Proposals under discussion by a working party headed by the President of Corpus Christi college may result in the colleges losing many of their admissions rights under a centralized admissions system.

Although I am in favour of centralizing power in some areas, this, most certainly is not one. Diversity of admissions is one of the things that ensures student diversity. Centralizing the admissions process, to my mind, can only reduce that diversity.

Write to Sir Tim Lankester and make your views known: tim.lankester@ccc.ox.ac.uk

Click here to see the working party report: Working Party report.

Or read the Education Guardian report, below.

Continue reading "Colleges may lose admissions rights" »

Posted by Guy Spier at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

One of our correspondents, Bill Whelan who writes for Oxford Magazine - sent us this piece of correspondence that he received from a Columbia grad & professional recruiter.

His first three prescriptions for a solid, Harvard or Yale size foundation?

Start early, put real resources into the effort, use the alumni base. Hard? Not really - once you've got everybody on the right track.

We recently met Jon Dellandrea. He's a Candian dynamo.

Read it all in the extended entry below.

Continue reading "How to fundraise - from a Harvard/Columbia grad" »

Posted by Guy Spier at 01:22 AM | Permalink

This story comes from the Oxford Student:

“The new plans retain the key dangerous idea of taking authority away from academics and giving it to a chief executive vice-chancellor and a committee with a heavy weighting of outsiders,” said Gillian Evans, a Cambridge professor who is heavily involved with the governance debate at Oxford.

You can read the rest of the article below. I have two points to make.

Firstly, there is no way that you can be an effective academic while you are also responsible for running the University. The overwhelming majority of decisions that Hood proposes to have taken by the University executive are unlikely to have any impact on academic feedom whatsoever.

Secondly, if the Dons want the University to remain world class, there is no choice but to centralize decisionmaking.

My personal suspicion is that many of the people resisting Hood's proposals know that they are mediocre academics that would not survive when subjected to closer scrutiny. They prefer to hide behind the banner of academic freedom.

http://www.oxfordstudent.com/mt2005wk0/news/dons_set_for_fresh_showdown_with_vice-chancellor

Continue reading "Dons set for a new showdown with the Vice Chancellor" »

Posted by Guy Spier at 10:04 PM | Permalink

This in from the Education Guardian.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/universityfunding/story/0,14337,1575006,00.html

Actually, the headline is, as best I can tell, a misrepresentation of what is written in the report - which identifies the need to come up withleast £100 million to as much as £200 million.

The report also only touches on the idea that resources may be allocated away from the less successful departments and towards the more successful departments.

If this is, indeed what John Hood intends, I believe that it is the right approach.

To read the report itself, click here:
Oxford's 5 year corporate plan

Posted by Guy Spier at 02:23 PM | Permalink

We received the following email and copies of speeches from Gavin Williams.

Dear Alumni

You have the flysheets accompanying the Resolutions that were put to Congregation last week, and Don Fraser's speech (editors note: see previous entry). I attach copies of speeches made For the Resolution and Against the Amendment, including an uncorrected copy of Professor Fraser's text.

Gavin Williams

Continue reading "Speeches from Debate on May 17th 2005" »

Posted by Paula Hoare at 12:31 PM | Permalink

We received the following email and documents from Professor Don Fraser, Worcester College and Department of Earth Sciences.

Dear Alumni in New York!

Greetings from Oxford. As the speaker who introduced the Resolution on what became an issue of academic freedom on 17th May, I was happy to see that the debate in Oxford has been put up on your web-pages already.

For background, I am scientist who has, amongst other things, recently spent nearly two years at Caltech and who has a collaborative research proramme at Princeton. I have never been remotely close to speaking in Congregation. So it may be of interest to your members if I enclose copies of the Flysheets which were published with the Gazette on 5th May and also of what I said to Congregation which voted for the Resolution 351 : 153. Gavin Williams did a great job in leading the debate against Council's amendment which was comprehensively defeated.

In particular, I wish now to stress that all the speakers for the resolution - and I believe most academics in Oxford are pro-appraisal!

Continue reading "Oxford Debate on Academic Freedom - May 17th 2005" »

Posted by Paula Hoare at 09:07 AM | Permalink

Amanda Pullinger (member of the OAANY Board and Membership Secretary) had the opportunity to visit with Dr. John Hood last week in Oxford

Her report is below:

Continue reading "Amanda Pullinger visits Vice Chancellor, Dr. John Hood" »

Posted by Guy Spier at 07:05 PM | Permalink

Dear Reader

I am sure that you share with my concern over the future of Oxford. Since John Hood has taken office as the new Vice Chancellor, he has started to take action and make changes - however, without involving the alumni. This does not make sense if Oxford wants to have a significant alumni fundraising component in its future.

But if we want to be involved, we are going to have to take some action. At the bottom of this email I have listed three action items that I hope that you will follow up on.

Oxford's Academic Strategy
Since taking office, John Hood has taken a number of steps, the most important of which has been to issue a “green paper” discussion document. If you have not read it, I urge you to, as the document has been carefully prepared, and contains much to feast on. Here are a few excerpts:

Funding

· “Oxford’s recent achievements have to be seen against a deeply problematic funding environment. The fact that staff have been able to continue to perform at the highest levels in this environment is remarkable.”

Continue reading "The Future of Oxford - a call to action" »

Posted by Guy Spier at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)