Editing St Antony's College, Oxford (section)

==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.{{fact|date=March 2021}}

In 1947, Besse was considering giving around £2 million to the University of Oxford to found a new college. Ultimately, on the advice of his solicitor, R Clyde, who had attended [[New College, Oxford|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 to the offer, and recommended that Besse instead 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 College|Keble]], [[Worcester College, Oxford|Worcester]], [[St Peter's College, Oxford|St Peter's]], [[Wadham College|Wadham]], [[Exeter College, Oxford|Exeter]], [[Pembroke College, Oxford|Pembroke]], [[Lincoln College, Oxford|Lincoln]] and [[St Edmund Hall]]. After 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 growing number of postgraduate students coming to Oxford, gave the venture their blessing; and in 1948, Besse signed a deed of trust appointing the college's first trustees.{{fact|date=March 2021}}

[[File:Antonin Besse.jpg|upright|left|thumb|Sir Antonin Besse, whose gift enabled the college's foundation.]]
The attention of the university then turned to providing the new college, by then 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, but its owners refused to sell, forcing the university to continue its search for premises. They looked at several properties in quick succession, including Youlbury, the Wytham Abbey estate, and [[Harris Manchester College|Manchester College]], which was known to be in financial difficulties and which might thus consider the sale of its 19th-century Mansfield Road buildings. None of these options proved tenable, and the college began to look elsewhere. It is said that Besse became very frustrated with the university and its apparent lack of interest in his project at this point, and almost gave up any hope of its completion. However the college finally acquired its current premises at 62 Woodstock Road in 1950.{{fact|date=March 2021}}

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 became a full member of the University of Oxford.<ref name="sant.ox.ac.uk">{{Cite web|url=https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/about-st-antonys/history|title=History of St Antony's College|website=www.sant.ox.ac.uk|date=3 December 2014 |language=en|access-date=2018-05-04}}</ref> 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 funding, and in the late 1960s serious consideration was given to uniting St Antony's with [[All Souls College]] when All Souls announced its intention to take a more active role in the education of graduate students. The plan did not come to fruition; All Souls rejected the proposed federal nature of the combined institution, saying they would consider nothing less than a full merger, a proposal which St Antony's governing body did not support. St Antony's lack of funds was partly solved under the wardenship of William Deakin, who devoted himself to college fund-raising and secured a number of generous loans from the [[Ford Foundation|Ford]] and [[Volkswagen]] foundations. Financial difficulties led to the cancellation of a number of proposed physical developments at its site on Woodstock Road. Not until the 1990s was it feasible for the college to embark upon a new building programme; however, since then 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 studies.<ref name="Nicholls2000" /> and houses centres for the study of Africa, Asia, Europe, Japan, Latin America, the Middle East and Russia and Eurasia.{{fact|date=March 2021}}

[[File:Anthony the Great armenia cropped.jpg|left|thumb|upright|Saint Anthony the Great, after whom the college is named.]]
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. The college soon 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, remaining one of the most international colleges of the university, and home to many of Oxford's region-specific study departments. 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]], 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 "a fitting gathering place for old spooks".<ref name="Woodhead2005">{{cite book|last=Woodhead|first=Leslie |author-link=Leslie Woodhead|title=My Life as a Spy|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5VuSHQAACAAJ|year=2005|publisher=Macmillan|isbn=978-1-4050-4086-0}}</ref>{{rp|220}} St Antony's became notorious in both the British and Russian press as a "spy college."<ref>{{cite journal |first=Sheila |last=Fitzpatrick |title=Back in the USSR: my life as a 'spy' in the archives |journal=The Conversation |url=https://theconversation.com/back-in-the-ussr-my-life-as-a-spy-in-the-archives-26303 |date=18 May 2014 |access-date= 28 June 2022}}</ref> The character of Roy Bland from [[John le Carré]]'s [[Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy]] is said to have been a top specialist in Soviet satellite states educated at St Antony's, from where he was recruited by [[George Smiley]].

[[File:Professor R. G Dahrendorf, 1980.jpg|thumb|upright|Lord Dahrendorf presided over much of the college's expansion in the 1990s.]]
The official annals of the university state that St Antony's was one of four colleges, along with [[All Souls College|All Souls]], [[Nuffield College|Nuffield]] and [[Christ Church, Oxford|Christ Church]], which made a concerted effort to establish external links. In St Antony's case, the college established wide-ranging connections with diplomats and foreign visitors; this 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".<ref name="Harrison1994">{{cite book|editor-first=Brian |editor-last=Harrison|title=The History of the University of Oxford: Volume VIII: The Twentieth Century|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OP5ePl7i5EIC&pg=PA625|year=1994|publisher=Clarendon Press|location=Oxford|isbn=978-0-19-822974-2|page=625}}</ref>

The college's name alludes 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 Anthony 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" Anthony, Anthony of Padua (distinguished by his holding of the Christ child), stands in the college's Hilda Besse Building.{{fact|date=March 2021}}