Summer 2010 - St Antony's College - University of Oxford

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Warden’s Letter (Photo: Greg Smolonski) By the time you read this the College will have celebrated its 60th anniversary. We are still very young indeed by Oxford standards but as I look back I am struck by how much we have accomplished in such a short time and how much my predecessors as Warden achieved. Our Founder Antonin Besse and our first Warden, Sir William Deakin, envisaged a College which was to “to be a centre of advanced study and research in the fields of modern international history, philosophy, economics and politics and to provide an international centre within the University where graduate students from all over the world can live and work together in close contact with senior members of the University who are specialists in their fields”. I like to think that they would be pleased to see what has grown from that seed. St Antony’s is widely recognized in Oxford as the international college both because of its makeup and for what it does. Our students come from almost 70 countries and our alumni are in as many again. We have over 40 fellows and 7 regional centres whose work covers many issues and most parts of the world. When the College was founded in 1950, the Cold War was the dominating fact in international relations and the early priorities of the College reflected that. Its fellows specialized in such areas as the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Communist China. When Sir Raymond Carr became Warden in 1968 he widened the College’s net to bring in the study of Spain and Latin America. His successors, Lord (Ralf) Dahrendorf and Sir Marrack Goulding, presided over the College as the Cold War came to its abrupt end and the hopes of a new and peaceful world rapidly faded in the 1990s. Today, as it has always done, St Antony’s continues to remain engaged with the world. We continue to study countries and regions but we also look increasingly at such international issues as development, education, migration, resources, or religion. There has always been one striking gap in our coverage of the world— North America—but I am very pleased to inform you that we are starting to do something about that. Thanks to the generosity of a Canadian donor, we are going to be setting up a research fellowship for the study of North America as a region—and that includes everything from the Arctic to the Isthmus of Panama and the Caribbean as well. Initially the new research fellow will run a series of seminars and encourage research in issues which cross boundaries such as trade, climate change, or security. I do not want to spoil what should be a festive mood but we have to acknowledge that the College, like the whole education sector in the United Kingdom, will face challenges in the next few years. The new coalition government is going to make severe cuts in expenditure, by some estimates as high as 25-30% over the next few years. Universities are bracing themselves for cuts in the funds available both for teaching and research. What we don’t know yet is how much the government is going to let us raise our fees to compensate. As a relatively poor College we don’t have much in the way of a cushion. On the other hand, we have, thanks to the foresight of our Bursar and the Governing Body, maintained the value of our endowment over the past 10 years and kept our costs under control. Our budget has balanced every year for the past 5 years and even shown a small surplus. In addition we have continued to find donors, some alumni but others too who like what we do, to support our work. Our annual fund is becoming increasingly important in funding student and fellows’ activities, from conferences to travel for research. Some 7% of our alumni have contributed to the College in the last 5 years. As a percentage that doesn’t match the Oxford average of 14% or begin to reach the dizzying heights of Yale and Princeton 60% of whose alumni are contributors. I like to think of it rather as a promising start. Elsewhere in the Newsletter you will read about some of the activities which have taken place here in the past year. One day conferences, workshops, seminars, lectures—as Warden my only complaint is that I cannot get to even a fraction of them. And our Centres are already planning their programmes for the next academic year. We will be welcoming new Fellows to our Governing Body, new students, and visiting researchers. We will be breaking ground for our new Middle East Building and, with any luck, starting the preparations for our Gateway Buildings. To all our alumni—come back and take a look for yourselves at how we are doing.
Ralf Dahrendorf Memorial Lecture On Friday 30 April, the first Ralf Dahrendorf Memorial Lecture was delivered by Lord (Adair) Turner, chair of the Financial Services Authority . His subject was “Wellbeing and Inequality in Post- Industrial Society”. Lord Turner He gave a penetrating analysis of the problems that have emerged in advanced capitalist societies, questioning the fetishisation of economic growth and examining the damaging effects of high levels of inequality, as well as those of instability in the financial system. Lord Skidelsky Responses to the lecture were given by Lord (Robert) Skidelsky, the biographer of John Maynard Keynes, and Professor Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and Fellow of St Antony’s. Issues included the question of whether, as is now fashionable in some quarters, happiness should be considered a more appropriate measure of the success of an economic and social model than economic growth, whether globalisation necessarily leads to an increase in inequality, and the impact of immigration. This was the first in a series of annual lectures to commemorate the life and work of the College’s third Warden, to be held on the Friday nearest his birthday. It was organised in the context of our newly-established Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom, dedicated to a subject central to Ralf Dahrendorf ’s life work. The programme has three major elements: the annual Dahrendorf Lecture and Colloquium, a research agenda (which this year focuses particularly on the subject of free speech), and a number of Dahrendorf Scholars, selected in a competitive process from among the College’s students. As well as working with the Programme, each of the scholars pursues a piece of independent research. This year’s scholars are Dominic Burbidge (“Doing God in Britain”), Andreas Knab (“Jihadists and free speech on the internet”), Christopher Kutarna (“Democracy and governance reform in China”) and Xu Xibai (“Liberalism in China”). Professor Paul Collier The inaugural Dahrendorf Lecture and Colloquium was attended by distinguished former friends and colleagues of Ralf Dahrendorf, as well as by members of the Dahrendorf family. It was generously supported by the Zeit Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, represented at the event by Professor Michael Göring. The work of the Dahrendorf Programme as a whole is also funded by the Aurea Foundation of Canada and the Fritt Ord Foundation of Norway. A full video recording of the Dahrendorf Lecture and discussion among the panellists, as well as a text of the lecture, can be viewed on the website of the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom at http://www.sant.ox.ac. uk/esc/dahrendorffreedom.html. Timothy Garton Ash
Page 1: St Antony’s Summer 2010 NEWSLETTE
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Page 9 and 10: St Antony’s International Review
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Summer 2010 - St Antony's College - University of Oxford

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