College Record 2014

We are approaching our fiftieth anniversary in 2016; and as 50-year-olds do, we
look to our past as well as to our future. The Old Wolves get together regularly for
nostalgic lunches; the History of the College booklet is to be brought up to date for
the anniversary by John Penney and Roger Tomlin. On 4 May 2014 we marked a
tragic moment in the College’s pre-history, by unveiling a plaque on the side of the
LWA in memory of those who died when a Whitley V aircraft crashed on the site
of Wolfson College on 4 May 1941. A number of those who witnessed the crash
as children were present; and, even more remarkably, we learnt from our current
Fellows, Jon Austyn and Nick Rawlins, of the medical outcomes of the event in the
development of transplant surgery, which have affected many people’s lives to the
good.
We look to the past and respect our traditions, but we invest in and celebrate
our future. Phase II of our building plans starts in October, and we’re immensely
grateful to our major donor for the project, John Adams, as we are to the Wolfson
Foundation. We hope that the new library extension, the new café, the new lodge
and the new front quad, will be as much admired and as much used as the auditorium.
Our students are our future, and we applaud their work, their spirit and their
involvement with the College. We currently have 608 students from all over the
world, 229 of whom arrived this year, and 431 of whom are DPhil students. We
have four Rhodes scholars and six Wolfson Foundation Humanities scholars. We
are doing as much as we can to help and support our graduates, with unstinting hard
work coming from the Development Office and the Senior Tutor’s Office, and with
the generous and imaginative commitment of our Bursar, whose priority is always
the students. We currently award 28 scholarships, with that number set to rise to
49 when all of our Oxford Wolfson Marriott scholarships come on board. We gave
out 103 travel and conference awards and 24 academic bursaries this year, and our
total expenditure on scholarships, travel awards and academic bursaries, was just
over £213,000. We also had a very successful ‘Wolfson Innovate’, or WIN event
this year, organised by Pat Nuttall, with support from Bill Conner, which attracted
a number of donors to provide prizes, judging and mentorship for students pitching
creative new ideas for social innovation. We hope it will be the first of many such.
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