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LINACRENEWS Issue 56 • 2020 A Glimpse of the Past: Climate Change: Shelve Linacre Goes to the Cherwell Edge Before the Rhetoric and Focus Nanjing Rowing Linacre on the Action Masters Regatta 14 18 21 Contact details Contents Alumni and Development First Thoughts 3 Lisa Smårs News & People 4 Alumni Relations and Communications Officer Charting a Growth Trajectory for a Future South Africa 6 Tel +44(0) 1865 271673 Viking Influences in the British Isles: A Lifelong Journey 8 [email protected] Interview with Alumna Monisha Ahmed 10 Antonella Di Marzio Advancing Linacre 11 Development Officer Tel +44(0) 1865 271658 Navigating Communal Use of Smart Home Devices: [email protected] Empowering Households to Tend Their Digital Devices 12 A Glimpse of the Past: Cherwell Edge Before Linacre 14 Liz Welsh Development Administrator Research News 16 Tel +44(0) 1865 271671 Climate Change: Shelve the Rhetoric and Focus on the Action 18 [email protected] Linacre Goes to the Nanjing Rowing Masters Regatta 21 Reception Tel +44(0) 1865 271650 Guest Room Bookings Karen Morris Accommodation Manager [email protected] External Events Bookings Jaye Newbrook Steward and Hospitality Manager +44(0) 1865 271651 [email protected] Alumni attending the Gaudy in September 2019. General College Enquiries Upcoming Alumni Events Jackie Favarin Pre-event registration is required for all College events. Sign up on the College College Secretary website, or contact Lisa on [email protected] or +44(0) 1865 271673. [email protected] March 2020 May 2020 Linacre College Monday 9th Saturday 30th St Cross Road Short and Sharp in London: Current Friends of the Boat Club Launch Party Oxford OX1 3JA College members will be presenting in Oxford during the Summer Eights. United Kingdom bite-sized research aimed at a general audience. June 2020 Registered Charity No. 1142130 Saturday 27th Saturday 21st Philadelphia Alumni Meet-up. Dinner in Berlin. Front cover image: Stained glass from the original house built in September 2020 April 2020 1886-7. From the College archive. Saturday 12th-Sunday 13th Saturday 18th Alumni Reunion in Oxford for alumni Dinner in New York. Design: Neil Morgan Design who matriculated between 2002-2016. Print: Lavenham Press Sunday 19th Lunch in Toronto. 2 • Linacre News 56 • 2020 First Thoughts The Linacre Choir has begun the new term rehearsing Orlando Gibbons’ beautiful madrigal “The Silver Swan”. This gentle and sorrowful song concludes with the somewhat bitter line “Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.” Musicologists have suggested that this is a barbed comment on what was perceived, in early 17th century England, to be a decline in culture and a loss of beauty. Many subsequent ages have been dogged by similar concerns that an irrepressible drive for increased wealth comes at a cost to human values. The “marketisation” of higher education, many have claimed, has resulted in the neglect of traditional areas of scholarship and an impoverishment of learning. Oxford has a delicate balancing act, needing to carefully select and nurture areas of new and rapid growth, whilst ensuring that valuable but less fashionable studies continue to flourish. Philanthropy has been fundamental to ensuring that we are able to achieve that balance. A landmark £150 million gift to the University from philanthropist and businessman Stephen A. Schwarzman will give Oxford’s humanities a new home with state-of-the-art academic, exhibition and performance spaces. It will promote the essential role of the humanities in helping society confront and answer fundamental questions of the 21st century. It is great news too, that the Humanities Division has made the endowment of a Chair in Old Norse one of its fund-raising priorities. In this edition of Linacre News you may The Principal picking up a parcel from the brand new Reception area. read an article written by Professor Heather O’Donoghue, a Linacre Fellow, culture in Old Norse at Oxford, scarce. This year the College offered Professor of Old Norse and Vigfússon providing opportunities for researchers 44 scholarships and instigated two Rausing Reader in Ancient Icelandic from around the world to develop new music prizes. You will read in this Literature and Antiquities. This field of their work further, and creating a rich issue of Linacre News of our plans for a study continues to interest and attract environment for scholars who will major redevelopment of key facilities in a large number of talented graduate become the leading academics and College including the Library. We will students each year, all of whom greatly professors of tomorrow. make sure that Linacre remains one of benefit