500 most undergraduates are living in college there's a great shift in into college and what we're going to get is the age of the college from now on increasingly Oxford will be run for the benefits of these colleges which are growing in size number what the colleges want is what Oxford will do and you reach the points where every vice-chancellor of the University until I forgotten that is about 1990 when John wood came every vice-chancellor will be the head of a college and his body of advisors have domino board will be largely made up of the heads of colleges and what the colleges want is what the University will do another huge difference distinction between colleges new colleges and the university is represented by the College founders that in this case you can make out that triptych of statues that there are three sets of these at this College got a close up the college is dedicated to the Virgin Mary who's in the tall nish in the center on her right the Archangel Gabriel on her left the college founder William of Wycombe Bishop of Winchester it has been wittily observed that this tells you all you need to know about a medieval Bishop sent to this place in the cosmos which is slightly below the Virgin Mary but at least on the part of the Archangel Gabriel so don't feel too sorry for this guy bankrupting himself setting up this magnificent establishment as Bishop of Winchester he was in possession so I've read of the second-richest bishopric in Western Christendom after Milan he was also the King's Chancellor which meant he was head of government and he was clerk of the King's works which meant he ran royal building campaigns which included Windsor Castle at this time he I mean he's exceptional but all most most college founders they are they are able energetic occasionally ruthless highly efficient people who will rise to the top in any society at any these are people who do not believe in the separation of powers they believe in the concentration of powers in themselves for preference this is the sort of person who's standing behind the college nobody is standing around the university of the universities founded by nobody it just emerged this College on the day that it opens its doors is immensely wealthier than the university universities got no money basically these colleges are set up with endowments and with the ability to go on getting getting wealthier that's right as I say it's increasingly going to be a world dominated by the colleges to use our American analogy again it is as if the Confederacy had won the Civil War the power significant power vested in the states so that's why I'd call this slide of the Divinity School which is you know that part of the bog Lee and library set up for theology lectures so I've called it the University Strikes Back the University in a quandary really it decides it needs to have some magnificent buildings to show and it's saying to the world don't forget the university you know a as well as all these colleges and that because there's a danger the colleges will take over totally and what the university always manages to cling on to is the awarding of degrees colleges have never been allowed to award degrees and the university has to admit them it examines them and so on but otherwise everything is being done so by and and for the colleges and here's the university putting up some magnificent buildings of its own but the clue here is in the dates the whole of New College is built in less than a decade the university takes over 60 years to build one room okay you can't go down to B&Q and come back with a room like this I mean it is quite magnificent but there's nothing the university doesn't have the money it has to stop building raise more money continue building and so on and there if you like enshrined is the difference now another theme and I can't cover everything I'm just just picking out themes that I want to refer to is a change that takes place in the university at the very top and it symbolized if you like by this gorgeous figure who is the Earl of Leicester Queen Elizabeth's favorite and who was the Chancellor of the University he was a successor of another number of other Grandy's who were Chancellor's of the university this began in the mid 15th century when the university decided that what it really needed was influence at the center of power influence at court basically so it began to appoint as Chancellor a grandiy up to then the Chancellor had been resident at Oxford and had been the CEO but from the mid 15th century what happens is the Chancellor becomes a grandiy outside Oxford and the executive authority devolves onto the vice-chancellor which is what we still have isn't it I don't if Chris Patton would want to be called a grandini but he is actually and and it's this vice-chancellor who's that who's effectively the CEO this works to some extent these people will do you favors which is what's wanted but you are entering a mafia-like world they will do you favors but at some point they will call it call those favors in and woe betide you if you don't do as you're supposed to so I mean this guy succeeded Cardinal Wolsey Cardinal Wolsey needed the university support in the matter of the Kings divorce the Earl of Leicester had a whole host of matters that he wanted the universities support for this guy is the control freaks control-freak he intervened in everything he even sets out what academic dresses to look like you'd think you'd have other things to do but know he's involved in absolutely everything and and he's he's he's utterly ruthless and he does not want to be dealing with congregation