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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, some Oxford academics fled northeast to Cambridge, where, in 1209, they established 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 43 constituent colleges, consisting of 36 semi-autonomous colleges, four permanent private halls and three societies (colleges that are departments of the university, without their own royal charter), 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. The university 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 31 prime ministers of the United Kingdom and many heads of state and government around the world. As of October 2022,^[update] 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 Registrar of the University of Oxford is one of the university's senior officials, acting (in the words of the university's statutes) as the "head of the central administrative services", with responsibility for "the management and professional development of their staff and for the development of other administrative support". The workload of the role, which has a 550-year history, has increased over time. In the 16th century, it was regarded as a lucrative position and one registrar reacted violently when the university voted to remove him from office for failing to carry out his duties for a year, leading to his temporary imprisonment. A commission headed by former Prime Minister H. H. Asquith recommended in 1922 that Oxford should improve its administration and that the registrar should become a more significant figure. As the historian Brian Harrison put it, Oxford's administration was "edging... slowly from decentralized amateurism towards centralized professionalism." The growth in Oxford's administration led to a move in 1968 to purpose-built accommodation in Wellington Square (pictured): until that time, the administration had been housed in the Clarendon Building in the centre of Oxford. About 4,000 of the university's staff of approximately 8,000 are under the Registrar's control. (Full article...)

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Montague Druitt (1857–1888) was one of the suspects in the Jack the Ripper murders that took place in London between August and November 1888. He came from an upper-middle class English background, and studied at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. After graduating, he took a position at a boarding school and pursued a parallel career in the law; he qualified as a barrister in 1885. His main interest outside work was cricket, which he played with many leading players of the time, including Lord Harris and Francis Lacey. In November 1888, he lost his post at the school for reasons that remain unclear. One month later his body was found drowned in the River Thames. His death, which was found to be a suicide, roughly coincided with the end of the murders that were attributed to Jack the Ripper. Private suggestions in the 1890s that he could have committed the crimes became public knowledge in the 1960s, and led to the publication of books that proposed him as the murderer. The evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, however, and many writers from the 1970s onwards have rejected him as a likely suspect. (Full article...)

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All Souls College was founded by Henry Chichele (the Archbishop of Canterbury) and King Henry VI in 1438. There are no undergraduates at the college, although there have been at some stages of its history, but the Codrington Library is open to some students from the wider university. All of the college's members are Fellows, including many distinguished scholars. Several of the university's professorships are attached to the college, such as the Chichele Professorships and the Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature. Many academics from overseas spend time at the college as Visiting Fellows. All Souls is centrally located on the High Street, near the Bodleian Library and the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. The chapel contains a complete set of misericords from the 15th century. The architect Nicholas Hawksmoor remodelled much of All Souls in the 18th century. The customs of the college include a feast every one hundred years (last held in 2001) at which the Fellows parade around All Souls, carrying flaming torches and singing the "Mallard Song", to commemorate an incident when a mallard is said to have flown out of the foundations as it was being built. (Full article...)

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Credit: Simon

The cloisters of New College. Founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, the college has educated distinguished names such as the author John Galsworthy, the legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart and the art historian Neil MacGregor.

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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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Well, take a man connected with the legislative class, directly by birth and indirectly by opportunities, give him at least enough taste not to be ashamed of poetry, give him also enough energy not to be ashamed of football, and add a profound satisfaction with Oxford in general and Balliol in particular, and there you are.

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— Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street (1914) – the speaker is describing the "essential Balliol"

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