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The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation. It grew rapidly from 1167, when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. After disputes between students and Oxford townsfolk in 1209, some academics fled north-east to Cambridge where they established what became the University of Cambridge. The two English ancient universities share many common features and are jointly referred to as Oxbridge.

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

It does not have a main campus, but its buildings and facilities are scattered throughout the city centre. Undergraduate teaching at Oxford consists of lectures, small-group tutorials at the colleges and halls, seminars, laboratory work and occasionally further tutorials provided by the central university faculties and departments. Postgraduate teaching is provided in a predominantly centralised fashion.

Oxford operates the Ashmolean Museum, the world's oldest university museum; Oxford University Press, the largest university press in the world; and the largest academic library system nationwide. In the fiscal year ending 31 July 2023, the university had a total consolidated income of £2.92 billion, of which £789 million was from research grants and contracts.

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

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The buildings of Nuffield College are to the west of Oxford's city centre, on the former site of the largely disused basin of the Oxford Canal. Nuffield College was founded in 1937 after a donation to the University of Oxford by the car manufacturer Lord Nuffield. The initial designs of the architect Austen Harrison, which were heavily influenced by Mediterranean architecture, were rejected by Nuffield, who described them as "un-English". Harrison then aimed for "something on the lines of Cotswold domestic architecture", as Nuffield wanted. The college was built to the revised plans between 1949 and 1960. During construction, the tower, about 150 feet (46 m) tall, was redesigned to hold the college's library. Reaction to the architecture has been largely unfavourable. It has been described as "Oxford's biggest monument to barren reaction" and "a hodge-podge from the start". However, the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner thought that the tower helped the Oxford skyline and predicted that it would "one day be loved". The writer Simon Jenkins doubted Pevsner's prediction, though, saying that "vegetation" was the "best hope" for the tower, and for the rest of the college too. (Full article...)

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Tony Benn (1925–2014) was a British Labour politician who was a Member of Parliament (MP) for 47 years and a Cabinet minister under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in the 1960s and 1970s. He was educated at New College and served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War before entering politics. With his successful campaign to renounce his inherited title of Viscount Stansgate, Benn was instrumental in the creation of the Peerage Act 1963. Later, in the First Wilson ministry (1964–70), he served as Postmaster General and later as a notably 'technocratic' Minister of Technology. When the Labour Party was in opposition, Benn served for a year as the Chairman of the Labour Party. In the Labour Government of 1974–79, he returned to the Cabinet, initially serving as Secretary of State for Industry, before being made Secretary of State for Energy. During the Labour Party's time in opposition during the 1980s, he was seen as the party's prominent figure on the Left, and the term "Bennite" came to be used for someone with radical politics. After leaving Parliament in 2001, Benn was President of the Stop the War Coalition until his death. (Full article...)

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Oriel College, in the centre of Oxford on Oriel Square, is the fifth-oldest college at Oxford. It is the oldest royal foundation in Oxford, a title formerly claimed by University College, whose claim of being founded by King Alfred is no longer promoted. The original medieval foundation set up by Adam de Brome (the rector of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin), under the patronage of Edward II, was called the House of the Blessed Mary at Oxford. The first design allowed for a Provost and ten Fellows, called 'scholars', and the College remained a small body of graduate Fellows until the 16th century, when it started to admit undergraduates. Oriel's main site incorporate four medieval academic halls, including St Mary Hall). During the English Civil War, Oriel played host to high-ranking members of the King's Oxford Parliament. The College has nearly 40 Fellows, about 300 undergraduates and some 160 graduates, the student body having roughly equal numbers of men and women (although Oriel was the last of the men's colleges to accept women students). Its distinguished alumni include two Nobel laureates (the biochemist Alexander Todd and the economist James Meade); prominent Fellows have included John Keble and John Henry Newman, founders of the Oxford Movement. (Full article...)

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Credit: Toby Ord

The front quadrangle of Balliol College. Founded in 1263, Balliol's alumni include four British prime ministers: H. H. Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath and Boris Johnson.

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Did you know

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

... that Seymour King, Member of Parliament for Kingston upon Hull Central for 25 years, was the first climber to reach the summits of Mont Maudit and Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey (pictured)?
... that Andrew N. Meltzoff's research revealed that infants of only a few weeks of age can imitate facial expressions and hand gestures?
... that civil engineer Robert Wynne-Edwards was the first President of the Institution of Civil Engineers to be elected while still working as a contractor?
... that Irish cricketer and artist Robert Gregory was the subject of four poems by W. B. Yeats?
... that when a rival took over an estate belonging to Sir Walter Clarges, Clarges used his position as a Member of Parliament to send the interloper to jail?

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A Fellowship at All Souls is now one of the greatest honours the University can bestow, it is the equivalent (and in the opinion of the Fellows, more than the equivalent) of being a Fellow of Kings at Cambridge, it entitles the recipient to the centre page should he send a letter to The Times – The Times is sometimes called the All Souls Parish Magazine – it absolves him from unnecessary truck with undergraduates: safe in the knowledge that he is surrounded by nothing but first-class brains, the All Souls Fellow may devote himself with passion to that research to which the University has called him.

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— John Betjeman

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Credit: David Iliff

Oxford looking south from the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in the centre of the city – the spire on the left is Christ Church Cathedral and Tom Tower is on the right.

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