he does not want a rabble of young teaching masters banging on his door he wants to deal with a select few people who are very much like himself and so he ensures that motions can only proceed from the university that have been approved by the vice-chancellor and the head Domino board that's the Board of Advisors so it's the university shifts from being an open democratic summer anarchic institution to being an oligarchy very much under the control of heads of houses and a handful of our professors and what you're getting for the first time is the university becoming an arm of the state this is a big difference it's becoming intimately linked in with with government another theme I just want to mention is an expansion of the university that takes place in the 16th century which is significant for a number of reasons there is of course a dip in recruitment round about the Reformation because all the students that would have come from the religious houses are immediately removed as religious houses are suppressed but that is then overtaken by an expansion of the university sixteenth and into the 17th century there's an expansion because there's a new type of student coming and that new type of students is the sons of the rich who start to come for the first time up to now the university has been made up of the middling ranks of society if you're a rich out of private education if you're poor you've got none it's the middling ranks but increasingly they start to come in the sons of the gentry effectively now these young men are coming in to treat the university's essentially as finishing schools it's part of being finished as a gentlemen that you go to university and you take some courses they're not necessarily doing the courses in order to acquire a degree they don't need degrees they don't need careers they are already rich and what's more they rather look down on people who do need degrees and do need careers because they're going to have to sully their fingers with Commerce so they're coming to university and mixing with people who in other circumstances they will be directing to the back door of their houses and this type gentlemen I'm at the amateur gentlemen of distinction is one definition of this type that grows up becomes a type much looked up to within the universities they come to dominate the the universities and what they're cultivating is this air of effortless superiority you must succeed without appearing to try that is the real mark of a gentleman and on the back of that there grows up the notion that professional training is for second-raters if you're any good you'd do it it's the natural talent of these gentlemen to be able to do these things only second-raters need to be trained it's an attitude that still clings does it not a little bit think of creative writing creative writing courses and often the comment is how can you be taught to be creative which you know isn't the point of the course but it's it's an attitude the clink and it comes to dominate the universities if you want I can't I spend all afternoon on this but if you want this type the epitome of this type that comes to dominate see late 19th early 20th entry fiction I mean Sherlock Holmes would be a case in point best of all but I don't know how many people read her anymore would be Dorothy al Sayers don't some people nodding said fear of you know Dorothy L says the hero of her novel crying she wrote crime detection novels in what sometimes called the Golden Age of detective fiction between the world wars and her detective is a man called Lord Peter Wimsey and there you have the type he's an heiress to Kratt he's a distinguished alumnus of Bailey all who got a first in in modern history he's just brilliant at everything he turns his hand - he plays Bach perfectly there's no evidence in any of the novels that I've read that just spends as much as five minutes practicing but he nevertheless can sit down and play the well-tempered clavier from memory he's a great collector of incunabula and and and and so on but this is the type and in in fiction it's not an unattractive model it's just no way to run a country but it's somehow it's what we end up doing because this this contempt of professionalism yeah I can room I can remember it when it was somehow just reputable to have professional training it was that it was the concept gentlemanly and and devaron certainly takes over civil service and so on and oxford crank is very big role in this the other shift with these people coming in his status which you find in the hall at Christchurch which is there of course and if you go into the hall the question to ask is who in the sixteenth century has their meals in a room like this and the answer is Henry the eighth does Cardinal Wolsey the family this College does and Oxford students this is high status they've come a long way from those little houses scattered through town to this and I think even today with modern streetwise kids it must be intimidating to sit down for your first meal in a room like this we've produced 14 Prime Minister's and so on there there's John Locke the great political philosopher that William Gladstone over your shoulder is Charles Dodgson over your left shoulders William Penn the great Quaker prettily intimidating this that we've moved into a different different worlds and it's a class conscious world now this is the period in which Oxford and Cambridge begin to acquire their snob reputation the earlier university has no snob value whatsoever it's something that comes in now again this is an effortless sue purity which superiority which so gets