from Heather’s supervision, the most desirable places to study in guidance and expertise. We are very Linacre is also doing its bit to alleviate Oxford. keen to endow this chair so that it can hardship and support scholarship in Nick Brown, The Principal continue to lead a dynamic research those areas where public funding is Linacre News 56 • 2020 • 3 Future Plans and Projects at College Michaelmas term was a period of College’s plans for building works intense activity and nervousness in the are now forming in more detail. Bursary as we explored and ultimately We plan to build an annex in the arranged a significant borrowing of grounds of an existing student capital as a bond known as a private property that we already own, with placement. We plan to use this capital architectural drawings well advanced to expand our student accommodation, and consultation ongoing around refurbish our main site, and strengthen planning permission with the City our endowment. Our Governing Body Council. If all goes well, we will be to set Linacre up to support student did not take the decision to borrow in able to announce full details very needs in our 7th decade and beyond. this way lightly – even though many soon. We are also exploring options other Oxbridge colleges have already to purchase new property in Oxford The challenge now, of course, will be taken the plunge. Our caution was for accommodation, but maybe most to deliver the planned building projects rewarded (only a little bit fortuitously) excitingly of all is the feasibility study within the tight funding envelope we by hitting a period of historically low we are undertaking to work out what have – certainly it does not provide interest rates, which we have locked in can be done on the main College site. enough to do all of the work we need for the next 35 years. The main building has been surveyed in to do to the main College building – detail to determine its exact structure and that, nice as new buildings are, Our finances were subject to intense and now we are beginning to work we cannot take our focus away from external scrutiny from our investor with architects to find out what is providing, for example, scholarships before we were awarded this bond. possible. Initial emerging priorities and hardship grants. The next five years It was only possible to take this out are to use our building footprint more will be transformational for Linacre but because of our existing endowment efficiently to increase study space as there is a lot of work to be done before that has built up through support well as developing a lecture theatre and the first of our new facilities opens. from our alumni and friends, as well as seminar/collaboration rooms. Slotting good financial management from my this into the space we have will be David Locke is Linacre’s new Finance predecessors in the Bursary. difficult but we are confident that we Bursar. He has joined College after a career can make changes through this project in the Civil Service and with KPMG. College Staff Retiring Sue Jones shift from what may be termed the took himself off to highly rated cooking Sue Jones has retired after 15 years Pre-Bockett era to the Bockett era. It classes and schools and the College at College. She started working in the was perhaps this last that had the most soon began to reap the reward. This Reception, but it was soon realised impact day-to-day. Food in College was not only true of everyday meals but that she had a good head for figures Pre-Bockett was only memorable on Guest Nights and special occasions and numbers, so she moved up to the in the sense that dry over-roasted he pulled out the stops and the meals Bursary in the Accounts Assistant sausages seemed to appear at lunch were outstanding in their imaginative role. It is in this role many of you will every day. The committee responsible creation and the quality of the have encountered her at your time at for appointing a new chef had no delivered product. Bringing guests into College. We would like to thank her difficulty in unanimously agreeing dinner was no longer a potential source for her long service and her cheerful on Michael although there were two of embarrassment but one of pride. contributions to College life. hesitations. One was settled almost Nor did Michael confine his efforts on instantaneously and the other proved behalf of the College to his kitchen; Michael Bockett unfounded. The latter was a concern he also played football for it. After 30 During the time I was an active Fellow about Michael’s age and experience, years of feeding us so well, Michael is (1971-2001) there were various but there was no case for worry (in fact going and he will be a hard act to follow.