New national measures:
As you can imagine the new national measures have caused a lot of anxiety as to how we approach them. The key features for us are:
- Teaching will continue as is with a mixture of person to person and remote.
- Student movement to and from term time and home residences is not allowed.
- Whilst there is no social mixing of households indoors, students can go for unlimited exercise, or visit outdoor public places with your household (bubble), or one person from another household.
- The College library will remain open as it currently is with booking of study slots.
- The college is working on ways to facilitate support for some multi-household activities and entertainment (in a covid-secure way)
- Most staff are required to support our students and services in college and so are essential workers, and letters to support this will be available.
Our adapted catering solutions are working well and are popular; although mostly take away we have systems that allow for plenty of choice.
In my position as Deputy Chair of Conference of Colleges I have a ringside seat in helping to fashion the response of both University and Colleges in these very challenging times. We need all the wisdom and good judgment we can muster. I am happy to say that all parts of the University and Colleges are working harmoniously and at great speed.
Blurbs:
The first blurbs of this year on 29 October featured Dr Sneha Krishnan, and a Tutorial Fellow in Geography talking about "The Real and Imagined Lives of Henrietta Clive: Chasing Love and Murder in the Colonial Archive". The HCR speaker was Estella Kessler, who is a DPhil student in Classical Languages and Literature who considered "The Marvellous Callimachus of Cyrene or how to discover the Wonders of the World from your desk".
Miscellany:
Congratulations to Geoff Bird and Bill Swadling for being recognised in the Recognition of Distinction for this academic year.
The next Head of Department for Economics, Hamish Low, is a former Brasenose PPEist. He will take this position in summer 2021 for a period of three years.
I am delighted to say that music provision continues in College. We were all invited to submit any pre-recorded (audio/visual) musical offering from home, room, college practice rooms etc. for our first Music at BNC Recital to be broadcast.
I have been reading David Goodhart’s book Hand Head Heart; Kim Darrock’s Collateral Damage; and Alexander Wilson’s In black and white; A young barrister’s story of race and class in a broken justice system.