Monastic Oxford hall to admit women for first time

St Benet’s, the Benedictine permanent private hall that is one of the last bodies at Oxford University with a single-sex policy, has voted to admit women for the first time.

At the meeting of the St Benet’s Trust held on Thursday 5 June, it was decided with immediate effect to admit female post-­graduate students in all subjects taught at the hall. “St Benet’s Hall extends a warm welcome to female and male graduate students,” a spokesman said.

The last previously single-sex college to change at Oxford was St Hilda’s, which started admitting men in 2008.

St Benet’s is overseen by Ampleforth Abbey in North Yorkshire and was established for Benedictine monks to live there while they studied at Oxford and this is still the case. The Abbot of Ampleforth, Cuthbert Madden, is chairman of St Benet’s Trust, which in turn is a subsidiary of the abbey’s charitable trust.

The aim is to admit female undergraduates as well, but owing to canon law and the ­residence of monks at St Benet’s, extra ­accommodation is needed, for which an open-ended development appeal has been launched.

The master, Professor Werner Jeanrond, former professor of divinity at Glasgow University and the first Catholic layman ever to run the hall, told The Tablet: “The hall has no permanent endowment and is reliant on further funding for its ambitions to
fund ­refurbishments to its current buildings and the purchase or building of further ­accommodation.”

He said that St Benet’s Trust made the unanimous decision to admit female post-graduate students with immediate effect which means that current visiting female graduate students will be able to join St Benet’s, as will new students joining in the next academic year. There are no female ­graduates currently studying specifically at St Benet’s, though Professor Werner teaches female undergraduates in his capacity at the Faculty of Theology.