In the runup to 0th Week of Michaelmas term, Oxford is surprisingly quiet while most students try to suck up the last days of a quickly fading summer, either savouring the last few enjoyable moments of the longest vacation in the Oxford calendar or frantically revising in a concerted effort to score highly in preterm collections.
But between these two groups there is always a mutual feeling of anticipation of return to the college way of life that Oxbridge is famous for. Each college has its own particular way of doing things, but for Christ Church, this Michaelmas brings an unwelcome and unexpected change to the way its students eat their meals.
The catered meals at Christ Church are one of the college’s most defining features. Yet, as leaked in an Oxfeud post late on the 26th, the college kitchen administration plans to move the morning’s canteen breakfast from the 16th-century hall to the much less famous and much more beige Freind Room, as well as the axe the aforementioned catered dinner service, changing a system that has been characterised as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘archaic’ towards a more modern, self-catered hall service.
Unsurprisingly, the Christ Church Junior student body are not happy. There is no doubt that such a change would always be viewed with a certain amount of animosity. It is impossible to please everybody, especially with a change that greatly affects the lives of the four-hundred-something undergraduates who study there.
But how could the college have expected a positive response when the change was completely out of the hands of those four hundred students? This is not something as trivial as changing a tourist route or what paper towels are used in college bathrooms.
This directly affects nearly half a thousand students, and the college didn’t even have the gall to tell the students themselves, before the information came out on an anonymous Facebook submission page.
Initially, one might think that there is little wrong with this change. Surely using a catered system is just a relic of a more upper-middle class lifestyle, alienating anyone who couldn’t afford to study at Eton, and a shift to a self-catered system would finally teach these Christ Church prats some discipline and to look after themselves instead of relying on a silver spoon.
But this argument fails to hold up once you realise that the college isn’t dropping its other ‘Formal’ meal sitting, which simply requires the attendees to wear their gowns to hall. As already discussed, people hate change. So a large majority of students are simply going to hold off their hunger pangs for an extra hour and commit to the oh-so-difficult task of slipping a gown on over whatever they’re wearing, resulting in an even greater Formal hall turnout which will leave the kitchen underprepared, understaffed and under the gun to feed several hundred hungry mouths.
And as big as Christ Church’s Harry Potter hall might be, the college frequently suffers from oversubscription to its guest dinner services already, and no amount of magic is going to make that space bigger.
As for the informal hall: a self-catered service will no doubt reduce the quality of food, with more of it being prepared hours beforehand and kept under heat lamps. This in turn will put further strain on the formal hall staff, who will have to prepare more fresh food under a set menu.
Certainly, the one good thing that comes out of a self-catered service is the increase in choice, as is bound to happen — else why change the service at all? – which might improve turnout at times when students might normally be put off by a set menu that demands a love of controversial food items. It remains to be seen how this will affect those with dietary requirements, such as those with vegetarian or gluten free diets, but it seems unlikely that the college will defer from its policy of throwing a dart at a board and serving just one alternative a night. At the very least, meat loving students might see an end to the controversial Meat Free Mondays introduced last year.
A point must also be made about the uniqueness of Christ Church’s catered service. It is something which draws students to Christ Church and is completely disingenuous towards the newly arriving freshers who may have to change their meal plans. Meals in hall were previously subsidised, which, in the context of living in one of the more expensive university cities, was a godsend for students who are unable to spend £7 every lunchtime on meals at whichever Pret à Manger took their fancy on Cornmarket.
But regardless of whether or not this change ends up being for the better or worse in terms of Christ Church’s culinary exploits, this change has much greater ramifications in terms of the students’ relationship with the college itself, through the body of the JCR committee.
While college politics differs from college to college, and JCR committees can seem as fickle as each student body, generally the JCR system works. Christ Church has, over the past year, seen positive changes in the college as a result of the JCR’s work, in lengthening library opening hours, improving LGBTQ+ welfare, and refurbishing the JCR’s student spaces, and Trinity ’17 ended with talks of developing a first-of-its-kind student café. Yet to have such a controversial change to student life be sprung on Christ Church students is absolutely unprecedented, taking one step forward and three steps back.
Regardless of negative attitudes towards having a catered service which provided a not-insubstantial number of part time jobs, the idea of removing a ‘bourgeois tradition’ is completely moot when it seems doubtful this was the college’s intention in the first place. The only notable thing this change has done is destabilise the relationship between student and college at Christ Church, setting a particularly terrifying precedent which allows the college to change student life at Christ Church without consulting the very people these changes affect.
