A message from the Warden and Chair of the Governing Body

It is my pleasure to introduce the College’s Annual Report for 2022/23. The past academic year has almost certainly been the most active in the college’s history. I am confident that neither the average combined number (around 15 per week) of seminars, workshops and conferences nor the high attendances that most of them attracted held during term time across the year will ever have been exceeded. The dining hall has been packed; at lunch times, the queue has not infrequently gone all the way down the stairs and out to the porter’s lodge. High Tables regularly required two or even three rows of tables. There have been student club, society and sporting activities as well as student-led events almost every day. In short, it has felt as if there has been a post-pandemic ‘sugar rush’ in the college as we rediscovered the pleasure of meeting in person after two years of living mainly online.

It is always invidious to pick out individual events among the many hundred that took place, but the talk - as part of the Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship series convened by Arminka Helic and Jonny Oates - by George Robertson, the former Head of NATO, on the current situation in Ukraine, drawing on his personal knowledge of working with Vladimir Putin, will live long in the memory of those who were there. Highlights of a different kind were St Antony’s coming top in the Climate League of Oxford and Cambridge (CLOC) 2023 ranking of Oxford colleges; the election of our former Warden, Margaret MacMillan by the late Queen as one of six new members of the Order of Merit; and, the arrival of our first-ever DAC Scholarship recipient, Samira Mohammed Ibn Moro.

On the topic of students, total student numbers have stabilised, post-pandemic, in the mid-500s as more students have completed their courses on time; 82% of our students are from outside the UK (over a third are from Asia), but there appears to be a definite post-Brexit reduction in EU students, doubtless linked to the fact that on many courses they are now liable to higher international fees. In the course of the year, we were saddened at the deaths of two of our Emeritus Fellows, Malcolm Deas and Celia Kerslake, as well as the College’s first Public Relations and Development Officer, Polly Friedhoff. At the Governing Body in June, we bade goodbye and paid tribute to the contributions of no less than seven GB fellows who were stepping down: Lenka Bustikova to the University of Florida after a year; Cathryn Costello to University College Dublin after 10 years; Miles Larmer to the University of Florida after 10 years; Simon Quinn to Imperial College after 10 years; Doug Gollin to Tufts University after 11 years; Kalypso Nicolaidis to the European University Institute in Florence after 24 years. The only person who technically ‘retired’ – rather than moved to a position elsewhere - from the Governing Body was Timothy Garton Ash. Timothy came to St Antony’s in 1978 and has hence been a member of the College for 45 out of its 73 years of existence; to have been affiliated for the equivalent percentage of their history at Balliol or Merton, he would need to have joined in around 1550!

To lose so many long-term and engaged members of the Governing Body at the same time will take some adjustments, but at the same time the College is delighted to have appointed six new Governing Body Fellows who will be joining us during the coming academic year: Catherine Briddick (Andrew W Mellon Associate Professor of International Human Rights and Refugee Law), Federica Genovese (Associate Professor in the International Relations and/or Politics of the European Union), Raihan Ismail (His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor in Contemporary Islamic Studies), Amir Lebidoui (Associate Professor of Development Studies), Jonathan Lusthaus (Associate Professor in Global Sociology), Michael Rochlitz (Associate Professor in Economies of Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia). We look forward to welcoming them all to the St Antony’s community.

The academic year ended on a high note with a Gaudy in mid-September for those who matriculated at St Antony’s in the 1990s. We welcomed around 160 alumni for a weekend of talks, music, eating and reminiscing.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the Governing Body, which has granted me a year of sabbatical for 2023/24 to undertake a new research project on the Japanese health system. I am particularly grateful to Professor Nandini Gooptu who will take over as Acting Warden in my absence.

Professor Roger Goodman, CBE