The University is waking up to the environmental, social, and geopolitical crises of our times – in one sense at least. The British higher education system pigeonholes us into one or two subjects of study for three or four years, an exception being the liberal arts format of some ancient Scottish universities. Oxford is rightly beginning to understand that the graduates of today and tomorrow need so much more. A new emphasis on training students to be well-rounded critical thinkers who can reason beyond their discipline is absolutely pivotal. STEM students need the tools to interrogate sources and communicate knowledge to policymakers and the public. Humanities specialists and social scientists can benefit from a contextual understanding of future challenges in order to apply their critical abilities.
This can take all kinds of forms, not least through the ability for some students to take outside options – such as the Physicists who can study a language for one paper. It is essential that this be expanded to allow – or even require – one Finals paper to be taken from a different subject altogether, technical abilities allowing. While as a Philosophy and French student I would obviously struggle to take 4th year Medicine, there is no reason why I should not be able to take an introductory statistics course or some Geography.
Those ambitions may be for the longer term, but the University is already taking action. The Vice Chancellor’s Colloquium was a great success, and I was delighted that my group’s presentation on reducing emissions from college travel grants reached the final. The new series on free speech, if it grasps the nettle of addressing the University’s own controversies and debates rather than ironically lapsing into didacticism, will succeed. Oxford Ministry for the Future is another bold new interdisciplinary programme. These initiatives are a great start, so let’s build on their momentum.
