"Y", a steel sculpture pointing westwards to reflect the setting sun, will be placed in a field at the edge of the grounds known as Bat Willow Meadow. "It's an extraordinary beautiful garden. I couldn't be happier about the location."

The choice was made by Magdalen's 70 fellows after a somewhat unnerving meeting with them. "I had to present my proposal in front of 70 fellows. I didn't expect them to be sat in cloaks.

"Some of them were health and safety minded and asked about high spirited students climbing it. I told them they didn't have to worry, the students would have to have koala bear abilities to be able to climb it. On the whole, they were pretty sympathetic to me.... I think is a bold step," he said.

A bold step indeed for a bastion of tradition, and sources say there was some initial apprehension among the dons. One unnamed fellow said: "I can't say it was a totally unanimous decision. If you have 70 fellows, it is inevitably that not everyone will agree".

Dr Nicholas Stargardt, from the modern history department at Magdalen, said some mathematicians had a few suggestion about symmetry - but they were quickly dismissed.

"The artist gave a wonderful presentation in front of a potentially very wayward body of fellows and there was very strong support for it.

"The problem is when any committee or fellowship get going, they start trying to adapt the artwork, but I think all art patrons should back off.

"There were a bunch of brilliant mathematicians who started thinking about assymetry, but no one was seriously suggesting changing it, let alone to the artist," he said.

Dr Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, the dean of arts at the college, called it "a bold and clever sculpture", but suggested it may inspire a "love it or hate it" response.

"Like any worthwhile work of art, it's likely to split the public into passionate admirers and equally passionate haters. What I like about it is its ability to be both brazen and subtle: it's shiny and new, but full of references to the past, like Gothic tracery and family trees; it's strikingly large, but practically disappears when looked at from some angles; it's a monument to science, but also a joke about the antlers of Magdalen's deer."

The college's president, David Clary, said that Magdalen held a fine collection of art works dating back to the medieval era "but very little from the 20th century and nothing at all from the 21st". What won them over was a previous Wallinger scultpure, "Ecce Homo", a life-size rendition of Jesus Christ which stood on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth in 1999, which the dons thought was "original and clever".