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), four are permanent private halls (owned by religious organisations), and three 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, 4 Fields Medalists, and 6 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 history of Brasenose College starts in 1509 when the college was founded on the site of Brasenose Hall by Richard Sutton and Bishop William Smyth. Its name is believed to derive from a bronze knocker (replica pictured) on the hall's door. The library and chapel were completed in the mid-seventeenth century, despite continuing financial problems. Under William Cleaver (Principal 1785–1809), the college began to be populated by gentlemen, its income doubled and academic success was considerable. New Quad was built between 1886 and 1911. Under Edward Hartopp Cradock Brasenose's academic record waned but it excelled at cricket and rowing; the reverse occurred under Charles Buller Heberden. Brasenose lost 115 men in the First World War and Lord Curzon's post-War reforms were successfully instituted. Sporting achievements again came at the cost of falling academic standards and finances. The 1970s saw the admission of women beginning in 1974, more post-graduate attendees and fewer domestic staff. Law and Philosophy, Politics and Economics were strong subjects under Principals Barry Nicholas and Herbert Hart) and the fellowship of Vernon Bogdanor. (Full article...)

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J. R. R. Tolkien was a British writer and university professor, best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, also at Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, with whom he shared membership in the Oxford literary discussion group the "Inklings". In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's published fiction includes The Silmarillion and other posthumously published books about what he called a legendarium, a connected body of tales, fictional histories, invented languages, and other literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, and Middle-earth. Most of these works were compiled from Tolkien's notes by his son Christopher Tolkien. The enduring popularity and influence of Tolkien's works have established him as the "father of modern fantasy literature". Tolkien's other published fiction includes stories not directly related to the legendarium, some of them originally told to his children. (more...)

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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: Todd Huffman

Part of the Inorganic Chemistry building in the Science Area on South Parks Road. Oxford has the biggest school of inorganic chemistry in the UK and one of the biggest in the world.

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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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“

It could not be real, he thought. It was a fragile city spun out of dreams, so small that he could have held it on the palm of his hand and blown it away into silver mist. It was not real. He had dreamed of it for so long that now, when he looked down into the valley, the mist formed itself into and towards spires that would vanish under the sun the moment he shut his eyes... He shut his eyes, opened them, and the towers were still there.

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— Elizabeth Goudge, from Towers in the Mist

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