Portal:University of Oxford

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...)

James McCormack (1910–1975) was a United States Army officer and the first Director of Military Applications of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, McCormack also studied at Hertford College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After service in World War II, he was chosen in 1947 as the Director of Military Applications of the Atomic Energy Commission. He took a pragmatic approach to handling the issue of the proper agency to hold custody of the nuclear weapons stockpile, and supported Edward Teller's development of thermonuclear weapons. He was appointed Director of Nuclear Applications at the Air Research and Development Center in 1952, later becoming Deputy Commander of the Air Research and Development Command. After retiring from the military in 1955, McCormack became the first head of the Institute for Defense Analysis, a non-profit research organization. In 1958 he became vice president for industrial and governmental relations at MIT, and originated a proposal for a new space agency, which eventually became NASA. (Full article...)

St Hugh's College was established in 1886 as a college for women by Elizabeth Wordsworth, great-niece of the poet William Wordsworth. She used money inherited from her father, who had been Bishop of Lincoln, and named the college after St Hugh, a 13th-century Bishop of Lincoln. Men were first admitted in 1986. It is based in north Oxford, between Banbury Road on the east and Woodstock Road on the west, and has large grounds. There are about 370 undergraduates and 225 postgraduates; the college is able to house all undergraduates and many of the postgraduates in buildings on the main college site for the duration of their studies. Two large lawns are used by students all year round, and the gardens are also the venue for croquet and tennis. St Hugh's is the only Oxford college with its own basketball courts. Alumni include the politicians Barbara Castle and Theresa May, the Burmese activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, the suffragette Emily Davison and the child-prodigy mathematician Ruth Lawrence. The Principal, appointed in 2007, is the Scottish lawyer Elish Angiolini. (Full article...)