2008 Homerton Roll News 1 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Letter from the Principal: WHAT IF HOMERTON WERE NOT HOMERTON? You will have seen in the Press that New Hall, the third Cambridge college for women, founded in 1954, has changed its name to Murray Edwards, thus commemorating its first President, Dame Rosemary Murray, and its two benefactors, Ros and Steve Edwards, who have recently given the College ÂŁ30 million for its endowment.
Dame
Rosemary wanted a change of name and felt that the name "New Hall" was a stop-gap, notwithstanding the antiquity of 'new' in New College, Oxford or the New Forest. So anodyne a name offered what fundraisers term 'a naming opportunity' and so it has proved, following Ros and Steve's generous donation. A similar example was the change of University College to Wolfson College, from bland to commemorative. Murray Edwards, as I must learn to call it, is a marriage of the old 'Murray' to the new 'Edwards' - like Gonville & Caius - usually shorted to Caius, which raises an interesting precedent. Not all former New Hall members are pleased by the change and see the new name taking something from them and from society in general. "New Hall" stood for something tangible in the politics of education, celebrating the higher education of women. The name change cannot invalidate that standing but should the New Hall alumnae - of whom I am one - feel that they have lost something in the re-naming? Among the most vociferous are members of my generation who had chosen New Hall in preference to the more established women's colleges of Cambridge and Oxford (there were no mixed colleges at that time). We were not then choosing single-sex education as such and it is only the more recent graduates who can claim to be outraged by the misfortune of having their college named after a man - in this case, Steve Edwards. I am reminded of a relatively recent visit by a Homerton old member, teacher-trained, but now working as a barrister. In the Hall, she stood in silence, nostrils dilated with displeasure. I asked what had offended her. "Men!" she said. "There were never men in my day!" Something had changed for the worse, it was clear. Her objection was that somehow the purity of an all-female Homerton before the 1970s had been sullied by the decision of my predecessors to admit men. She can hardly have objected to the outcome, which has been better-educated male teachers over the last thirty years. What would happen if Homerton changed its name? How could that happen and how would you feel about it? None of us can remember the original Homerton, named after a London village, which gave its name to the Academy. Like Girton and Newnham, we are named for a locality and not for a person, so we too offer a fundraiser's 'naming opportunity'. Don't read anything into this. No-one is making us an offer so generous that we are contemplating a change of name but if they did the Principal and Fellows of the day would surely do what New Hall has done to protect the institution itself for the future, to ensure that its Murray Edwards students benefited as their New Hall predecessors did, from a first-class education for women - now enhanced by an enormous donation. Just as I have made changes, physical and academic, to Homerton, so will my successors and, I am sure, something of the old Homerton will remain, indomitably, in perpetuity. Kate Pretty 30th July 2008