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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 position of Laudian Professor of Arabic was established at Oxford in 1636 by William Laud (pictured), who at the time was Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Archbishop of Canterbury. The first professor was Edward Pococke, who was working as a chaplain in Aleppo in what is now Syria when Laud asked him to return to Oxford to take up the position. Laud's university regulations provided that the professor's lectures were to be attended by all medical students and bachelors of arts at the university, although this seems not to have happened since Pococke had few students. In 1881, a university statute provided that the professor was to lecture in "the Arabic, Syriac, and Chaldee Languages", and attached the professorship to a fellowship at St John's College. Successive professors had few students until after the Second World War, when numbers increased because of the reputation of Sir Hamilton Gibb and because some British students became interested in Arabic culture while serving in the Middle East during the war. Julia Bray, the Laudian Professor as of 2015, was appointed in 2012 and is the first woman to hold the position. (Full article...)

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Richard Dawkins (born 1941) is a British biological theorist with a background in ethology. He is a popular science author focusing on evolution. He came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution. In 1982, he developed this view in The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of Selection, emphasizing that the phenotypic effects of genes are not necessarily limited to an organism's body but can stretch via biochemistry and behaviour into other organisms and the environment. Dawkins is a prominent critic of religion, creationism and pseudoscience. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described a dysteleological perspective on the process of evolution by natural selection as "blind", without a design or a goal. In his 2006 million-selling book The God Delusion, he contended that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist, writing that such beliefs, based on faith rather than on evidence, qualify as a delusion. Dawkins retired from his position at Oxford University in 2008. (more...)

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Christ Church (sometimes known as "The House" from its Latin name, Ædes Christicode: lat promoted to code: la , or "House of Christ") is one of the largest Oxford colleges, and is also the site of the cathedral church of the Diocese of Oxford, namely Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. The college can trace its history from 1525, when Cardinal Thomas Wolsey suppressed the Abbey of St Frideswide in Oxford and founded Cardinal College; he fell from favour before it was completed. King Henry VIII refounded it as King Henry VIII's College in 1532, and then (after the break from the Roman Catholic Church) as Christ Church in 1546, making it the cathedral of the new Oxford diocese as well. The buildings also include Tom Tower designed by Sir Christopher Wren, where "Great Tom" rings 101 times every night. Christ Church has produced thirteen British prime ministers, the two most recent being Anthony Eden (1955–57) and Sir Alec Douglas-Home (1963–64). The college is the setting for parts of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, as well as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland – Carroll was a Fellow of the college and taught mathematics. Christ Church has been used in the filming of the movies of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and the film adaptation of Philip Pullman's novel Northern Lights. (Full article...)

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Credit: Bob Collowan

Hertford Bridge, also known as the Bridge of Sighs, at Hertford College. The bridge, designed by Thomas Graham Jackson, links the Old and New Quadrangles of the college, which are on opposite sides of New College Lane. It was completed in 1914.

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Did you know

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

... that Kenelm Hubert Digby was the proposer of the notorious 1933 "King and Country" debate in the Oxford Union (debating chamber pictured)?
... that the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club claims to be the second oldest ice hockey team in the world?
... that Christopher Elrington, general editor of the Victoria County History, was a professor at the University of London even though he never taught there?
... that the position of Laudian Professor of Arabic was established at Oxford by William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury?
... that Gwilym Davies was the first person to broadcast in Welsh, on Saint David's Day in 1923?

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“

The Master of Balliol has been ill but unfortunately is getting better. Otherwise deaths have been poor for the time of year.

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— Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham College

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Credit: David Iliff

A 360-degree view of the main quadrangle of Keble College. Designed by the 19th-century architect William Butterfield, the buildings have attracted considerable praise and criticism for their use of bricks in various colours and patterns, in contrast to the older stone-clad colleges elsewhere in the city.

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