College Record 2013

All our academic clusters have been bubbling over with activity. Just to pull
a handful of events out of the cornucopia, we have had a Life-Writing series on
Portraiture and Life-Writing, an all-day conference for the centenary of Leonard
Woolf ’s The Village in the Jungle, a day to celebrate the one-hundredth volume of
Richard Sorabji’s Ancient Commentators on Aristotle project, a three-day workshop
on translation and bilingualism in Ancient Near Eastern texts, a conference on
Tibetan life-writing, the arrival of the Leverhulme-funded Empires of Faith
project, seminars and workshops on India in the Eyes of Others and on India-
China comparative studies, and an end-of-year open meeting on Digital Research,
crossing over disciplines – which is the point of all our clusters.
The academic year came to a climax with two major events within a week of each
other. One was the Berlin Lecture on 30 May, given by Alfred Brendel, a ‘piano
alphabet’ of magnetising interest, drawing on his lifetime’s experience as one of
the great pianists of our time, and paying tribute to his friend Isaiah Berlin. The
second, on 6 June, Isaiah Berlin’s anniversary, was the naming of our new Leonard
Wolfson Auditorium, designed by Berman Guedes Stretton, built by Benfield and
Loxley, part-funded by the Wolfson Foundation, driven along by the Home Bursar
Barry Coote, and masterminded by the Bursar, Ed Jarron. About a hundred and fifty
Wolfsonians and friends of Wolfson, including the Vice-Chancellor and members
of the Wolfson Foundation, came to hear a celebratory programme of words and
music and to look round the building for the first time, and some came back again
with all the families and the neighbours and the students on the Saturday for the
public opening. We could not have tested the acoustics more thoroughly, from a
string duo and a poem by Jon Stallworthy to a brass band and the a cappella group
‘Out Of the Blue’. We had some very good publicity, and the building has been
generally acclaimed as a triumph. It has immediately become much in demand, and
one visitor to a lecture was overheard saying to his neighbour: ‘I’m having a bad
case of auditorium-envy’. All looks set fair for the building to become a popular and
much-used part of the college, and for the development of our plans for the next
phase of the Academic Wing. At the end of my fifth academic year as President,
three years away from our Fiftieth Anniversary, I thank all those who have helped
to make this part of my vision for the college such a success.
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