St Anne’s College has recently launched the Jane Schulz-Hood Travel and Research Scholarship Fund in memory of alumna Jane E. Hood. The initiative will provide travel and research grants to support students undertaking field work for projects that advance understanding of ecology, the environment, society, global health, and equity issues. 

By providing financial assistance for research and travel, it intends to support students to meaningfully contribute to fields that were important to Jane, where they might otherwise be limited by financial barriers. According to St Anne’s, the fund aligns with its mission to help students “understand the world and change it for the better”. 

Established by Jane’s family, the scholarship honours both her achievements and her commitment to education. After graduating from Oxford with a BA in Geography, she built a distinguished career as a lawyer in London. Jane passed away in September 2019 at the age of 49, after a battle with cancer. 

Her husband Christian said: “For her, education was always a top priority. This included learning as much as possible about other cultures.

“Not surprisingly, Jane loved travelling. She was always very respectful towards others and cherished being in nature. She therefore was interested in the environment and supported initiatives that look after wildlife, water and education.” 

Christian added: “Through this fund, we hope that, by providing financial support for research and travel, students at St Anne’s will be able to explore areas that were important to Jane. This will be a wonderful opportunity to give back and to have a legacy for Jane.

St Anne’s told Cherwell that the College “expects to award the grants annually, with the intention that they’ll begin being offered as soon as the fund is fully established”, within the 2026-27 academic year.

“We are thrilled that this Scholarship Fund will become a living legacy for Jane’s generosity of spirit, love of education and deep respect for people and the planet. We look forward to seeing the impact it will have on the next generation of St Anne’s students.”

During my first week in Oxford, I stumbled upon a Scottish third year in the college bar. This was startling; I’d only come across one or two students from north of Newcastle so far, and none of them any older or wiser than I was. I quickly took advantage of the opportunity to ask what societies I should join at the Freshers’ fair the following day. 

“Anything but CalSoc”, he said, referring to Oxford’s Caledonian Society. “They’re not actually Scottish. Closest they get is owning an estate up there.” 

This was a sweeping and, I thought, probably inaccurate claim, but in those first few days—homesick, lonely, having my own accent parroted back at me during pre-drinks – I didn’t struggle to believe it. While I’d hoped vaguely that I might eventually be proven wrong, I found very little evidence to the contrary. Those I met who were eager for a ticket might not have been royalty, but they were invariably English, and drawn to the ball’s structure and glamour. Tickets were pricey, and seemed to come on the condition of technical ‘training sessions’. The society’s website provided a list of dances to be learned; I only recognised two. One night in Hilary, I saw a throng of kilts and tartan sashes clustered outside the Town Hall, but as I passed, I heard only the same clipped Southern accents I’d become used to in tutorials. I started to hate-watch the dance videos on their Instagram. All of this cemented in me a vehement – and, I always felt, slightly unfair – distaste for CalSoc. What was ostensibly a familiar cultural practice seemed to me somehow violated, alien. I felt worlds away from the dances of my teenage years, where I would often wake up with mysterious injuries from an over-violent Strip the Willow. Why was something ostensibly so familiar, so ‘Scottish’, so unrecognisable?

I was interested to read Nancy Robson’s recent article on reeling practice for the CalSoc ball – a fresh perspective on what has always been, for me, a very one-sided debate. Yet I was also somewhat disconcerted. The picture that emerged was of a strange fusion between English courtly balls à la Bridgerton and some kind of vaguely Scottish aesthetic (Robson makes a passing reference to ‘Braveheart’; the CalSoc website, more egregiously, to ‘ancient druidic roots’). This is a difficult one to square. The histories of ‘ceilidh’ and ‘reeling’ are intertwined, and equally culturally suspect. In his thoughtful essay on the subject, Greg Ritchie notes that both are the result of a 19th century ‘rediscovery’—and appropriation—of Highland culture, differing only in the use they make of a ‘Scottish identity’. 

But this difference is still important. Caledonian Societies remain the preserve of the South, and of the Scottish elite, while ceilidh dancing is, for better or worse, part of Scotland’s shared social history. It’s taught in every school, and is the central feature of most weddings. I used to organise ceilidhs as community fundraisers. Reeling may not entirely pretend to be a ceilidh, but it does not exist in some kind of cultural vacuum. When we dress up in tartan, and (in the words of the CalSoc website), ‘party as only the Scottish can’, what kind of mythology are we appealing to? Why is CalSoc so English? 

The answer comes in part from its connection to the glamorous ‘reeling circuit’: mainly based in London, this is a season of black and white-tie balls held in royal venues and private member’s clubs. But it’s also to do with the way Scottishness features in the English cultural imagination. As Robson’s article demonstrates, the practices are easily tangled up – and in England, ceilidh rarely comes out on top. She contrasts the formality of CalSoc rehearsals with her previous experience of ceilidh: in a stuffy basement, she found that ceilidh meant ‘descending into a hellish, slightly pagan underworld’. Here, as in reeling societies across the country, ceilidh and reeling are set up as sibling practices – equal in their Scottishness, diverging only in the etiquette they demand. But reeling tends to feel rather out of step with modern-day Scotland. It’s telling, perhaps, that it remains the preserve of lairds and Londoners; yet more telling is its insistence on propriety. The CalSoc website is strict on both dress (‘shorter dresses, jumpsuits, and skirts are not acceptable’) and training (mathematical dance diagrams are provided).While claiming to bring ‘Scotland to the South’, this codification of reeling misses what makes ceilidh so appealing – its inclusivity. CalSoc co-opts, only to gatekeep.