up the noses of other people and which the university is so anxious to to shake off now another point I want to make and give you something to look at while I make it the the building to concentrate is the central one there that you know is the Sheldonian theater designed by Christopher Wren for university ceremonies in the 1660s and incidentally the first neoclassical building to go up to 200 years now it will be all neoclassical but it marks it marks a point that it's this period I just want to say a few words about in the mid 17th century the general point I want to make is that no university no human institution come to think about it is ever steady-state they always come and go switch back sometime he's doing well other times not so well and this universities fits that pattern mid 17th century I would maintain is appeared when the university is doing exceptionally well and it appeared it can look back on with some pride and that's because the university plays an important role in the development of what we think of as modern experimental science that is a shift put it horribly crudely from alchemy to nor experimental science and there are a number of significant figures working in Oxford in the 1650s in particular think there are people that we've all heard Robert Boyle everybody everybody at school is heard of Robert Boyle there is Robert Boyles successor sucks at his assistant sorry Robert Hooke very spooky looking character he is interestingly there is no contemporary portrait of Hooke this is a modern portrait put together on the basis of verbal descriptions of what it looked like it never had knowing how accurate he looks a bit scary but I mean science colleagues in the room will call it correct me but at talking science colleagues a lot of them now regards although he was Boyle's assistant they now regard hookers the most significant scientist of the two of them whether that's true or not I don't know I do know that a few years ago I read Lisa Jardine's biography of Christopher Wren and it dawned on me after a while that there is actually all about Robert Hooke but it may be that you can't sell a book with Robert hooks name on it but you can always sell a book with Christopher Wren's name on it and it be that as it may he's he's hugely significant in frozen the general public know him Larry is pioneering lists of microscopes for the study of organisms as you find her this famous depiction of the flea which is fairly well known from his micrographia eye there are there are a lot of these people another one just quickly William Harvey warden of Merton College who's the man who demonstrates that the heart is a pump that circulates blood around the body so this is all significant stuff that's going Christopher Wren himself of course never called himself an architect far as I know he was a mathematician and an astronomer and a geometrician what happens in the 1650s is that these scientists working in Oxford meet together regularly to discuss each other's work and in doing this they begin to draw it rules by which they will accept each other's work it is no longer enough for somebody simply to assert that they have proved something you've got to demonstrate it you've got to demonstrate it to your peers so putting it as succinctly as I can all the power of paraphernalia of modern experimental science are emerging at this time in other places I mean not just Oxford but it's just Oxford does play I think a significant role and these figures who are working oxen and 1650s at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 many of them then pursue their careers in London continued to meet in London and there formed the Royal Society so the Royal Society has its origins in the meetings of these auctions academics and in the 1650s but then as if to prove my point about fluctuating fortunes of the university it is almost as if the university falls off a cliff in that the 18th century is generally regarded as academically the low point in the university's career and there are a number of reasons listed it's highly entertaining because the university has the misfortune to be at its low point at a time when some of the finest writers in the English language are at work and they begin to excoriate the university you know Edward Gibbon and figures like that all criticizing University and what they portrayed going on at Oxford is generally sort of erratic behavior this sort on the part of students or or it's it's the teachers of the university misbehaving and so on and part of the problem is that the fellows the college fellows lose sight of the fact that they are in the education business as college fellows they are virtually in possession of freeholds you can't get rid of them and they are free to follow their own interests and for most of them their interest did not include teaching undergraduates so as an undergraduate in many colleges if you wanted a really good education you had to hire a private tutor you wouldn't get it from your from the college tutor there are also big problems in religion and politics in religion as quickly as I can in 1581 and the Queen Elizabeth an order was brought in that to obtain a place at Oxford or Cambridge which means to get a university education you have to swear an oath that you're a member of the Church of England what that means if you think about it is that if you are Catholic Baptist Quaker Jewish you cannot get into university university doors are shut against you you'd think that's really bad news for these people but they do they do alright they they they set up their own academies for young people and if