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St Antony's College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Founded in 1950 as the result of the gift of French merchant Sir Antonin Besse of Aden, St Antony's is one of the most cosmopolitan of the University of Oxford's colleges and is considered to be a centre of excellence for study and research in the fields of international relations, economics, politics, and area studies.〔Nicholls, C S. The History of St Antony's College, Oxford, 1950-2000. Palgrave Macmillan. 2000. p. 1-31.〕 The college's areas of specialist study include Europe, Russia and the former Soviet states, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Japan, China, and South and South East Asia. The College is located in leafy North Oxford with Woodstock Road to the west, Bevington Road to the south and Winchester Road to the east. As of 2012, St Antony's had an estimated financial endowment of £30m.〔 (updated January 2014)〕 ==History== St Antony's was founded in 1950 as the result of the gift of Sir Antonin Besse of Aden, a merchant of French descent. Besse had been considering giving around two million pounds to the University of Oxford for the foundation of a new college since 1947. Ultimately, on the advice of his solicitor, R Clyde, who had attended New College, Besse decided to go ahead with the plan and permitted Clyde to approach the university with the offer. The university was initially unreceptive of the offer and instead recommended that Besse devote his funds to improving the finances of some of the poorer existing colleges. Eventually Besse acquiesced, contributing a total of £250,000 in varied amounts to the following colleges: Keble, Worcester, St Peter's, Wadham, Exeter, Pembroke, Lincoln and St Edmund Hall. In the wake of this large contribution, the university decided to reconsider Besse's offer to help found a new college and, recognising the need to provide for the ever growing number of postgraduate students coming to Oxford, gave the venture their blessing. It was thus that, in 1948, Besse signed a deed of trust appointing the college's first trustees. The attentions of the university then turned to providing the new college, by then being called St Antony's, with a permanent home. Ripon Hall was initially considered as a good option for a building in which to house the college, however its owners refused to sell, forcing the university to reconsider its position and continue the search in the hope of finding alternative premises. The university then looked at a number of properties in quick succession, including, amongst others, Youlbury, the Wytham Abbey estate, and Manchester College, which was known to be in dire straits and which might thus consider the sale of its 19th century Mansfield Road buildings. Ultimately, when none of the aforementioned options proved tenable, the college began to look elsewhere. It is said that Besse became very frustrated with the university and its apparent disinterest in his project at this point, and almost gave up any hope for its completion. However, after much delay, the college finally acquired its current premises at 62 Woodstock Road in 1950. The College first admitted students in Michaelmas term 1950 and received its Royal Charter in 1953. A supplementary charter was granted in 1962 to allow the College to admit women as well as men, and in 1963 the College was made a full member of the University of Oxford. By 1952 the number of students at St Antony's had increased to 27 and by the end of the decade that number had risen to 260, amongst whom 34 different nationalities were represented. The college initially struggled due to a lack of appropriate funding, and in the late 1960s there was serious consideration given to the prospect of unifying St Antony's with All Souls College when that institution announced its intention to take a more active role in the education of graduate students. Ultimately this plan did not come to fruition because All Souls rejected the federal nature of the proposed institution, with the college's fellows saying they would consider nothing less than a full merger, a proposal which St Antony's governing body was not supportive of. The issue of funding and the constraints it put on St Antony's growth and development was, however, partly solved under the wardenship of William Deakin, who devoted himself to fund-raising on the college's behalf and ultimately secured a number of generous loans from the Ford and Volkswagen foundations. Over the decades since, St Antony's has had to deal with an almost constant lack of financial security - a reality which led to the cancellation of a number of potential developments intended to expand the college's physical presence at its site on Woodstock Road. Not until the 1990s was it really feasible for the college to embark upon a new building programme; however, since that date St Antony's has continued to expand and open new specialist centres for the pursuit of area studies; the college is now recognised as one of the world's foremost centres for such study.〔 From the beginning Besse had expressed his hope that the new college, which he intended to open to men 'irrespective of origin, race or creed', would prove instrumental in improving international cooperation and intercultural understanding. It was thus that, only shortly thereafter, the college announced its primary role as such: 'to be a centre of advanced study and research in the fields of modern international history, philosophy, economics and politics and to provide an international centre within the University where graduate students from all over the world can live and work together in close contact with senior members of the University who are specialists in their fields'. The college is still true to its founding principle to this day, remaining one of the most international colleges of the university, and the home to many of Oxford's region-specific study departments. It was this latter feature, combined with the wardenship of William Deakin and St Antony's reputation as a key centre for the study of Soviet affairs during the Cold War period, which led to rumours of links between the college and the British intelligence services; the author Leslie Woodhead wrote to this effect, describing the college as:〔Woodhead, L. My Life As a Spy. Macmillan. 2005. p. 220.〕 Moreover, the annals of the university's authorised history make the point that St Antony's was one of four colleges at the University, along with All Souls, Nuffield and Christ Church, which made a concerted effort to establish outside links. In St Antony's case, the college established wide-ranging connections with diplomats and foreign visitors, a feature which is further commented on as having made the college 'perhaps more significant than any other single development in Oxford's adjustment to the contemporary international academic environment'.〔Harrison, B. The History of the University of Oxford VIII The Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press. 1994. p. 625.〕 It is interesting to note that whilst the college was named St Antony's to allude to its founder, whose name, Antonin Besse, is derived from the same linguistic root, for a long time it was not made clear whether Anthony the Great or Anthony of Padua was the intended namesake. The matter was finally settled in 1961, when the college finally deemed Antony the Great to be more the appropriate choice due to his links to one of the college's prime areas of specialisation - the Middle and Near East. Despite this, the college's banner is flown each year on both saints' days as a matter of tradition and a statue of the 'wrong' Antony, Antony of Padua (distinguished by his holding of the Christ child), stands in the college's Hilda Besse Building. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「St Antony's College, Oxford」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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