“Hey hey, ho ho, reporters have got to go!”

These were the words that could be heard chanted repeatedly by a human shield of students at Missouri State University last week, as they blocked media access to the scene of resignation of the University President, Tim Wolfe. On November 9th Wolfe made his resignation speech under the watchful eyes of student protestors angry at Wolfe’s apparent ambivalence towards serious and ongoing episodes of racial hatred involving Missouri State students, as well as what many students felt was a campus-wide atmosphere of intolerance and racism. Things came to a head when graduate student Jonathon Butler was joined four days into his hunger strike by a largely black contingent of the Missouri State football team; by day eight Wolfe capitulated and protestors rejoiced.

The ‘no-media safe-space’ created by students at Missouri State is a novel, and rather confusing, thing. Students erred frustration at the way the media reports racial issues in America and emphasised their right to a safe space. Infuriating though the mainstream media can be when reporting on race-relations, and crucial though it is for students who feel victimised to be able to voice their opinions with confidence, there is an undeniable degree of irony to this story.

Recent student protestors at Missouri, Missipipi, and Colombia have all taken inspiration and strength from one another, as well as from the highly publicised Black Lives Matter campaign. A hunger strike is, at its core, an attention seeking device. Everything about the behaviour and actions of these students was designed to shame University administration into addressing their grievances; and it worked. Fear of public outcry, and not a sudden change of heart and sincere concern for the health and safety of his students on the part of Tim Wolfe, is what forced the University to react.

Some definitions are needed here. A safe space is defined by Advocates for Youth as “A place where anyone can relax and be fully self-expressed, without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome or unsafe….a place where the rules…strongly encourage everyone to agree with others”. A protest is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a statement or action expressing disapproval of or objection to something”. A protest, by nature, necessitates a degree of conflict. Safe spaces are conflict free-zones and therefore safe spaces and protests must be mutually exclusive. To protest is a democratic right, but we do not have the right to expect our protest to come at no personal cost; protests are designed to upset and inconvenience their targets and a protestor should therefore not be surprised if their action forces them to encounter conflicting opinions and people who question their position. The students of Missouri have co-opted the concept of a safe space; protesting is a public demonstration of dissent and there is nothing ‘safe’ about it.

If you care enough about a cause to attend a protest in its name, you ought to be able – you ought to want to – talk to reporters and argue your case. If, as the protestors at Missouri argued, you feel that the media will “just get the headline wrong anyway”, then it is understandable to want to simply block the media out. But to do so would be to deny the critical role media outlets and TV cameras have in bringing about social change. In the twenty-first century we have the privilege of being able to take journalism into our own hands; if you don’t like the way someone is reporting something you can go online and tell your side of the story; if you don’t like the media, you can be the media. The students of Missouri may have successfully kept journalists off university property – something they are within their rights to do – but they have not kept the story out of the headlines. I was angered, though not surprised, by Fox News’ coverage of events at Missouri State and feel for the students who do not want to be the target of antagonistic news anchors and online trolls, but the solution cannot be to ban the media outright.

Rather than employ no-media safe-spaces we must change the media from within so that protestors can relish the opportunity to practice their freedom of speech and defend what it is they feel so strongly about, rather than shy away from it. A no-media safe-space may in some circumstances be a good idea, but it seems to me that in most cases no-media safe-spaces undermine freedom of speech and undermine the very causes that those who enforce them believe in.

CN: mental health, suicide

The mental health of graduate students is frighteningly poor. In a recent survey done at the University of Berkeley, it was reported that 50 per cent of reported suicide attempts were of STEM graduate students. For many, it has become an accepted part of joining the academey. Students are dismissed – and often punished – for being ill, or wanting to have some time off for a holiday, to recharge their batteries. From within my own department, Chemistry, I have heard stories so horrific that they border on unbelievable.

For students who don’t have the fortune of a research group to fall back on (and even for some of those who do), completing a research degree can mean facing long periods of isolation, with little or no support. If they’re lucky, they might have a great supervisor, who they see more frequently than once a month. However, for the majority of students, this is not the case. Add this to the concerted shutdown that Oxford undergoes during holiday periods, and the lack of accountability of college advisors, and you have a recipe for disaster. For international students like me who cannot go home for Christmas, it can be an exceptionally lonely and isolating time. The counselling service even shuts down over the breaks, leaving struggling students to manage by themselves. This is not just about graduates, either: for undergraduate international students who face exorbitant fees, going home is simply not an option. Further, many final year undergraduates have to be here outside of term time to do research, or to prepare for finals. Never mind the culture shock you face when you arrive. Getting a degree from Oxford is a gruelling process, and one that the University is not adequately addressing.

I’m writing this as someone who has battled depression for ten years, and almost didn’t survive my degree because of the lack of signposting, the confusing UK health system, and absence of institutional support. It took me six weeks to get something that resembled healthcare, by which time I was severely ill.

Oxford University Student Union needs to be on the frontline of this battle – we have good relationships with the Collegiate University, the Counselling Service, and local services. This is why it’s not good enough to focus purely on extending term lengths, introducing reading weeks, or workload caps as solutions to the mental health crisis we are facing at this and every University. Aside from the fact that these will take years to implement, they are ideas that will either have negligible, or in some cases, negative impacts, upon the graduates that make up 47 per cent of the student population. You can’t cap a DPhil workload, and you can’t extend what is essentially a full time job without cutting into the little holiday we are given. We have to think about the wider implications of these policies in much more detail, and consider the effect they will have on all students, financially and materially as well as in terms of wellbeing.

