A new humanities facility, located in the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter along Woodstock Road, is to join the faculty buildings of Oxford University. The Schwarzman Centre is set to open in 2025 and it will house the institute for Ethics in AI and the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre.
This new facility’s move to the University has been made possible by a £185 million donation by the Centre’s eponymous benefactor Stephen A. Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone Group, as well as short-time chairman of President Donald Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum.
The Centre will consist of a 500-seat concert hall, a 250-seat theatre, a 100-seat ‘black box’ laboratory for experimental performance, a café and a new library. It promises to “encourage experiential learning and bold experimentation through cross-disciplinary and collaborative study.”
In order to comply with the University’s aim to halve carbon emissions by 2030, the building’s construction will adhere to Passivhaus principles, including the use of solar power generation on the roof and high levels of insulation to reduce the heat needed in the building.
Professor Daniel Grimley, head of the humanities division at Oxford, told Cherwell: “It will be a place to share knowledge and ideas, attend events of a varied nature, and ultimately to find innovative answers to the fundamental question of what it means to be human in an increasingly complex world.”
As well as housing seven humanities faculties, this facility will now host the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre. It will be moving to the University from its previous host, the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, after having been awarded extension funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The centre was created in 2019 to “enhance public understanding of modern slavery and transform the effectiveness of laws and policies designed to address it.”
Professor Grimley told Cherwell: “Working in this innovative manner has helped the centre to influence decision-making at a regional, national, and global level.” The recent example he cited was its work in support of the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, chaired by Theresa May, “for which researchers gave evidence at Parliamentary groups, and showed how human and evidence-led research can improve the world in tangible ways.”
The Schwarzman Centre will also be home to Oxford’s new institute for Ethics in AI. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, has remarked: “If AI is to benefit humanity we must understand its moral and ethical implications. Oxford with its rich history in humanities and philosophy is ideally placed to do this.”
Vice-Chancellor Professor Irene Tracey has highlighted the promise that the Centre holds to “benefit teaching and research in the humanities” and “to be a place which makes a genuine contribution to the local community in Oxford as well as the national and global cultural sector.”
