Portal:University of Oxford

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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 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 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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Sir William Walton (1902–1983) was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Façade – An Entertainment, the cantata Belshazzar's Feast and his First Symphony. Born in Lancashire, the son of a musician, Walton was a chorister and then an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. On leaving the university (without a degree), he was taken up by the literary Sitwell siblings, who provided him with a home and a cultural education. His earliest work of note was a collaboration with Edith Sitwell, Façade, which at first brought him notoriety as a modernist, but later became a popular ballet score. In middle age, Walton left Britain and set up home with his young wife on the Italian island of Ischia. By this time, he had ceased to be regarded as a modernist, and some of his compositions of the 1950s were criticised as old-fashioned. In his last years, his works came back into critical fashion; his later compositions, dismissed by critics at the time of their premieres, were revalued and regarded alongside his earlier works. His most popular compositions continue to be frequently performed in the 21st century, and by 2010 all his works were recorded for CD. (more...)

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Wolfson College, in north Oxford on the banks of the River Cherwell, is a college for postgraduate students (about 600) and fellows. It was established in 1965 as Iffley College with grants from 12 other colleges, but it did not have any premises initially. The college was renamed in honour of Sir Isaac Wolfson, in recognition of his financial contribution to the construction of the college under its first President, Sir Isaiah Berlin. The main building, designed by Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, was completed in 1974 and were given Grade II listed building status in 2011. There are three quadrangles: the central quadrangle (known as the Berlin Quad), the Tree Quad built around established trees, and the River Quad into which the Cherwell has been diverted to form a punt harbour. Unlike many other Oxford colleges, there is no separate High Table or Common Room for the fellows, and the students and fellows eat and associate together. Alumni include the astronomer Richard Ellis, the novelist Iain Pears and the mathematician Nigel Hitchin. (Full article...)