reflections on Mansfield By Janet dyson

Reflections on Mansfield

Janet Dyson Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics

My 36 years at Mansfield have been an exciting time, as the College has gradually achieved its aims: self governance, full collegiate status and a much more secure financial future (though that still needs work), all within a growing, vibrant academic community. Most importantly I think we now have the confidence to go our own distinctive way, and build the college we want, without forever looking over our collective shoulder at what is done in other colleges.

In 1977 Mansfield was a Permanent Private Hall, governed by an external Council. It had no University funded posts, and minimal endowment. We survived on student fees (and, even then, conferences), and the chief method of budgeting certainly appeared to be to spend as little as possible. Indeed, when I first arrived I asked for a blackboard. What did I get? A tiny square of hardboard (maybe two-foot square), painted black. The paint had caused it to warp and the first time I tried to write on it, it fell off the wall.

Yet there was confidence. The College was expanding and, within its policy of taking reasonable numbers of undergraduates in a small number of disciplines, was moving into new subjects. Maths was to be the first science. The autonomy I was granted when I first arrived was both exciting and terrifying. There I was, a mere non-stipendiary lecturer, setting up the teaching of maths within the College: teaching the first four students, arranging other teaching, admitting the next year’s students, stocking the library, etc, etc.

The following year I became a stipendiary lecturer and then after a decade (and having produced two daughters) I was appointed as a Senior Research Fellow (a device to give me a fellowship and thus a seat on the newly created Governing Body). Then, in preparation for full collegiate status, in 1993, I was one of five Mansfield Fellows to be appointed to Special (non CUF) Lecturerships (I loved the convoluted title).

REsEARcH

One reason I do maths is because it gives me such a buzz. Nothing produces quite the buzz that one gets from successful original research. (The downside is the frustration when things don’t come out, but let’s not go there.) For 35 years, until she retired in 2009, I collaborated with Professor Rosanna VillellaBressan from the University of Padua. Another collaborator has been Professor Glenn Webb from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and I continue to work with him (our latest paper on cell-cell adhesion has just been accepted). A collaboration that has given me particular satisfaction has been with Stephen Gourley, who is now a professor at the University of Surrey, but who was my student at Mansfield. Modern communications have made collaboration across continents far simpler. When Rosanna and I met in 1974 it was really only feasible to work by meeting face to face, and even telephone calls between Britain and Italy were difficult and expensive. The advent of fax, emails and now scanners have made it all so much easier. We tend to work with paper and pencil, so to be able to scan what I have just done and send it off is great. When this system is at its best, I work on a problem during the day, send it to Glenn in the afternoon, he does some more, returning it for me to start again next morning. Easyjet also has its uses.

coLLEAguEs

For the first 10 years of my appointment I did everything on my own, finding tutors each year to carry out the teaching I couldn’t do. Conducting admissions on my own was particularly stressful. In 1986, the late Dr Bob Coates, whose full-time job was with the Open University, looked after the Mansfield mathematicians while I was on maternity leave, and then stayed on, becoming a stipendiary lecturer in 1989. He was magnificent. In admissions I was soft cop to his hard cop. He was a fabulous teacher, and a wise colleague. When he retired in 2003, his good work was carried on by Derek Goldrei, whom I had known since we were undergraduates, and who was also a colleague of Bob’s from the OU. Derek doesn’t do hard cop, so I had to learn a new role!

We now have the confidence to go our own distinctive way, and build the ‘ college we want, without forever looking over our collective shoulder at what is done in

’other colleges.

For most of my time at Mansfield we have been constrained by a quota on undergraduate numbers. So one reason for taking Maths and Stats students when the new course was introduced, was to increase our maths numbers. It also enabled us to appoint a University Lecturer in Statistics, Dr Jonathan Marchini. Our students in Maths and Stats have been particularly successful: in the very first cohort, Anthony Dewell came top of the year, and Elizabeth Rae achieved the same feat a few years later. Indeed, in her year all three firsts were from Mansfield.

I am leaving Mansfield Maths in very good hands. There are two new appointees. Professor Colin Please has already been with us for a year; he works on mathematical modelling of industrial and biological problems. Professor Peter Keevash started in September 2013 and works in Combinatorics and Graph Theory.

sTuDENT succEss

Over the past decade around 53% of Mansfield mathematicians have got Firsts. St John’s College says on its website that, since 1998, around 55% of its undergraduate mathematicians have got Firsts and that this is comfortably the largest proportion of any Oxford College – not so comfortable now! We have also received a handful of University prizes, including Markus Mobius’s Junior Mathematical Prize for coming top of the year. Markus is now a professor at Harvard.

Some mathematicians are also remarkably sporty; I can’t take any credit, and I don’t understand the attractions. Dan Harvey rowed in the Oxford boat of 2012, and in the University Lightweights in 2009; and Lucy Mase-Robinson rowed in the University women’s boat, also in 2009. Valentina Iotchkova was European champion in Taekwondo, and, of course, a Blue, and we have also had Blues or half Blues in hockey (several), basketball, table-tennis, pool, etc. Frequently those with Blues also achieved Firsts.

Firsts are not everything. Mansfield mathematicians can be found on pretty well every continent (Antarctica excluded). In no particular order, there are professors, investment bankers, teachers, actuaries, accountants, statisticians, social workers, ministers of religion, police, a computational neuroscientist, many working in IT; there was a tree surgeon, but he became an accountant, I think. So to those who ask, as a recent school careers advisor did, whether there are any careers for mathematicians other than teaching, this is your answer.

