Oxford faces serious questions over its admissions policy and, given lower acceptance of BME applications (13 per cent vs 25 per cent for non BME) and private school influence (they comprise 7 per cent of students at secondary level but supply 50 per cent of Oxford entrants), rightly so. But both Oxford and Cambridge also possess a rich reserve of talented individuals ready to take on such challenges, as shown in a joint event held by OxPolicy and Cambridge’s Wilberforce Society last Saturday.

OxPolicy presented three studies; overcoming racial inequality, identifying the major access issues for applicants, and the desirability of contextual admissions. The first involved interviews with BME members of the university, half of whom felt ethnicity affected the administration process (although, notably, most were more concerned with the state/ private divide). The recommendation here was to increase outreach to socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, which tend to contain disproportionate numbers of BME students, whilst heightening support targeted at helping them once they arrive at Oxford.

The second study involved surveying a number of schools classified as disadvantaged by Ofsted, to work out what pupils thought of as the main impediments to access. Key problems included a lack of access to information about the complex admissions process, coupled with the deterrent effect of university accommodation and travel costs. Policy recommendations involved increasing the transparency of often byzantine applications and bursary programmes, whilst subsidising travel for those living far from Oxford.

The final study concerned contextualising admissions. This is already employed to a certain extent by Oxford, which flags applicants for recommendation for interviews on the basis of disadvantaging factors (such as care status and education). The problem, as diagnosed by OxPolicy, is that these students still need to have basic AAA predicted grades to receive an interview, excluding those who excel in especially poor quality schools.

Throughout these three studies, a running theme was the pernicious effect of the negative portrayal of Oxford as an elitist and unwelcoming institution. This message, delivered to students by both the media and teachers at some state schools, demands extensive outreach programmes to counteract it.

The Wilberforce Society, Cambridge’s own student political think-tank, rounded off the talk with two quick presentations. The first recommended instituting pre-16 access programmes and women’s only summer schools in order to encourage more female STEM applications.

The second proposed developing an informative guide to dispel myths about Oxbridge in order to give advice about how to practice for interviews and entrance examinations to those who are not fortunate enough to receive it from their school or social circle.

The event was at once sobering and inspiring. On the one hand, it set out the significant challenges that still lie in the path of genuine equity in admissions. But on the other it showed students refusing to merely sit and shake their heads from the stands, but coming in to bat for their less fortunate counterparts themselves. For this, and much else, OxPolicy and The Wilberforce Society must be commended.

The title of Tobias Jones’ book The Dark Heart of Italy perfectly captures one side of his journalistic and literary interest. He has written several works of both fiction and non-fiction on the often corrupt and provincial world of Italian politics and crime, and his most recent contribution to The Guardian’s ‘long read’ detailed the unfolding of a complex murder case in a small town near the Italian Alps.

However, Tobias Jones is also the author of A Place of Refuge, an account detailing the establishment of Windsor Hill Wood: the communal refuge he and his wife set up in Somerset, with an open door policy to those experiencing crisis in their lives. It is here that he has lived for almost seven years now with his wife, three kids and half a dozen troubled visitors at any one time. “It’s been wonderful, rewarding and joyous, but it’s also been gruelling,” he tells me on the phone.

“It’s taught me to be far more empathetic and understanding of people, and yet to be far more sceptical and suspicious of people at the same time. I suppose it also just kind of reinforced something I knew already, that human nature is just endlessly fascinating and unpredictable.”

People who set up communes are often pigeonholed as naïve idealists who want to escape the grit of reality in favour of something better that doesn’t exist. Jones rallies against this stereotype, “I think if you’re living with ex-offenders and soldiers with PTSD and anorexics, then really you’re closer to reality.”

If Windsor Hill Wood is closer to reality, is there something especially illusory about modern life, I ask. “I think it seems to be predicated on escapism really, and that a lot of what constitutes entertainment is really escaping realities.”

“But I think the other aspect of modern life is that we have less and less in common. Everything becomes very atomised and privatised and isolated. There are fewer and fewer common spaces and things that are shared. It’d be unthinkable a hundred years ago that we’d have almost a third of households with only one person living in them. That degree of isolation is extraordinary.”

In a recent article Jones wrote for The Guardian he detailed the increasing destabilisation of longstanding rural communities. His comments to me on the causes seemed to continue a more general critique of the world we inhabit. “The problem is rootlessness. The problem is endless mobility. I’m all in favour of people being able to move and I’m not advocating that we always stay in the same home we were born in.”

“But the idea that anyone can move where they want and anyone can buy property anywhere in the world. So, the fact that the richest can buy their umpteenth house in a Cornish fishing village when actually the people that grew up there can’t even afford to live 10 miles away is just destroying the social fabric of these communities.”

He mentions our idealisation of cosmopolitanism and travel as an aspect of the increasing rootlessness that seems to be eroding the basis of these rural communities, pushing droves out of the villages they grew up in and causing village shops and pubs to close at a rapid rate. I ask whether he doesn’t see certain benefits to travel and cosmopolitanism, despite the effects it might be having on the countryside.

“Of course there are. The trouble is that it’s only the positives that are promoted and it’s just become another huge leisure industry. And actually any notion of being rooted or settled or having links to the place you’ve grown up is seen as yokel or backward or inbred. So, it’s not that there aren’t positives to travel it’s just that travel has become like a one night stand. It’s not a long-term faithful relationship. It’s a go there take a photo in front of some iconic building and move on” he remarks.

