It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to write to you again as Chair of the Board of History. Those with long memories may remember that I held this role a decade or so ago, and it has now rotated back to me for a second three-year term. It is a very good time to be returning to the office. Much has changed in the interim in the Faculty, and largely for the better. We have been able to recruit a number of new colleagues; we have expanded our graduate student body, especially at the Masters level; and amidst all of the changes in Britain, Europe and the world over the last few years, there is, one senses, a new hunger for the insights which History can provide. That is certainly true at the undergraduate level, where we continue to receive large numbers of applications, especially for the highly successful joint school of History and Politics.
There are of course challenges too. The current funding model for students, both undergraduate and graduate, is not fit for purpose. A fee-based system has many shortcomings, most obviously the burdens it places on students in terms of debt. But that is particularly so when the value of the fee income it generates has fallen well below the break-even point. The consequences of that are being seen in the considerable number of job losses and cutbacks that have taken place in British universities over the last year or so. Oxford, as always, is a rather special case.
The Faculty benefits more than most from grants won by our researchers, from fees from overseas students, and from donations from alumni. But the urgent need for a new model of undergraduate funding is surely obvious to all. That is also true at the Masters level. Over recent years, a Masters-level qualification has become much more the norm in many disciplines, and that is also now true in History. Therefore many of our undergraduates wish to stay on to do a Masters degree, and we receive many applications from elsewhere, including from Europe and North America. There is, however, almost no funding available to support students doing Masters degrees, obliging them to fall back on loans and the bank of mum and dad (with all of the consequent inequalities). You will hear more about this in a forthcoming mailing to all History alumni.
But there are also many positive stories. Prominent among these is the new building, The Schwarzman Building, currently being constructed on the site of the former Radcliffe Infirmary. This will become in the summer of 2025 the single home for almost all of the Humanities faculties in Oxford, and it will give the Faculty for the first time a purpose-built home for teaching, for research students, and for the numerous research-funded projects which operate under our aegis. Moving will be stressful, but it is also a great opportunity for the Faculty to build its own future.
Alongside this, the Faculty remains a busy and lively community: the largest institution in the world, as we always rightly boast, for the study of History, and one which continues to expand into new regions of Global History, and new domains of cultural and social history. I hope that this newsletter will give you a sense of what we are doing, and we hope you are pleased with what you find.
Martin Conway
Chair of the History Faculty Board
martin.conway@history.ox.ac.uk