you think what's going to happen in this country is commercial revolution but all Industrial Revolution religious nonconformist a very prominent in those movements and they're all right it's the universities that struggle because they turn in on themselves and become just in wordly focused almost obsessed with religious matters until by the end of the 18th century it's reckoned that that Oxford really had only two products sausages and Parsons were said to be the products to come out of Oxford there's this political trouble there are if you if you can recall to attempted coup d'etat in this country in the 18th century 1715 1745 Jacobite rebellions the university is implicated in both in 1715 the university's chancellor the duke of almond has to flee the country to avoid execution for treason so what does the university do to demonstrate its loyalty it appoints his brother instead so the university's position is well known and what that means if you think about it as a parent is this if you send your son to Oxford you are making a political statement and it's quite a dangerous political statement and fewer and fewer parents are prepared to do it and you see that in the matriculation figures in in 1650 chanting there's a high point something like 400 new students every year come on that's good for that time 1700 it's down to about 300 and in 1750 there were only a hundred and eighty-two new students the place is dying people are not just not coming more in Gerry Bentham the great political philosopher said that in his time at Oxford the only useful thing he had learned was how to play tennis he then of course goes on to set up London University in the 1820s and he sets it up to be as unlike Oxford as possible in particular he forbad the teaching of religion it was to be a secular institution you can still go and see the founder of London University in the entrance at University College is there there's a mummy fire on the gruesome character but that is that is Bentham and it was London University was a huge success and it's tempting to think that had bent them lived forty fifty years earlier when Oxford was at its lowest point would Oxford have survived we tend to assume that because things happen in a certain succession that they had to happen in that very but they don't of course there could be there could be alternatives and this is well III over aid this this period because it's such an entertaining period and so I felt one ought to do something to redress the balance and say now that there are significant figures at work in Oxford like this guy Hallie Edmund Halley's Comet but all those other things as well he's a polymath and I understand is the man who to some extent is responsible for the appearance of Isaac Newton's Principia in this the reason being again so I'm told is that Newton was very reluctant Michael you could correct me here but Newton I understand very reluctant to publish in coming up with one excuse after another and his final excuse was he couldn't afford it at which point had he paid for it at his own pocket Newton had run out of excuses and Julie dearly appeared so there are there are significant fit but it's the generality that is the problem this is counterintuitive because as you wandered around Oxford there are lots of really magnificent buildings of this period and you'll look at them and think in your innocence well action must be doing really well in the 18th century you know look at all these buildings it's putting up well what it's telling you is that the money is coming in is just not going on education it's going on buildings so new new university buildings or just about every college rebuilds itself partly or totally in this period Queens College 1675 about to begin a building campaign looking here at think more than big enough for the 20 or 30 people they'll be living there in the 18th century but no they knock it down and rebuild it as a palace and of course what they're doing they're trying to attract back students are not coming anymore the message goes out come to Oxford the most comfortable Society of any in Europe and that's the message you come to Oxford come to Oxford and be comfortable and it's not much of a battle cry really I mean we're all happy to be comfortable but really as a student you've got to go to where you get the best education and it has to be said that in the 18th century in the newly formed United Kingdom if you want to top quality higher education you do not go to England you go to Scotland Scotland very much on the roll Scots would still say you should go today yeah I mean at least we can argue the case now but it's very difficult for the 18th century the failure of these building campaigns to draw back students you're not coming means the University at last realizes that it must reform routine branch or go under and really the the story of the 19th and 20th centuries which I'll conclude with is a story of the dismantling of that old clerical society and its replacement by a university devoted to teaching and research and going through some of its it's unusual it's things like this what this is referring to is the fact that from 1877 and only from 1877 could the fellow of an Oxford College get married and keep the job what it means is that until 1877 you cannot have an academic career the family not officially anyway religious tests were abolished in 1855 so until 1815 aunt 1855 religious test then becomes a secular University more significantly and in a way of a sort of institutional reforms that attempt to turn around the curriculum and so on so that you get the Ashmolean Museum