ADMIssIoNs THEN AND NoW

As a Permanent Private Hall, Mansfield was much disadvantaged in admissions. Prior to 1985 candidates could provide a long ordered list of colleges. Certainly in maths, Mansfield rarely put in an appearance on any such list, and was never placed first. There was a rather bizarre system by which a lower-placed college could offer a candidate an award and thus trump a higher-placed college’s offer of a place – except that Mansfield was excluded. So, after all the other colleges had made their decisions, we set out to search for the best of the remaining candidates. There were some very good candidates left. As I started out, having never conducted admissions before, I was advised to look for candidates from state schools. Not from any high-minded sense of equity, but because they had not been trained so well, so other colleges were more likely to miss their potential. We were not discriminating against

the well taught, but making suitable allowance. Even once we started getting first-choice applicants some of our best students were found in this way.

Admissions for Mansfield improved enormously in 1985 when the system was simplified and some of its more Byzantine aspects swept away. Awards were no longer given at admission, waiting until students had taken their first public examination. Even better, candidates could put in an open application which would then be allocated to a less popular college and thus even-up applications. After vigorous lobbying, Mansfield was allowed to participate in this on the same terms as full colleges. Finally in 1988 Mansfield became a full member of the Admissions system. But not until full collegiate status was acquired in 1995 did we move to the main part of the University Prospectus, no longer hidden at the back. Full collegiate status had unexpected bonuses.

Janet (front row second from right) at the final meeting of the trustees before Mansfield became a full college in 1995

THE FE AccEss INITIATIvE

Once full collegiate status had been achieved, there began the business of developing Mansfield, to reinforce its reputation and distinctive character, and to enable it to prosper in what always seem to be difficult financial times. In 1999 David Marquand launched Mansfield’s Access to Excellence Campaign. This had many strands. At its centre was Guy Hands’ magnificent donation, in which he paid off the College’s debts, thus retrospectively making substantial contributions to several recent (and much needed) buildings. The part I was most involved in was the Further Education Access Initiative. Since the beginning most of the mathematicians who came to Mansfield were from state schools, and I was recruiting mainly from those who had been rejected by other colleges. Yet our students were doing every bit as well as students from those other colleges. Therefore I knew that the University was losing out on a wealth of talent. So when David Marquand asked me to become Tutor for Admissions, I relished the opportunity of encouraging more such people to apply to Oxford and most especially of establishing the FE Access Initiative.

The Initiative was originally proposed in 1999 by a working group led by the then Tutor for Admissions, Ros Ballaster. It contained many innovative elements and has been remarkably successful. In 1999, Oxford received only 379 applications from General Further Education (FE) Colleges and the success rate for these students was significantly lower than other education sectors. The overall aim was therefore to increase radically the number of applications to Oxford from the General Further Education sector, though, recognising that many of the difficulties faced by those in General FE were also found in Sixth Form Colleges, the project was quickly expanded to include these. By 2009, applications to Oxford from FE Colleges had increased by 77% since the Initiative began, and applications from Sixth Form Colleges by 48% over the same period. The number of offers made to students in the FE and Sixth Form College sector had increased as a proportion of overall offers to the maintained sector.

When I became Tutor for Admissions I established the project and supervised it for the first four years, then Lucinda Rumsey took over and expanded it further. If the FE Access Initiative was to be successful, there would be far more new applications than a college of Mansfield’s size could accommodate, so we set up a consortium of colleges to work with us. To implement the project Mansfield raised around £140,000 from the Sutton Trust, Atlantic Philanthropies, and HEFCE; our own alumni gave another £60,000. (From 2003 each consortium member paid a modest annual fee.) With careful husbandry, we kept the project going on this for ten years.

This was a time when many colleges were starting access projects, but ours was one of the first and one of the few to last and really make a difference. We conducted careful initial research and our first temporary Access Officer, Claire Asquith, established many contacts within FE as well as starting the dialogue with both lecturers and students. The Initiative was launched by a conference at Mansfield in September 2000 for FE College Principals. This not only provided information about Oxford, but also included discussions about how application and success rates for candidates from the FE Sector could be improved.

We were extraordinarily fortunate in our Recruitment Officers. Both Janine Fisher and Helen Etty were energetic, committed and very creative. Both understood FE and Oxford well, having come to Oxford from FE colleges themselves. They visited Colleges of Further Education to meet students and their teachers, to answer their questions about the University, and to encourage students to apply to Oxford. But they did a great deal more. For example there were the Regional Forums where representatives (staff and students) from the consortium colleges would hold a one-day session about Oxford University at a designated FE college that would act as host and invite all other colleges from the area. FE students were also invited to special FE open days at consortium colleges. Our students were, as ever, our best ambassadors, telling of their own experience and generally dispelling myths about Oxford. At one of the first regional forums, I went to the ladies and overheard a group talking about how they had expected our students to be posh and geeky and they weren’t.

There were some aspects of the Initiative that were specific to Mansfield. We set ourselves a goal of raising our intake of students from the state sector to 75% (at that time it was 58%, which was already much higher than the University average of 46.1%). It has been above 70% on a number of occasions since 1999, and the average over the past three years has been 78% (in 2012 it was 84.7%). Since 1999 Mansfield has run a Freshers’ Induction Programme. We run sessions where we explain how the Oxford tutorial system works and how to get the best from it, emphasising the need for serious independent study before each tutorial. We also have sessions where successful students in higher years advise on how to develop good study skills. This helps freshers to hit the ground running, and I think has contributed to Mansfield’s improved academic performance over the past few years – though I believe the improvement also owes much to the efforts of the Senior Tutor and others to create a culture where academic success is valued.

With colleagues Derek Goldrei, Colin Please, and Jonathan Marchini

Receiving a gift from current students at her retirement dinner