College Record 2017

atmosphere of Wolfson, and the fact, as Maita later put it, that all the tables in Hall
were at the same height and spouses were not transparent. The architecture of the
place was also very congenial to someone like Maita, trained in Brazilian modernity
in the tradition of Oscar Niemeyer and others of his generation. A few years ago, we
found ourselves staying with friends a short distance from Portofino in Italy and just
a few yards from Isaiah Berlin’s summer house. It meant a lot to Maita to see the
beautiful curved bay of Portofino, which inspired our first President to suggest to the
architects Powell and Moya that they adopt a curved layout for our iconic B block
leading to the bridge over the Cherwell – the ‘Berlin curve’.
Nor did I initially understand what Wolfson meant within the wider University
system.
I was aware early on that Iffley College was founded in 1965 as part of a solution
to the University problem of entitlement. It was designed to absorb many of the
academics who, for one reason or another, had no college attachment. Once a
building on Banbury Road was secured, the intake of graduate students started in
1968, by which time the college was renamed Wolfson. It is easy to forget now just
how radical the creation of graduate colleges was in the 1960s. This was brought
home to me by reading Michael Brock’s 2003 account of the early days of the
College reproduced in the delightful book about its first fifty years, compiled and
edited by John Penney and Roger Tomlin. Michael Brock characterises Oxford’s
attitude towards the development of graduate colleges as ‘a mixture of disdain and
alarm’. Disdain because the prevailing view, particularly in the humanities and social
sciences, was that teaching undergraduates is what really matters in a university.
Alarm because graduate colleges would make possible the implementation of a
rather unpopular recommendation in the 1966 Franks Report, namely that students
going on to graduate studies be released by their undergraduate colleges to seek
more graduate-friendly institutions. Brock himself admits that when he came to
Wolfson after 16 years of a tutorial fellowship in Oxford, he was slow to grasp the
awkward truth, espoused by Isaiah Berlin, that ‘for good or ill a place among the
world’s leading universities no longer depended, to any great degree, on excellence
in undergraduate teaching.’
That was then and this is now.
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