Plans & Prospects 2023

Credit: John Cairns
Welcome
Sir Tim Hitchens
President
It’s always important to remember that the heart of the Wolfson community is the sheer variety of extraordinary
people who emerge from here. Three alumni come to mind in particular, each so different, working in such varied
fields; but equally fascinating and compelling.
Karim Khan was a DPhil candidate at Wolfson; he left to serve on a number of international tribunals and was last
year appointed as the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. This year, on 22nd February, he issued a
warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin on charges of the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
Tim Palmer completed his Oxford DPhil on General Relativity from Wolfson in 1977. He shifted from outer space to
inner space, building weather prediction models (he is responsible for the modern weather forecasts by percentage
likelihood of rain) as well as key climate change models. This year he received the highest accolade from the Royal
Astronomical Society, its Gold Medal; he lectured back at Wolfson this summer.
Sara Paretsky was a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson in 1997. She is one of America’s leading crime writers, having
published twenty-one novels in the V. I. Warshawski series set in her home city of Chicago. “VI” is a hard-boiled
Chicago woman fighting both crime and social injustice. I was lucky enough to meet Sara while in Chicago this Easter,
having just finished reading her latest novel (Overboard, told against the backdrop of the windy city emerging from its
pandemic lockdown).
One of the great pleasures of my job is to meet those who started here and became eminent. Another is to know
those who are setting off from here now, and who look set to change the world. How do we help them reach their
potential?
First, we continue to search for scholarships to ensure that all those who are qualified to study at Wolfson can find
the funding to do so. Too often outstanding individuals have to go elsewhere or cannot take up the offer of a place
because of financial constraints. Second, we know that the experience of a new student, especially one arriving in
the UK for the first time, is significantly enhanced by living in college in their first year. We have 300 or so rooms on
offer, but that still means we can’t give a room to every new arrival. I want to redress that, and we have just received
permission to construct a new Garden Building with fifty new bedrooms on what is now the South Car Park.
And third, the pandemic has taught us that physical and mental wellbeing are critical to resilience and success at
Oxford. We offer a great community, wonderful grounds, a talented welfare team, and a small and dated gym. We
want to supplement that with an outstanding wellbeing centre and designs for that – to be built around the current
squash courts and next to our playing fields – are currently with the planning authorities. Again, more on that in due
course.
Balancing an intellectual environment, a built environment, and a social environment: that’s the way to support our
extraordinary students and help them go out and change the world - just as Karim, Tim and Sara have done. Thank
you for being part of that process.
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