What is Oxford University? Colleges Demystified

It occurs to us that we have been rabbiting on about Oxford Colleges as if everyone knows all about the place, but your emails have put us straight. So with apologies, here is our first take on the basics. (And, native informants, feel free to tell us what we’ve got wrong!)

Oxford University and Oxford Colleges

Oxford is not really a ‘university’ as most people think of one – it’s a grouping of thirty-nine colleges, each with its own identity and location, usually around a central quad and containing a chapel, dining hall, student housing, a library, and fellows’ (=faculty) rooms (=offices). Most Oxford Colleges are small, with a few hundred undergraduates, and they range in ages from nearly 800 to a few dozen years old. Many were initially religious foundations, some for students coming from a particular area of Britain. Because they grew over a long period, they sometimes build out in odd directions. Most have additional student housing, office buildings, playing fields and the like situated elsewhere in town. Cambridge University has a similar setup, but both town and university are slightly smaller.

Studying at Oxford as an undergraduate means that you have already chosen a field to major in (=’read’). Not every college offers every subject. And once enrolled, students don’t exactly take classes. There are traditional classroom lectures, which students can attend, or not. More important to the educational process, however, are the tutorials, weekly gatherings of one to three students plus a tutor. These focus on the reading and discussion of students’ written work. They are, from a North American perspective, wildly inefficient; they are also wildly successful in helping students to pass their famously difficult exams.

College Eating

Nobody will be surprised to hear that we are keenly interested in the eating at Oxford Colleges. The wealthier ones have fabulous chefs, and dining at high table is an experience not to be missed, for the food as well as the location! The three- or four-course dinners follow sherry or drinks in the Senior Common Room (‘SCR’, =faculty lounge, but classier), and precede dessert, which is a separate course in a different room, after the dessert that comes with the dinner. At this dessert, there is port, brandy, and dessert wine, along with fruit and chocolate. In case you haven’t eaten or drunk enough. And this course is often followed by coffee back in the SCR. Many of the colleges have elaborate rules around dessert, as for example that the third most junior fellow in attendance is responsible for passing chocolates around.

There is also, at some colleges, snuff. (One of Laurel’s proudest professional accomplishments is having served as Snuffmistress at Exeter College when she was a Visiting Fellow there in 2007-2008 – so she knows from snuff!) Lunches are much less elaborate and happen elsewhere than in hall, in less formal but still beautiful rooms, with excellent food.

What’s the Best College?

We are most familiar with the colleges that offer Classics, so our opinion is biased toward them. Christ Church is probably the most famous, not least because of Harry Potter. Plenty of other Colleges also host film crews, including for TV shows like Morse, Lewis, and Endeavour and movies like the Dark Materials series. (We saw some filming for a period piece at Merton just a couple of weeks ago!) Magdalen, St. John’s, and New College are also regularly singled out as especially attractive in various guidebooks and websites. But nearly every college has something uniquely beautiful about it: stunning gardens, a chapel, a rare painting by an Old Master, a deer park (really!), stained glass windows, medieval cloisters… Each College has a different reputation (e.g. as posh, or friendly, or athletic), well-known to insiders, but opaque to us.

We have, between us, had visiting gigs of one sort or another at: All Souls’, Christ Church, Corpus Christi, Exeter, St. Anne’s, St. Hugh’s, Wadham, and Worcester. So which is our very favourite? Whichever one is hosting us!