Portal:University of Oxford

The University of Oxford portal

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 prohibited English students from attending the University of Paris. After escalating conflict between students and the Oxford townspeople, some Oxford academics fled northeast to Cambridge, where they established the University of Cambridge in 1209. The two universities share many common features and are jointly referred to as Oxbridge.

The University of Oxford is made up of 43 colleges – of which 36 are chartered colleges (independent bodies), 4 are permanent private halls (owned by religious organisations), and 3 are societies (controlled by the university) – and a range of academic departments that are organised into four divisions. Colleges control their own membership and activities. Typically social life for students is centred around fellow college members. All students are members of a college. Oxford does not have a main campus. Its buildings and facilities are scattered throughout the city centre and around the town. Undergraduate teaching at the university consists of lectures, small-group tutorials at the colleges and halls, seminars, laboratory work and 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 2025, the university had a total consolidated income of £3.02 billion, of which £801.3 million was from research grants and contracts.

Oxford has educated a wide range of notable alumni, including 31 prime ministers of the United Kingdom and many heads of state and government around the world. As of October 2025,^[update] 76 Nobel Prize laureates, four Fields Medalists, and six Turing Award winners have matriculated, worked, or held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford. Its alumni have won 160 Olympic medals. Oxford is home to a number of scholarships, including the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the oldest international graduate scholarship programmes in the world. (Full article...)

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The university's position of Keeper of the Archives dates from 1634, although its records pre-date this, and Oxford claims to have one of the longest continuous record-keeping traditions in Britain. Records were initially kept in the Priory of St Frideswide, moving to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in the 14th century. The archives were left in considerable disarray by a burglary in 1544, and remained in chaos until Brian Twyne was appointed the first Keeper of the Archives in 1634 as a reward for his work preparing new statutes for the university. Under Twyne and his successor as Keeper (Gerard Langbaine), the archives were moved into one of the rooms in the Tower of the Five Orders in the Bodleian Library; three of the wooden presses that were built at that time to store them are still in use. The third to hold the position, John Wallis (pictured), prepared an index of the collection that was still used in the 20th century. (Full article...)

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Robert Winchelsey (c. 1245– 1313) was an English Christian theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury. He studied at the universities of Paris and Oxford, and later taught at both. Influenced by Thomas Aquinas, he was a scholastic theologian. Winchelsey held various benefices in England, and was the Chancellor of Oxford University before being elected to Canterbury in early 1293. Although he initially had the support of Edward I, Winchelsey later became a forceful opponent of the king. The archbishop was encouraged by the papacy to resist Edward's attempts to tax the clergy. Winchelsey was also an opponent of the king's treasurer Walter Langton as well as other clergy. On one occasion he rebuked an abbot so sternly that the abbot suffered a fatal heart attack. Following the election of a former royal clerk as Pope Clement V in 1305, the king was able to secure the archbishop's exile that same year. Upon the succession of Edward's son, Edward II, Winchelsey was allowed to return to England after the new king petitioned the pope to allow his return. Winchelsey soon joined the king's enemies, however, and was the only bishop to object to the return of the king's favourite, Piers Gaveston. Winchelsey died in 1313. Although miracles were alleged to have happened at his tomb, an attempt to have him declared a saint was unsuccessful. (Full article...)

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Kellogg College is one of the newest colleges at Oxford. It was established on 1 March 1990 as Rewley House, and changed its name on 1 October 1994 to reflect donations made by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation (set up by the American food industrialist Will Keith Kellogg). It accepts only graduate students, mainly on a part-time basis (there are about 150 full-time students compared to 400 part-time students), and operates to support Oxford's lifelong learning provision, as well as continuing education and professional development. It traces its heritage back to efforts made by the university to provide education to those outside the university from the 1870s onwards. The college acquired a site for a new home, in the Norham Manor of north Oxford, in 2004. The President of the college is the economist Jonathan Michie, who is also Director of the university's Department for Continuing Education. (Full article...)

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Credit: Romanempire

Magdalen College on May Morning. By tradition, revellers gather outside the college at 6am on 1 May (many having attended all-night balls and parties) and the college choir sings madrigals from the top of Magdalen Tower.

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Did you know

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

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

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“

Oxford is not intellectually stimulating – but that would be a good deal to ask of a university atmosphere... It is a dreadful climate, I know, but one seems able to eat and sleep very well, and keep very healthy.

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— T. S. Eliot

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Credit: Dbmag9

The main quadrangle of Worcester College; on the left are the medieval buildings known as "the cottages", the most substantial surviving part of Gloucester College, Worcester's predecessor on the same site.

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