Message from the Principal

Helen Mountfield QC

I’ve been Principal of Mansfield for three years now. The last time I spent as long at Oxford – in the late 1980s –I got a degree out of it (and did a lot more dancing)!

Knowing now the Herculean effort that goes into making College operate, I realise how blissfully unaware I was, as an undergraduate, of the inner workings of my college. Things may be different for the current generation. Since March 2020, the students have had to be very much included in the rationale for the strange (and sometimes cruel and unusual) reworking of our way of doing things.

They have borne up with amazing resilience and fortitude. These have been hard times for all of us, but their generation has had to adapt to methods of learning and living that are starkly different from what they would have expected when arriving at Oxford. The endless updating and re-updating of Covid protocols, and household rules; changing edicts on whether and when they could return to College; and learning (as we all have) how exams would work online. I hope some students have kept diaries: they will be fascinating historic documents.

So I was particularly moved to watch this year’s graduands troop off to their graduation ceremony at the Sheldonian in the autumn sunshine, all dressed up in gowns and hoods (the first in-person ceremonies since 2019).

It gave me cause to think about the passage of time. Although my pre-Mansfield career was as a barrister, I am forever grateful that my first degree was in history. And 2020/21 has certainly been an ideal time for reflection on the interaction of past and present.

We have marked three significant anniversaries. One which the University celebrated belatedly was the centenary of women being awarded degrees at Oxford; at College we also saluted the 40th anniversary of women’s admission to Mansfield.

These events took place in 2020, but the University’s celebration had to be postponed until 2021. It was reflected at an Encaenia where all Honorands were women. I had a ringside seat, next to the Vice Chancellor and the Senior Proctor (our own Lucinda Rumsey). It was great to catch up with our Honorary Fellow Hillary Clinton, one of the Honorands – and to hear her advice to our JCR President Sara Cepele, on the myriad ways she could use her Law degree.

In 2021, we also commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Tests Acts, which allowed Nonconformists to become full members of the University. This opened the way to Mansfield’s foundation – the Nonconformist College (as we still are) – on our current site in 1886. You can read about this later in the magazine.

As a member of the University’s Race Equality Task Force, I have been part of a process of reflecting on our past and the inclusive, welcoming, plural present to which we aspire. We have looked with inquiring new eyes both at what we value in our history, and to debate, in an open way, what we need to change. The Task Force (which met entirely online) made its initial report to the University’s Council ‘awayday’ in late September 2021 and a consultation on its conclusions was launched in October.

There are many things to be proud of in Mansfield’s past – including the College’s call to its sister colleges in the USA to abolish slavery – but also food for historical reflection. You can read our entry on the Oxford and Colonialism website here: https://oxfordandcolonialism.web.ox.ac.uk/ mansfield-college.

The links between our past and future have also been reflected in the arrival, in 2021, of our first Refugee Scholar. This scholarship has been generously funded for three years by the Lutheran World Federation. It is part of the recent commitment we have made as a College of Sanctuary to have at least one funded refugee scholarship each year. Mansfield is also supporting Afghan academics in collaboration with the other colleges and the Committee for Academics at Risk. We recognise how much the intellectual life of this University owes to ‘outsiders’ – indeed, Mansfield was founded specifically to enable them to participate. And we recognise our luck in living in such relative peace and security. We want our students to be aware in intellectual and human terms, of the costs of global instability.

But along with time for historical reflection, the Covid crisis has also thrown up immediate challenges. So I have been working hard with the wonderful Richard Scanlon, our outgoing Bursar, Development Director Tess McCormick and Governing Body to consider how to deliver our strategic vision, ensuring Mansfield’s long-term resilience.

Like all historic upheavals, the pandemic has produced existential threats, but also revealed how quickly we can adapt – if we map clearly where we came from, where we want to go, and have a plan about how to get there. I hope to report more fully on our thinking on this next year.

I hope, too, that despite all this year’s hardships, we have engendered in our students a sense of realistic optimism and purpose. They deserve it: their own energy and fortitude gives me strength and determination to secure Mansfield for future generations of scholars and students.

I know from my reading of history that progress is not inevitable, and depends on the steps we take now. In the famous words of the Preface of HLA Fisher’s History of Europe, written as storm clouds gathered in 1935: ‘The fact of progress is written plain and large on the face of history. But progress is not a law of nature.’

Progress is, however, built on bravery, imagination, creativity, and effort: qualities that my Mansfield colleagues, and our wonderful Mansfield students, have shown in spades.