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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 in 1209, some academics fled north-east to Cambridge where they established what became 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 thirty-nine semi-autonomous constituent colleges, four permanent private halls, 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.

It 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 30 prime ministers of the United Kingdom and many heads of state and government around the world. 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 Council of Keble College, Oxford ran the college (in conjunction with the Warden) from its foundation in 1868 until 1952. The council – a group of between nine and twelve men – has been described as "an external Council of ecclesiastical worthies", as most of the members came from outside the college, and many were not otherwise linked to the university. Keble was established by public subscription as a memorial to the clergyman John Keble. The first council members were drawn from the committee whose work had raised the money to build the college. By keeping matters relating to religion and the college's internal affairs in the hands of the council, the founders hoped to maintain Keble's religious position as "a bastion of 'orthodox' Anglican teaching" against the opponents of Tractarianism. In total, 54 men served on the Council, 11 of whom were college alumni; in 1903, Arthur Winnington-Ingram (Bishop of London) became the first former Keble student to join the council. It ceased to exist after 9 April 1952, when new statutes of the college placed full management in the hands of the Warden and Fellows. (Full article...)

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Bill Clinton (born 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Born and raised in Arkansas, he studied at Georgetown University before earning a Rhodes Scholarship to attend University College, Oxford. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, before leaving for Yale Law School, where he met his future wife, Hillary Clinton, who has served as the United States Secretary of State since 2009. Clinton was elected president in 1992, and presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. After a failed health care reform attempt, Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, for the first time in forty years. Two years later, Clinton became the first member of the Democratic Party since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second full term as president. He successfully passed welfare reform and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, providing health coverage for millions of children. Later, he was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice in a scandal involving a White House intern, but was acquitted by the U.S. Senate and served his complete term of office. Clinton left office with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any U.S. president since World War II. Since then, he has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work. (more...)

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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...)

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Credit: Godfrey Kneller

Henry Compton, who studied at The Queen's College, was Bishop of Oxford from 1674 to 1676 and Bishop of London from 1675 to 1713. He was one of the "Immortal Seven" who wrote to William III, Prince of Orange (later William III of England) asking him to force James II of England to make his daughter Mary heir, rather than the newborn Catholic James Francis Edward Stuart.

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Did you know

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

... that economist Barbara Ward (pictured), an early advocate of sustainable development, was the first woman ever to address a synod of Roman Catholic bishops?
... that Sir Albert Napier was described as the "midwife to civil legal aid"?
... that academic Anastasios Christodoulou was named 'Anastasios' ('Resurrection') by his parents as he was born on Easter Day?
... that cricket writer Gerald Howat won the Cricket Society's Golden Jubilee award for his biography of Learie Constantine?
... that William Wroth founded the first independent chapel in Wales in 1639, after he refused to obey King Charles' instruction to allow sports to be played on Sundays?

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Ladies and gentlemen, here is the result of event number nine, the one mile: first, no. 41, R.G. Bannister, of the Amateur Athletics Association and formerly of Exeter and Merton Colleges, with a time which is a new meeting and track record, and which subject to ratification will be a new English Native, British (National), British (All-Comers), European, British Empire and World Record. The time is three...

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— Norris McWhirter, announcing Roger Bannister's achievement in running a mile in under four minutes on 6 May 1954 at the university's Iffley Road Track. The remainder of his announcement was drowned out by cheering.

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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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