The Visiting Parliamentary FellowshipSEMINAR SERIES WITH VISITING PARLIAMENTARY FELLOWS Details of planned events are available on our Special Lectures page. Although St Antony's has always included many Fellows and students with an interest in contemporary politics and world affairs, a notable addition to the College's activities was launched in May 1993 when the Governing Body approved a proposal by Professor Archie Brown to create a Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship. The idea was that two Members of Parliament - one from the governing party and the other from one of the main opposition parties - would be elected to the Fellowship each year. The hope, which has been fully realised, was that they would visit the College regularly and in one term play a role in organising a seminar on major political issues. The origins of the Fellowship were a chance encounter between Patrick (later Sir Patrick) Cormack, MP, and Professor Brown in Moscow in January 1991 which later led to their putting to Ralf Dahrendorf, the College Warden at the time, the idea that there would be intellectual benefits for both sides if an academic relationship between Parliament and the College could be established. Once the issue of the modest amount of funding needed to launch the enterprise had been resolved, the idea took off. A full list of the Visiting Parliamentary Fellows from 1994 to 2009 is provided at the end of this article. They have included such notable former Cabinet Ministers as the Rt Hon. Gillian Shephard, MP, the Rt Hon. Sir Brian Mawhinney, MP, and the Rt Hon. Ann Taylor, MP. Three influential Chairmen of House of Commons Committees - Donald Anderson, MP (Foreign Affairs Committee), Dr Tony Wright, MP (Public Administration Committee) and Martin O'Neill, MP (Trade and Industry Committee) have been among the Fellows. In addition to these very senior parliamentarians, those elected have included also several of the brightest of the younger Members, among them Dr Calum MacDonald, MP (Labour), Alan Duncan, MP (Conservative) and Michael Moore, MP (Liberal Democrat). A tradition rapidly developed that in Hilary Term - on Tuesdays at 5 p.m. - the two Visiting Parliamentary Fellows would, along with the St Antony's Governing Body Fellow who co-ordinates the Fellowship, put on a seminar which would bring together political practitioners and academics. The novel format was that there would be three speakers, whose opening presentations would take a maximum of twenty minutes each, following which the floor would be open for questions and general discussion. Usually, but by no means always, the first two speakers are politicians and the third is an academic. The overall theme of the seminar is invariably a broad one - more often than not with a strong international dimension - and it cuts across all Centre boundaries. It is by far from unusual for the 150-seat lecture theatre to be full, or almost full, for these events. Speakers in Hilary Term 2004 included no fewer than three former British Foreign Secretaries. The 2005 series is representative of the mix of contentious domestic and international issues that have been tackled in an academic context, sometimes - as in the case of the Northern Ireland seminar - bringing together people who are not on speaking terms outside the St Antony's setting. The programme of that latest Hilary seminar series is appended to provide an example of what is on offer. Many of the MPs have in the other two terms convened informal seminars for any St Antony's students wishing to take part, and several of them have arranged for groups of students from the College to visit the House of Commons. The Parliamentarians' presence in the College (from late Tuesday afternoon until after High Table that evening) has helped to keep resident Antonians in touch with the politics of the 'real world' and it has given the MPs access to arguments that, at their best, are more analytical and also based on more specialised knowledge, than they would generally encounter in the Commons. Other advantages to both sides include the fact that some of the MPs have consulted specialists in one or other of the College Centres when they wished to better briefed on a particular country, while our Parliamentary Fellows have, for example, helped out when graduate students in this most international of Oxford Colleges have encountered excessive delays in the renewal of visas. Former Visiting Parliamentary Fellows have also hosted social events in the House of Commons for London-based Antonians. From the launch of the Fellowship in 1993 until 2005 the local co-ordinator was Archie Brown. From the 2005 till 2008, he was succeeded by Dr Alex Pravda, who has previously served as a Special Adviser to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. From academic year 2008-9, the co-ordinator is Professor Robert Service. VISITING PARLIAMENTARY FELLOWS AT ST ANTONY'S COLLEGE, 1994-2012 1994-1995: Mr Patrick Cormack FSA MP (now Sir Patrick Cormack) and Mr Giles Radice MP (now Lord Radice) |
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