Nuffield College, Oxford
Nuffield College | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
pears sable . The Crest was slightly moderated and redrawn to simplify the design in Summer 2017. | ||||||||||||||
Location | New Road and Worcester Street | |||||||||||||
Coordinates | 51°45′10″N 1°15′47″W / 51.752834°N 1.262917°W | |||||||||||||
Full name | Nuffield College in the University of Oxford | |||||||||||||
Latin name | Collegium Nuffield | |||||||||||||
Motto | Fiat Justitia | |||||||||||||
Established | 1937 | |||||||||||||
Named for | William Morris, 1st Viscount Nuffield | |||||||||||||
Architect | Austen Harrison | |||||||||||||
Sister college | None | |||||||||||||
Warden | Sir Andrew Dilnot | |||||||||||||
Undergraduates | None | |||||||||||||
Postgraduates | 90 | |||||||||||||
Endowment | £282m[1] | |||||||||||||
Website | www | |||||||||||||
Map | ||||||||||||||
Nuffield College (
Its architecture is designed to conform to the traditional college layout and its modernist spire is a landmark for those approaching Oxford from the west.
As of 2021, the college had an estimated financial endowment of £282m.[6] Due to its small intake, it was the wealthiest educational institution per student in the world as of 2013.[7] Since 2017, Nuffield has committed to underwriting funding for all new students accepted to the college.[8] Owing to its small size and guaranteed funding, Nuffield has the lowest admission rate of any Oxford college; in 2020, only 5.9% of applicants were admitted.[9]
History
Nuffield College was founded in 1937 after a donation to the University of Oxford by Lord Nuffield, the industrialist and founder of Morris Motors. On 16 November 1937, the University entered a Deed of Covenant and Trust with Lord Nuffield.[10] He donated land for the college on New Road, to the west of the city centre near the mound of Oxford Castle, on the site of the largely disused basin of the Oxford Canal.[11] As well as the land, Nuffield gave £900,000[n 1] to build the college and to provide it with an endowment.[10][13] For the creation of Nuffield College and for his other donations he was described in 1949 by an editorial in The Times as "the greatest benefactor of the University since the Middle Ages".[14]
From its inception, Nuffield College initiated a number of trends at both Oxford and Cambridge.[4] It was the first college to have both women and men housed together. It was also the first college to consist solely of graduate students. In addition, it was the first in modern times to have a defined subject focus, namely the social sciences.[15]
Nuffield appointed its first fellows in 1939, a group that notably included the historian Margery Perham, but the outbreak of World War II meant that the college's construction did not begin until 1949. During the War, Nuffield hosted the Nuffield College Social Reconstruction Survey, which examined issues related to post-War reconstruction. Nuffield admitted its first students in 1945, and received its Royal Charter from the hands of the Duke of Edinburgh on 6 June 1958.[15]
Drove to Oxford for the Nuffield College dance... Nuffield is vigorous and forward-thinking. It has absolute equality between men and women and close camaraderie between teacher and student. It draws its Fellows from a wide social background. There is no snobbery about it at all.
In the 1960s, Nuffield became closely associated with Harold Wilson's "modernizing" Labour government. During his tenure as Wilson's Chancellor of the Exchequer, future Labour prime minister James Callaghan, who had no formal university education, took tutorials in economics at Nuffield overseen by College fellow Ian Little.[17] Such was the perceived intimacy between College and government that decades later, writer Christopher Hitchens could recall the "fast set that revolved between Nuffield and Whitehall".[18]
Buildings
Nuffield is located on the site of the basin of the Oxford Canal to the west of Oxford. The land on which the college stands was formerly the city's principal canal basin and coal wharfs..[11]
The architect
The architectural aesthetic of the final design, particularly the tower and its flèche, has attracted some criticism; unlike the other "dreaming spires" of Oxford, Nuffield's tower is a masonry-clad steel-framed book-stack. The architectural historian Sir Howard Colvin said that Harrison's first design was Oxford's "most notable architectural casualty of the 1930s";[19] it has also been described as a "missed opportunity" to show that Oxford did not live "only in the past".[20] Reaction to the architecture of the college has been largely unfavourable. In the 1960s, it was described as "Oxford's biggest monument to barren reaction".[21] The tower has been described as "ungainly",[22] and marred by repetitive windows. The travel writer Jan Morris wrote that the college was "a hodge-podge from the start".[23] However, the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, although unimpressed with most of the college, thought that the tower helped the Oxford skyline and predicted it would "one day be loved".[24] The writer Simon Jenkins doubted Pevsner's prediction, and claimed that "vegetation" was the "best hope" for the tower – as well as the rest of the college.[25]
Research
Around a third of Nuffield's
The college was the birthplace of the "Oxford School" of
Student Life
All Nuffield students are members of the College
People associated with Nuffield
Notable students and fellows
Many prominent people have studied at Nuffield, including
Notable fellows have included
Visiting fellows include Stephanie Flanders, former BBC economics editor; Tim Harford, author and economist; and George Soros, investor and philanthropist.