incidentally the last great neoclassical building to go up but it's more than there as a museum to house archaeological and art collections it is a way bringing together the humanities teaching and research into one place to create what I think the colonists might call a critical mass where small elements interact and produce something that's greater than the sum of the parts of greater significance was this building the Museum of Natural History 1860 doing the same thing bringing together the scattered collections and teaching of science in Oxford into one place because it's realized that that this country and dr. Lynch is falling behind in a big way our two great rivals that is the United States and Germany in the teaching of science and this is partly it's to to remedy that and you go in and it is of course it's the materials of the railway age iron and glass being used for academic purposes but what is startling I think to people today is that if you look at the environment of that building in 1860 very early photograph there's nothing else there it's on a greenfield site and you look take a moment for your eyes to acclimatize to Google Maps but just look at it that is staggering the difference and that whole science area that you see here has spun out it away from from that Museum and it conveys I think very graphically the extent to which really science drives almost everything in Oxford these days sciences is the big science brings the big money in and science is one of the main reasons why the university has reemerged center stage having been pushed there by the college's science is so expensive that it cannot be done satisfactorily College by college you cannot have 38 particle accelerators I don't if the 38 in the world but you can't I mean even even a wealthy college could hardly afford a really decent chemistry laboratory it has to be done across the university so science undergraduates will get some of their teaching within college still but they'll spend a lot of time up at the laboratories and lecture theatres in the science area medical students at the hospitals and so on and that is supervisor organized and funded by the university rather than by the colleges which has put them in powerful position and another great reform of the ages of the age is the arrival at long last of women in Oxford a mere 700 years after the university has been going and I've called this thrilled to be at Oxford because they actually don't look very thrilled to be they look a bit fed up don't they having struggled so hard to get in they don't look really pleased to be here and people often say oh oh that's because in 1888 you have to sit still for two minutes because the cameras were so slow which you didn't they weren't that slow if anybody's interested it's because in 1888 photography saw itself as a branch of the high arts so you sat for photographs if you're having your portrait painted and if you look at her today she would be listening to her phone while the cameraman is getting set up that she's striking a pose for a portrait and that is oh no I've forgotten the name she's hugely signatures a significant figure and all sorts really particularly for women's history she's the woman is a pioneer traveler exploring Iraq they'll they'll get to you about thank you thank you that's got to about as an as an undergraduate thank you but I mean the point here is it's sometimes said this is the generation that has won the battle they've got in and I don't think that's really accurate if more accurate perhaps to say they've won a battle perhaps most accurate of all to say they've won the right to be on the battlefield because we know at hindsight how many battles still lie ahead these young women have done better than their brothers to get to university and most families what money they've got to spare will have gone on their brothers not on them they'll have been second-best to their brothers to this point so they've got in they go through the curriculum they sit their exams their exams are graded but they will not get degrees Oxford didn't give its women students degrees until 1920 Cambridge was even worse Cambridge didn't give women degrees until 1948 so these young women will be middle aged before they can come and collect their degrees their contemporaries at Cambridge never will never be dead it's another 60 years oh and I went the reason why I couldn't is they they they weren't allowed to matriculate they didn't sign the matriculation registers they weren't fully members until 1920 so I went to university archives and looked at the registers for 1920 were the first women to sign and there on the front page as Dorothy L sayers come to collect to come to collect her degree because I say it's it's a start rather than than an end of a process and with it's a process that we're very familiar with but I I I must hurry all other ways in which the university has changed enormously is one is the extent to which it's become an international university having until about 1900 been almost entirely a national institution it has become international as the figures I love that New Yorker cartoon that is a Rhodes Scholar walking across that clearly at Oriel College but walking across the quadrangle and the heavens open the shaft of sunlight comes down to illuminate but it's it's that it's not only the students there I believe that if you look at the origin of faculty the university is over 40% are from overseas as well it very much is an international organization and another way in which it has changed is the extent to which it's becoming a postgraduate institution Oxford did