You absolutely should feel like you’re descending into the pits of hell. It will be very sweaty and you will probably be knocked over. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the steps: someone else will lead the way. Ideally you should wake up with bruises. You don’t have to be dressed up, you don’t have to be drunk, and you absolutely do not have to be Scottish. What’s important is that it’s an inclusive and open practice. Ceilidhs have featured in my life since childhood, and still the moment I’ve felt closest to the tradition was in fact in Oxford. My friends and I held an impromptu ceilidh in our living room: there was absolutely no space and no one knew what they were doing. Yet the genuine attempt to engage, the joy and lack of pomp (and black tie) was what made it so special. I don’t disagree with the enthusiasm the CalSoc committee seem to demonstrate; ceilidh dancing is a wonderful practice which can absolutely improve your life. But you don’t need a dance card, training sessions, or an £80 ticket to do so.

The House of Medici, an Italian banking family, donated an enormous amount of their wealth to support the arts in the 15th century, from funding the construction of Saint Peter’s Basilica and Florence Cathedral to patronising some of the most famous Renaissance painters, like Botticelli and da Vinci. Their money indelibly shaped not just their contemporaries, but the groundwork of much of Western canonical art.

This might seem a rather lofty bar with which to judge the contribution of Stephen A Schwarzman.  But, with Oxford University describing his donation as their single biggest “since the Renaissance”, it’s hard not to harken back to the civilisation-defining benevolence of the Medicis. Indeed, the CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone is estimated to have a net wealth of over $42bn, making him one of the 50 richest people on the planet – not a bad place from which to start a new era of Gilded Age-inspired philanthropy.

His donations to Oxford come to £185mn and have produced a new Centre for the Humanities – a single building in which seven faculties and two institutes come together, decked out with state-of-the-art music and theatre venues, a cinema, and exhibition spaces. The two-pronged vision is bold and enticing: an upgraded student experience and a way for the cloistered University to reach out to the public. The ‘Cultural Program’, launching in April 2026, offers an enormous range of exciting shows, giving Oxford a new artistic centre and locals a pleasant benefit from the University with which they (sometimes uneasily) co-inhabit the city. 

The neat concept, however, has in practice led to conflict. Rather than the student and public elements exhibiting a complementary relationship, the commercial side of the venture has dominated, sidelining students and moving the Centre uncomfortably away from the core operations of the University. 

Firstly, whilst the Centre is a substantial building (much of which operates at a subterranean level), its size fails to do justice to the huge number of faculties, students, and academics that it represents. This is evident in a number of ways: the faculties themselves, which circle the RadCam-inspired and proportioned Great Hall, are fairly small in size, and homogenous in design. Whilst a coloured kitchenette is a nice touch, the move for my own department (Philosophy) from the spacious and historic Georgian building on Woodstock Road to a few rooms on the second floor is quite hard to sell as an upgrade. 

Similarly, the Humanities Library, though bigger than it perhaps first appears, fails to adequately compensate for the libraries it supersedes. Books have had to be moved offsite to fit, and the number of dedicated seats in the library itself is less than the previous capacity. There are more if you count the other available seats in the building – but with no sound regulations, they are hardly a substitute when you need to hammer out an essay. Losing books and study space, whilst not quite the fire of Alexandria, is still disappointing for what promises to be an exultation of the Humanities in an age of their belittlement. 

It’s not just the library that is rammed: fewer large lecture rooms means that bookings are more competitive, introducing frictions into already-bureaucratised academic schedules. Indeed, many lectures remain in their old locations, and feel all-the-less pleasant for it. Making the bottom floor open to the public, whilst a charming way to potentially break down the town-gown divide, also necessarily means fewer seats for the students paying (at least) £9.5k a year for access. 

The worst issue, though, is financial. Schwarzman’s historical donation was enough to construct the largest Passivhaus university building in Europe – but as a one-time gift, not enough to keep it maintained. This has made the finances shaky, to say the least. Faculties have been squeezed as they are forced to pay higher rents; money is taken away from students and used to fund a truncated space. Far from being a boon for neglected studies, the Centre looks to be urging the cold free-market logic along. 

Even students lucky enough to be in the University are losing out. Prior to the Centre’s construction, a society of which I am a committee member could use our faculty’s multiple lecture rooms for free, with very little competition. Now, the task to get a room is Kafkaesque. After over 20 emails and multiple booking form requests, I was told that the society would be charged £200 an hour for use of the cinema to do a private film screening for our members. The attempt to charge an academic student society eye-watering amounts to use a room in their own faculty building exemplifies how the commercial imperative has vitiated student experience. 

In an almost paradoxical way, what should have been a desperately-needed and generous contribution to the Humanities, and the wider University, has actually reinforced the sense that Humanities students are unwanted money-suckers. Not long after the opening of the Centre, the Life and Mind Building, which hosts the Departments of Experimental Psychology and Biology, also opened its doors. If you looked at both buildings without any context, you’d be hard-pressed to tell, based on size alone, which was the home of two departments, which the home of more than three times as many. Rather than facilitating interdisciplinary study, locking all the Humanities students into a cramped part of OX2 and charging them more for it looks like another act in the long history of shunning artists and thinkers. It might be time for the music students to start busking outside.