Oxford Vice-Chancellor to share ‘lessons from America’

Professor Hamilton, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, will examine the influence of universities on wider society, locally, nationally and internationally. Drawing on his 30 years’ experience working in US universities, including his time as Provost of Yale, he will examine what lessons can be taken from America, and how they might be applied to the UK.

In doing so, Hamilton will explore the impact of UK universities in terms of their teaching, research and so-called ‘third stream’ activity. For example, how restrictions on UK institutions ability to recruit the brightest and best academics and students from around the globe will not only have adverse consequences for the UK higher education sector and the UK economy, but the international knowledge economy as a whole.

Professor Andrew Hamilton was admitted as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford on 6 October 2009.

He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 1980 and then spent a post-doctoral period at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg.

In 1981 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University then in 1988 served as a department chair and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. He joined Yale in 1997 and was Provost of Yale from 2004 until October 2008 where he combined a wide-range of administrative duties with teaching and research.

Achievements during his time as Provost of Yale included the acquisition of the West Campus, the re-establishment of the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science after a forty-year hiatus, a reform of the tenure process and the significant enhancement of the Yale undergraduate curriculum. In addition to serving as Provost he was Benjamin Silliman Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry.

In 1999 he received the Arthur C Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society, and in 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2010.

Since 1983, Clare Hall has hosted the Ashby Lectures, a widely acclaimed summer event in Cambridge. Named after one of the College's founder fellows, Lord Ashby who was also Master of Clare College at the time, the lectures focus on the presentation and discussion of ideas that inspire human values in a wider sense: values that relate, in compelling and contemporary ways, to philosophical questioning about the nature of life and society.

Clare Hall is a College for Advanced Study in the University of Cambridge. It is a community that welcomes graduate students and senior scholarly visitors and their families from all over the world.

Clare College, the second oldest in the University of Cambridge, was known as Clare Hall from nearly the time of its foundation in 1326 up until 1856.

Clare College founded Clare Hall as a separate Institute for Advanced Study in 1966 and Clare Hall received its own Royal Charter as an independent College in the University in 1984.

The Clare Hall Ashby lecture “Lessons from America: The Impact of Universities on their Region and the World” will take place on Wednesday 25 May at 6pm in the Auditorium at Robinson College on Grange Road.

The lecture is free and open to all but tickets are required
For further information, please contact
E: alumni@clarehall.cam.ac.uk / T: 01223 332 368