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Illustration: Ella Baron
Last week, I remember one of my friends informing me in a pub that the police had seized copies of the student magazine ‘No Offence’ for containing ‘obscene’ content. I immediately checked the Cherwell website for news, as any self-respecting Oxford student would; which prompted a, now slightly hazy, debate with my friends on freedom of speech and the proliferation of student publications, before we remembered our looming essays, and got on with our lives.
I was surprised the next day to see that the news had hit several national outlets, both in print and online. Why did The Independent and The Telegraph care about the antics of university students? The immediate reaction of many students, from the OUSU BNOC wannabees to the pathetic aspiring journos, was that of Regina George from Mean Girls- why are they so obsessed with us?
This was not the first time in recent history that Oxford has featured so prominently in national news. When student protested Marine Le Pen’s appearance at the Union, cameras from various media outlets flocked to what is, after all, no more than a student club. It must have made the Union’s day, bolstering the flagging self-esteem of an institution which has been largely irrelevant for the past 80 years (after all, who would care if the members would not fight for king and country now?). Many in student activism were delighted when Brendan O’Neill of the Spectator claimed that he was “attacked” by a “mob” of “furious feministic…Stepford Students” of Oxford University after they protested that he had been invited to speak on a debate about abortion at Christ Church.
At least once a year, broadsheets produce the same spiel on the Oxbridge application process, dedicating several stories aimed at anxious middle class parents and which probably deter numerous deserving applicants from a wider range of backgrounds. Regularly, newspapers report, the brightest talent of a generation, with 10 A*s at A Level, fails to get into Oxbridge, whilst a digest of the admissions process and “curveball” questions get their annual re-printing, to be repeated by “tigerati” parents over increasingly stressful family meals- “Well – what WOULD you say about a banana Annabelle?”
The broadcasting of the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race, whilst great for Oxbridge students, is yet another example of Oxbridge student activities hogging the limelight. The Scottish Cup (between Edinburgh and Glasgow), The Allom Cup (between the various London universities) and the Northumbrian University boat-race (between Durham and Newcastle) are equally worth watching but seem to have fallen into a media black hole.
So the great question- if it can be said that no one really cares for the student politics of Oxford and Cambridge over other universities, why does it feature so prominently in media coverage? Several media outlets have traditionally been dominated by Oxbridge, from the BBC to The Guardian. The Sutton Trust found in a survey that of the 81% of the 100 most influential journalists in the UK news media who attended university, half went to Oxbridge. Many news outlets are making a conscious effort to change the make-up of their staff, but the legacy continues.
Universities have a great deal to offer to public life. One often hears about the vital scientific research Oxford carries out, researching cancer and muscular spinal atrophy, for example. The humanities and arts professors occasionally get a look-in, it always useful to hear from academics that The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Diana “play the same role as 16th century princesses.” But most of the time, student politics is not essential information for the public, and perhaps debates over ‘No Offence’ distracts from more important news. Either the media must focus their attention on all aspect of university politics, or simply focus less on Oxbridge. The focus on Oxbridge student politics, and Oxbridge in general, inculcates the dangerous impression that simply because some students go to Oxbridge, their activities are somehow more news-worthy than those of students at other universities.
I am sure that there are limits to the interest of journalists at the Guardian, The Times, and The Daily Mail in Oxbridge, and those limits will not extend to what is written by this pathetic student journo. But if by chance any of you have wandered on the website or discovered a paper by accident while stuck on a broken-down train, I offer this tentative suggestion. Leave University news to Cherwell. No one else really gives a damn.
