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Home / Alumni / Hertford today / Introducing Hertford

Introducing Hertford

Hertford is not your typical Oxford college. Its buildings are beautiful and the Hertford Bridge is one of the most photographed icons in all of Oxford, but dig below the surface and it’s an entirely different story.

There has been a college or hall on the Hertford site since the 13th century, previous iterations being Hart Hall and Magdalen Hall. But after several dramatic events, including bankruptcy in 1816 and the collapse of our buildings along Catte Street, we were refounded as the second Hertford College in 1874. The buildings were rebuilt by one of the great late Victorian architects, Sir Thomas Jackson, giving us our special look and feel. Just as famous as our bridge is Simpkin, the college’s resident feline whose dynasty has been a familiar feature of central Oxford since the 1970s.

Hertford history

Historic Hertfordians

The Simpkin Dynasty

Breaking new ground

It was in 1907 that Oxford’s first African American Rhodes scholar, Alain Leroy Locke, was admitted to Hertford after being turned down by five other colleges. Locke went onto become a renowned writer and philosopher, and was one of the primary figures behind the cultural movement known as the ‘Harlem Renaissance’. Martin Luther King acknowledged him as one the major influences on his thinking. His portrait now hangs in Hall, alongside our historic forebears.

In popular memory, the modern character of the college dates to the 1960s when a young academic, Neil Tanner, brought about a huge change in the admissions of students. Tanner, a physicist from Australia, spotted that Oxford was missing out on huge talent because the existing system made it difficult for boys (at that stage it was a male-only college) from working class families to apply. With the support of his colleagues, he suggested a new way, whereby fellows made unconditional offers to students before they received their exam results, allowing them to bypass the existing system. Hertford became known as the college for working class boys and from that point onward has had access and diversity at the heart of its academic and social mission.

In gender too, Hertford was at the forefront by being one of the first clutch of colleges to embrace co-education and co-residence in 1974. Prior to that, women could study at Oxford, but only at the women-only colleges. Among the first women to study at Hertford were Jacqui Smith, who went on the be the UK’s first female Home Secretary (and whose portrait also hangs in Hall), and Helen Alexander, who became CEO of The Economist group and the first female President of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).

Alain Leroy Locke

Neil Tanner and the Tanner Scheme

Co-education

Hertford today

Hertford has over 400 undergraduate and more than 300 graduate students, slightly higher than the Oxford average. At undergraduate level, women make up 55% of our student body. Our mission statement declares our belief in academic excellence framed by a commitment to fairness and opportunity, and we live out those values. We have 48 fellows, a third of them women, who range from the world’s leading experts in Shakespeare, the crusades and the philosopher David Hume to those at the forefront in thinking about astronomy, curing cancer, and the development and ethics of artificial intelligence. All of them are as passionate and committed to their teaching as they are to their research. Our students learn directly through their tutorials; the opportunity to be taught in small groups by some of the world’s finest minds is one of Oxford’s great attractions, and it’s a system to which we are profoundly committed.

We feel just as strongly about ensuring that we recruit the best and brightest from whatever social or ethnic background, embodied by our pioneering record of admitting women and opening up access to state school students from under-represented backgrounds. More than 80% of our latest undergraduate cohort were educated at state schools, and the mix of students from diverse backgrounds gives the college a particularly friendly and dynamic character. This, along with a readiness to innovate and break new ground when the opportunity arises, has earned us recognition as Oxford’s “friendliest, funkiest” college.

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