The Record 2009 - Keble College - University of Oxford

The Life of the College
Fellowship. In November 2008 I was privileged to be asked to
read (from his own account of his time at Keble) at the grand
memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral in honour of the Revd
Chad Varah (1930), the founder of the Samaritans. Sadly, this
year we have lost Dr Robert Lucas, Emeritus Fellow in Plant
Sciences, who died in January 2009.
James Martin
This is surely also the place to mention the further challenge
grant of £36 million (in addition to the original £100 million)
offered to the James Martin 21 st Century School by Dr Martin
(Physics, 1952, and Honorary Fellow). Dr Martin’s remarkable
prescience about the challenges facing us all in the coming
century, and his decision that Oxford was the university which
was best placed to find answers, have elicited an extraordinary
response across the University. Many of our academics and
graduate students are actively involved in the many areas
of research covered by the School, and I hope Keble can
claim some small credit for playing a part in this outstanding
beneficence to Oxford and crucial contribution to solving the
problems of our common future.
The coming year holds an interesting array of challenges. Like
all colleges, and indeed all universities and private schools,
Keble is required to register with the Charity Commission, and
to that end we are amending the Statutes so that they are in the
right format. In Keble’s case this is made easier by the fact that
the College had new Statutes in 1952 and unlike some others,
ours are not encumbered by bye-laws or provisions about
medieval property. The year will also be challenging because of
the overall financial situation, especially to the extent that this
is likely to impact on the University’s finances, and therefore
indirectly on the colleges. We are already having to spend more
of our own College money on maintaining the tutorial system
and the level of academic provision we consider essential. But
I am glad to say that thanks to the work of our investment
advisory committee our endowment has held up better than
that of many of our peers, and certainly very much better than
the major US ivy-league universities which are usually held
out as models. The current year has also been a good year for
fund-raising, not least for the income from legacies, which are
vitally important to the College, and exceptional for the level of
conference business, for which we are indebted to the hard work
of many, but especially the Domestic Bursar, Janet Betts; we
shall have to see how far this continues in the next period.
As I write, my colleagues have already embarked on the process
of choosing my successor as Warden from October 2010 [see
9