Somerville College Report - University of Oxford

14 | Principal’s Report
gave a fascinating talk on Somerville’s behalf about her prize-winning biography
of Matisse at a special reception at Christie’s in June. Katherine Duncan-Jones
celebrated her seventieth birthday by publishing a critically acclaimed book,
Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan 1592-1623, and joining a large lunch party of
her former students in College.
Tuition fees and student support
This was a tumultuous year for higher education in the United Kingdom, and
my reintroduction to British academic life after nearly a decade in the United
States has certainly not been boring. The University of Oxford has been through
intense debate about the level of tuition fees to charge in the wake of the coalition
government’s decision to withdraw financial support for university teaching.
(Somerville’s JCR voted to join the nation-wide protests against tuition fees in
London in November, but none of our students got involved in any of the more
strident demonstrations.) Oxford’s decision to charge the maximum fee of £9,000
per year per student (in common with the majority of the country’s universities)
was not a foregone conclusion. Equally closely argued was our provision of fee
waivers and bursary support, which will bring down the cost for students from
families with a low household income.
The government’s Office for Fair Access has approved Oxford’s financial package,
along with our plans for significant additional efforts to attract the brightest
students from disadvantaged backgrounds. With the publication of access
arrangements for all English universities, it turns out that Oxford is among the least
expensive to attend. Our next challenge will be that of persuading able students
and their families that the new fee arrangements, rather than being the massive
life-time debt that has been portrayed, amount in fact to a very manageable level of
tax on future income, payable only when they start to earn at about the average for
graduates. At the same time, there is a new spirit in the air that no university should
ignore: students and their families seek value for money, for an education that now
imposes more direct and visible costs on them than ever before. It makes it all the