LADY Ogilvie, principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford, liked what she saw when she opened the Queen Margaret Hall at Kirklee, Glasgow University’s new residence hall for women, in November 1964.
Such halls, she declared, could be a natural meeting point of academic disciplines and a means of enriching student life.
After the opening ceremony she chatted to students and served them slices of cake. A new Dionne Warwick album kept some of the students entertained at the communal record player (above).
Lady Ogilvie, who herself once lived near Queen Margaret Hall when it was housed in the Bute Gardens building it was now replacing, also referred to the valuable “common-room element” in residence halls.
University education, she told the students, was necessarily demanding more and more specialisation, but there was evidence that “a specialist is not so good a specialist if he is nothing more”.
The discussions, arguments and cross-fertilisation of ideas which were part of residence hall life “are in no sense a substitute for formal education but they help it immensely”.
She also remarked that an “awareness of solitude is one of the marks of growing up”, which was why she was delighted to see the single-study bedrooms in the new hall – a shining example which she hoped would be followed elsewhere.
Lady Ogilvie, who died in 1990, had a distinguished academic record, as had her husband, Sir Frederick Ogilvie, who had succeeded Lord Reith as Director General of the BBC in 1938.
The website of St Anne’s Oxford says Lady Ogilvie is remembered “as kindly and accessible to students, a shrewd entrance interviewer with a liking for ‘taking chances’ on students”.
Her 13 years at the college were a time of “bold and rapid expansion”, both in terms of buildings and of student numbers. She also created Oxford’s first-ever nursery for the children of staff.
Read more: Herald Diary
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