In 2008, a third of all economists who were fellows of the British Academy had connections to Nuffield, as did a quarter of all political science, sociology and social statistics fellows.[4]
-
Nicholas Stern, economist and academic
-
Stephanie Flanders, journalist
-
Tim Harford, economist and journalist
-
George Soros, business magnate
-
Sir David Cox, statistician
-
Lord Skidelsky, economic historian
Wardens
- Sir Harold Butler, 1938–1945
- Sir Henry Clay, 1945–1949
- Alexander Loveday, 1949–1954
- Sir Norman Chester, 1954–1978
- Michael Brock, 1978–1988
- Sir David Cox, 1988–1994
- Sir Anthony Atkinson, 1994–2006
- Sir Stephen Nickell, 2006–2012
- Sir Andrew Dilnot, 2012–present
Visitors
The Visitor of Nuffield College is ex officio the Master of the Rolls.
Gallery
-
Aerial view showing Nuffield College and Castle Mound at centre left
-
College buildings at the corner of New Road and Worcester Street
-
Nuffield College from the top of Castle Mound
-
Sculptures and a pond in the Quad
-
The west gate
References
- Notes
- References
- ^ "Nuffield College Annual Report and Financial Statements" (PDF).
- ^ Nuffield College: A Tour, retrieved 18 March 2022
- ^ a b "About Nuffield College". www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 15 March 2017. Retrieved 15 March 2017.
- ^ a b c "Revolutionary road". The Guardian. 3 June 2008. Retrieved 24 August 2013.
- ^ The Secret History of Oxford, retrieved 18 March 2022
- ^ "Nuffield College Annual Report and Financial Statements" (PDF).
- ^ "Is Nuffield the richest educational institution in the world per capita?". posnetres.blogspot.co.uk. 29 January 2014. Retrieved 13 May 2018.
- ^ "Funding your Studies - Nuffield College Oxford University". Nuffield College Oxford University. Retrieved 13 May 2018.
- ^ https://www.theprofs.co.uk/student-resources/university-applications/oxford-university-acceptance-rates/#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20Nuffield%20College%20had,%2C%20Economics%2C%20and%20Public%20Policy.
- ^ a b Loveday
- ^ a b Tyack, p. 300
- ^ Officer, Lawrence H. (2011). "Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.K. Pound Amount, 1830 to Present". MeasuringWorth. Retrieved 21 March 2012.
- ^ a b c Colvin, p. 174
- ^ "Nuffield College". The Times. 22 April 1949. p. 5.
- ^ a b "About the College". Nuffield College Oxford University. Retrieved 12 June 2022.
- ^ Benn, Tony. "The Benn Diaries, 1940-1990", p. 52
- ^ Oliver, Michael J. “The Management of Sterling, 1964-1967.” The English Historical Review, vol. 126, no. 520, 2011, p. 586. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41238715?seq=5. Accessed 19 March 2024.
- ^ Hitchens, Christopher. "Simply too exhausted." London Review of Books, Vol. 13, no. 14, 25 July 1991. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n14/christopher-hitchens/simply-too-exhausted. Accessed 19 March 2024
- ^ Colvin, p. 166
- ^ Richards
- ^ Smith, p. 28
- ^ Tyack, p. 301
- ^ Morris, p. 205
- ^ Pevsner, p. 65
- ^ Jenkins
- ^ "'The Evolution of British Electoral Studies' by David Butler - The British Election Study". www.britishelectionstudy.com. Retrieved 22 January 2016.
- ^ "Club details". Linacre College Boat Club.
- Bibliography
- ISBN 0-300-03126-2.
- Harrison, Brian, ed. (1994). The History of the University of Oxford Volume 8: The Twentieth Century. ISBN 978-0-19-822974-2. Retrieved 23 September 2009.
- Jebb, Miles (1996). The Colleges of Oxford. ISBN 0-09-476160-4.
- ISBN 978-0-14-103929-9.
- ISBN 978-0-7129-1064-4. Retrieved 10 July 2009.
- ISBN 978-0-19-280136-4. Retrieved 11 July 2009.
jan morris oxford.
- ISBN 0-300-09639-9.
- Tyack, Geoffrey (1998). Oxford: an architectural guide. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-817423-3. Retrieved 26 June 2009.
External links
- Official website
- Virtual Tour of Nuffield College Archived 22 July 2020 at the Wayback Machine