Is rural communal living then, the only way out of this shallow and rootless existence? No, Jones says. He’s realistic about it not suiting everyone, and is aware there are many other approaches. “But I think it does just answer so many of the questions. I do think that sharing more things, including a roof, is the way forward.”

For many, it’s hard to conceive of Jones the advocate of a stable rural community existence as the same Jones who writes stories on the murky world of Italian crime and politics. I wonder what binds these two seemingly diverse interests. “I’ll tell you what the common denominator is; it’s is just fascination with human nature.”

“Crime shows you the very darkest depths of humanity, and often the higher idealism of the grieving families and the investigative forces that try and bring truth and justice to a case. The two are comparable in the way that they concern human nature and a story,” he says, towards the end of our chat.

Jones and his wife always only planned to run Windsor Hill Wood for seven years, with this time almost up they’re looking to move on, and are in the process of setting up a non-residential commune on donated land elsewhere. Will anyone take over running the woodland commune they’ve called home for so many years now? “I don’t know. I keep putting the word out there. It’s hard to know… I hope so.”

Oxford, wake up! We are a town under occupation by coffee shops in the same order of magnitude as actual ‘coffee shops’ in Amsterdam, or trap houses in the favelas of Rio.

As each day passes, the sandstone colleges’ reign over the cityscape is further eff aced by the sterile gleam of these mass-marketed menaces, pushing upon us a substance as dangerous to the sleep-deprived student as Jack Daniels to an alcoholic.

Being able to function only after hitting your local ‘dealer’ isn’t as cute and cosmopolitan as we imagine. None of us are tux-wearing George Clooneys in the Nespresso advert, sipping a beverage to pass idle hours. We are red-eyed wretches, stumbling to Exam Schools while clasping a scalding Nero cup to our bosom. We are the fools at the front of the Pret queue, looting the depths of our bag for the pound coin that stands between us and our fifth filter coffee of the day.

Caffè Nero exerts the same control over our lives as its eponymous mascot. (Emperor) Nero, along with his cronies, Paul, Starbucks, Costa, Pret and Taylors have colonised the highstreet, subduing us with this modern-day opiate of the masses, disguised in all its delightful forms and flavours.

Aged 20, did you really think you’d already undergo Sunday withdrawal? Each Sabbath you enter that terrifying purgatory between the hours of eight and 12, a world made bleak without 200 mg of the good stuff coursing through your veins.

Face it, Oxford has become a blazing inferno of capitalism and caffeine and the only thing that can save us is the second coming of Christ.

Student campaigns, in Oxford and beyond, are now fighting a political context which attacks those struggling the most. They cannot fight it alone. I approach this referendum first and foremost as a disabilities campaigner, and in this respect it is important to note the crucial work that goes on behind the scenes.

In 2014, the National Union of Students formed a huge chunk of the resistance to proposed Disabled Students’ Allowance cuts. Students could take pride in their campaigning and lobbying of MPs when the changes were subsequently thrown out, and we cannot understate the NUS’s role in providing students and activists alike with information on the proposals, as well as coordinating a nationwide response to a nationwide problem. The problem is, though, that the government is still intent on slashing DSA, and even now the NUS are at the forefront of working against this matter.

Campaigning to remain in the NUS is thus in the interests of so many disabilities campaigners, not to mention activists working on other campaigns. This referendum will place pressure on groups such as OUSU’s Oxford Students’ Disabilities Community – disaffiliation would do this even more so. And as a member of their committee, I think it fair to say that we are already overstretched in providing the services and communities that we do.

The point is that the NUS provides a critical link between the higher and further education institutions across the UK, giving a united voice to students who want change. Our JCRs, MCRs, and OUSU cannot perform a similar role alone. Because Oxford is in the NUS, it can send representatives to the NUS Disabled Students’ Conference, and others like it. It is here that, while students won’t agree with every decision made, we find a common voice and common ground.

The NUS stays connected with Oxford all year around too. I sit on the OUSU Executive in a part-time, unpaid position as Academic Affairs Officer. The work I and others do on this executive committee is greatly enhanced by the resources the NUS has to offer. It was partly through the NUS, for example, that colleges across Oxford could introduce consent workshops in the past few years, and the importance of positively rethinking and reshaping the problems of sexual violence on campus is of great importance to so many of us.

Beyond leading the campaign to stop cuts to the DSA, the NUS has done so much more to help. It is among the most significant national organisations conducting research on the interests of students as a target group. Just one example of this is the new Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Guide, where new research was conducted into improving mental health services across campus. This was picked up by major national newspapers and given as evidence in Parliament, on top of the advice it gave to us campaigners here in Oxford. The NUS will now fund two PhDs for research in the causes and prevention of student suicide. If it sometimes feels like the NUS is a soapbox or a friendship group, hopefully you now realise that this is a problem rooted in misinformation, and one we can fix. It is not an argument to leave it.

Losing our NUS membership would seriously damage the ability of Oxford students to campaign for change. Just this Wednesday, when the referendum was decided, some of us had to rush straight from OUSU Council to deliver a talk with Rethink Mental Illness on responding to our mental health crisis. This is only the beginning; it would be a shame to expend our energies on an NUS referendum when we have degrees to do, campaigns to work on, and ourselves to care for. I can only hope that our situation does not get worse, and that we do not end up without the aid so required from the NUS.