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Merry Christmas from Magdalene College
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Merry Christmas From Magdalene

We are delighted to share the annual Christmas Message for Members and Friends from Dr Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene.

Thank you for your continued support over the last year and we look forward to welcoming you at one of our events in 2020!

Magdalene College Christmas Message 2019

We wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.


Transcript

Once again it’s my very great pleasure to wish you all the very best for the Christmas season from Magdalene College.

We’ve had another extraordinary year at Magdalene, a year of great academic success and sporting success. A year where we have seen well over 90% of our finalists leaving with firsts or 2:1s and where we’ve seen Magdalene as coming second on the river. A great year for us and a year that has been marked by a huge amount of energy, imagination and devotion.

We have now raised about twenty-three million of the twenty-five million we had hoped to raise as part of our Future Foundations Campaign. It’s a result that has frankly exceeded all our expectations, It means that The New Library building is nearly completed, that we have secured a large number of new bursaries for our students so that we are still able to make that promise which is so important to us, that anybody who is capable of coming to this College can come without financial anxiety.

So it is part of the same vision that means we invest a lot in our outreach, our programs of access and our relationship building with schools and regions of this country. Our involvement with schools especially in Wales over the last couple of years through the Seren Network has produced a very large increase in our applications from Wales, which of course for me personally is a very welcome thing. But it has also meant more generally that we have had a very near 20% increase in overall applications to Magdalene.

The College thrives, the College grows in the ways it can, we are not looking to grow enormously in numbers but we continue to grow in our sense of community, and sense of purpose. The number of alumni who have been involved in one way or another in supporting our Campaign is over 3000. The number of gifts we have received is impressively large and that commitment to the College and the future of the College is something we always want to celebrate at this time of year.

This is an opportunity for me, on behalf of the College, to say thank you to all our wider Magdalene family for that generous support, not only in financial terms but also for the enthusiasm, the friendship and the human warmth that is involved with all of this.

This will be the last time I record a Christmas message. This is my last year in office as Master, and so it’s also an opportunity for me to say what a huge privilege it has been to serve this College for the last seven years. The intimacy, the mutual commitment, the likeness of spirit, the seriousness of vision, all of these things about Magdalene are things that you like myself treasure. These have been part of what makes me feel so very fortunate to have been here.

It’s been a joy to have been part of the Magdalene family and I hope I’ll continue to be so, but for now, thank you all and thanks to the College for all that you have done for myself and my family during our time here at Magdalene.

It is my delight to wish you every blessing and every good wish for Christmas and the New Year from your College.

Dr Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College