Wednesday, 26 October 2011
College Profile: St. Antony's College
This is an article in my series on Oxford's colleges and PPHs. These 'profiles' are based entirely on my own personal perspective and opinions; prospective students are advised to look rather to the prospectus and alternative prospectus of any college they are considering applying to, rather than place too much stock in my descriptions. Previous articles describe what colleges are, then discuss Nuffield College, the PPHs, All Souls' College, and University College.
Like Nuffield College, which I profiled previously, St. Antony's is a graduate-only college with a social sciences focus, that does not admit MBA students in spite of its speciality. (With this article, I have now covered all of the colleges that do not admit MBAs.)
Unlike Nuffield, St. Antony's belongs to one of the waves of college-building that have occurred periodically in the history of the university, namely the one that occurred in the 1960s. At this time a number of colleges were created that catered to the emerging phenomenon of graduate students—and, unlike the existing colleges, many of these were created with a specific subject focus: Templeton for business and management, St. Antony's for international relations, and, somewhat later, Green College for medical graduates.
Actually, many Oxford colleges were created with a specific subject speciality in mind, but these "specialities" tend to disolve after a couple centuries, so these 1960s colleges owe their focus more to their youth than anything. In St. Antony's case, however, the association with international studies is likely to continue for some time, since, besides its own library, the college site also houses the University's Middle East Centre Library, Latin American Centre Library, the Bodleian Japanese Library, and the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre Library. So any researcher focusing on these areas has a good incentive to apply to St. Antony's as his first-choice college.
Because it uses the buildings of a nineteenth-century Anglican convent, the college architecture is far nicer than one would expect for a 1960s foundation. (St. Stephen's House and St. Cross College also salvage ruins of the Oxford movement for their buildings, with beautiful results—Victorian monasteries being far more attractive architecturally than the kinds of new buildings people were putting up in the 1960s!)
St. Antony's is perhaps best known throughout the university for its lively social scene, capitalising on its diverse and international student body to organise themed bops such as Balkan Night, Latin American Party, and many others, that are widely attended by students from all over the university.
Unfortunately, as I was never in Oxford on weekends, I missed out on these bops, and with no MBA students there, I never had any occasion to interact with St. Antony's College myself.
All the same, I have great respect for a graduate-only college that is able to make such an imprint on the university social scene: sometimes I get the impression that the graduate-only colleges recede into the background a bit, as their students prefer to be involved primarily with their departments, or simply focus on their individual research without getting involved in the larger university at all. Clearly, at St. Antony's, this is not the case, and I commend them for that.