not award D fills and really until after the first world war it took the view that if anybody had anything interesting to say why don't they write a book about it what's the point of a doctorate so Liam he's doing a doctorate what's the point of a doctorate which will be read and the most by examiner and possibly the candidates mother and then nobody else but that too lofty attitude crumbles under pressure particularly from German in the United States where postgraduate student studies were pioneered and developing very fast and the university has become increasingly postgraduate at the moment I believe the figures are something like 60% undergraduate 40% postgraduate but the figures are moving together and of course one reason for that is that the university still loses money on every undergraduate it educates but you don't lose money or at least not as much on post graduates and so we have the happy arrival of colleges like like our own and and here you are rejoicing we're playing a big role in this transformation I mean what is it what is it now a thousand students here postgraduate students it's big it's a big transformation and postgraduate studies is an area of activity in which the university plays a big role as well as as the colleges and the other reason why the or another reason why the university has pushed forward to the center stage is of course government government has since the Second World War just a succession of measures countermeasures revisions and so on policies many of which have required the university to administer them like research activity and so on you see that quite dramatically I think in the university offices into the 1950s the University Registrar who is the senior administrator of the University the Registrar had a staff of 40 to 50 people the Registrar now has a staff of 1600 people and if you read the auction magazine the cry goes out from the colleges that university administration has increased is increasing and ought to be diminished there's a loss that it is interesting if we've gone from the university worrying that it did not know if it would survive in the face of all powerful colleges we've now got colleges worrying if they can survive in the face of an all-powerful University it is shown how the world turns is it not and if I might just say something like very briefly about how I see colleges in a way I see them as as a means of humanizing a much bigger institution because when you come to Oxford certainly undergraduate as you would realize as an undergraduate you don't apply to the university you apply to a college if the college accept you you become a member of the University it's different for you as post-grad you'll apply to the University and what it means is that you are a member of two organizations the college and the university using our American analogy it's as if you're a Californian and an American it's two and I think the college sort of humanizes the much bigger University it provides that almost if it goes well it does work in as much family like ray and accounts presumably for the fact that colleges until the last couple of decades colleges were always much more successful than the University in fundraising because people felt that immediacy of belonging to the to the college rather than to the University so that just to give one example at random almost it when Rupert Murdoch gave Oxford a library he didn't give it the university gave it to his old college Worcester College and that would be it would be fairly and typical but as you know all students now have to belong to colleges there is a big difference from the way the university started off with no students belonging to colleges and the last slide I want to put up this afternoon is deliberately provocative this is a university slide designed I presume to demonstrate the university's diversity and and published unfortunately just at the time when the political arguments were getting very hot in the newspapers and so on pointing out that the doctrine Cambridge above all do not represent the demography of this country at all and something must be done about it and so on but it I do it because it makes the point that it is never set as steady state there is always something that's going to come over the horizon that rule that will that will need to to be dealt with and this is a big problem for the university and obviously will continue to be a problem for some time for the future but I would point out that Oxford as you well know features very highly in all international tables of the standing of universe world universities it's there in the top group I would ask you what are the human institutions you can think of that are still successful after 900 years of activity the papacy the monarchy in this country you're beginning to run out of examples pretty rapidly and I think that's a remarkable achievement still to be different but still going strong after as I say after after nine nine hundred years so um I hope I've given you some idea at least of what it's been like over the past 900 years to live and work in this most delightful of perverse of places and that maybe if you didn't know before you have a little better idea of why it is such an eccentric organization today it wasn't set up as such it's just become that way and if it's giving you any idea about that then it's been worthwhile so thanks thanks very much everybody [Applause]

Channel: Kellogg College, University of Oxford

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Id: uol4V1Wa8B0

Length: 64min 38sec (3878 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2018