We need to have a serious, well-thought-out conversation about what comes next. We need support for students for the whole time they’re here, and a better way of reaching them – many graduates do not interact with their Colleges at all, and so addressing welfare provision in departments is critical. We need to signpost the NHS Services better, and make the University or College provision that does exist less variable. There are tangible ways of effecting change, that are achievable, and that will make a huge difference to the life of every student.

In short, we need a plan – a vision – for how welfare works at Oxford, made by all of the people who will be affected by it. OUSU has a duty to represent and work on behalf of every student at Oxford, and to provide support for all those in need of it. Currently, that’s not happening. A welfare vision would allow OUSU to set clear priorities for the next few years, so that we keep pushing the University to make change where we as a student body want it most. I don’t need any more empty platitudes about not being ill at Oxford. I am ill, I am at Oxford, and I deserve to be here and to be heard, as does every other student, undergrad or grad, wherever you’re from. We are accountable to every student – it’s time that all our needs are put in the frame.

In 2013, Shirin Gerami became the first woman to represent Iran internationally in the triathlon. This alone says something about her character: she is brave, ambitious, and passionate. But ultimately her story illustrates more than just passion for sport and competition; it is a story of ishq, which is, in Gerami’s words ,“a very powerful word in Farsi”, combining “the highest sense of love and passion together.” And this story of ishq, unexpectedly, became bound up with my own.

Seven months ago, I received a call from my mum telling me that my dad had had a heart attack and died. I was living in Jordan and immediately I began searching for the next flight home.

On the plane, I began to write about my father – a piece of writing I would later read at his funeral. It may seem strange to begin writing a eulogy so quickly, but somehow even in that state of shock I found an intense clarity, and I knew exactly what I wanted to say: that my father lived his life for love.

Grief revealed to Dad the full strength of love. His father died prematurely and Dad would always remember the last loving caress his parents shared. In this, he realised the absolute bravery it takes to love another person in full knowledge that you can lose them.

This realisation changed his life; my dad was a Catholic priest, and after witnessing his mother’s grief he began viewing his celibacy as cowardice. He left the Catholic priesthood. He met my mother, confident that his love for her posed no conflict with his love for God or his role as a vicar. 

After the funeral Shirin, who had been a student at St Chad’s College, Durham, when my dad was the Principal there, contacted me. She had read the eulogy and was struck by how far his attitude towards love and grief reflected hers. Shirin’s own father died when she was nine. We were keen to talk to each other further and I asked if she wanted to meet.

Today, in Taylor’s on St Giles’, we smile at each other over our food and talk about her studying PPE, living out in a student house, her memories of my father – dodging the issues somewhat. I had watched a TEDx talk in which Gerami said that an attack she experienced aged 18 was the beginning of her journey towards the triathlon.

I ask about this. She explains that she and her friends impulsively decided to hike the Alborz mountains from Tehran to the Caspian Sea. Shirin describes how she “remember[s] the fourth night ever so clearly, completely and utterly overfl owing with a sense of love and appreciation; that immense sense of gratitude to be alive.”

But on the fifth night they were attacked by a group of men. “I really thought I was going to die that night,” Shirin tells me. “The experience still affects me today, helping shape who I am and what I do.”

She looks down at her food: it is clear that this is a painful subject. “After this, you still went on another adventure to Antarctica. Was that more difficult to do in light of what happened?” I ask.

“I was in pieces,” she replies. Soon after this she was diagnosed with a mental illness. She did not agree with the diagnosis, but was told that she had to take medication if she wanted to receive further help.

But the pills did not help; they made her worse. She wrote to the organisers of the trip, asking to drop out as she did not think she was mentally healthy enough. But the trip’s leaders persuaded her. Again, Gerami set out on an adventure. Once en route, however, she became ill and had to stay behind in her tent alone.

“That time still feels an eternity,” she says to me. Eventually, she recovered enough to leave her tent. As she crawled out, “I felt the warmth and the rays of the sun on my skin. It warmed me up from the core of my being. It set the beautiful landscape alight, and I realised that the universe doesn’t judge.”
She poured the pills into the sea.

Of course, trauma is not solved in an instant, but a process of healing was underway. That year she went to university in Durham and it was there that she found triathlon. It let her be “back in nature, doing something physically demanding”. It filled her with “selfconfidence; it was, and is, therapeutic and empowering.”

Gerami wanted to get permission to represent Iran in triathlon races. Permission had not been granted to Iranian women to race, previously. At this point, she looks up at me with a wry smile: “What does challenge mean?” she asks. Clearly she would never have backed down.

The process of getting permission to compete took six months. “It made me question everything,” she says. “Everyone was saying no. I had so many near yeses but they always ended in no. “But I had a ray of hope. Everyone was telling me to stop, but where there’s a will there’s a way…I arrived in London just before the competition and I still had no permission. I thought, ‘Let’s just crawl into bed.’ But then I thought to myself: there’s one last chance of staying positive, of not giving up.”

Permission from the Iranian government arrived that day and she competed. I ask her if this is something she wants to see more Iranian women involved in. “Of course,” she replies, explaining that she wants other women and girls to benefi t from the therapy and empowerment that sports can provide.
“No one’s willing to hear them, believe them,” she says. “This was the tool I had as therapy. It’s enlightening, empowering.”

After recounting these struggles, Shirin suddenly reiterates the philosophy that had connected us: that the very real pain caused by losing her father, being attacked, and nearly being prevented from competing in the sport she loves due to her gender had ultimately only strengthened her faith in ishq – her faith that love coexists alongside and within the pain.

As I was walking from Taylor’s back to my class, I thought about how, a few days before my father died, as part of a sermon for a friend’s wedding, he had written, “Life is ultimately all about love; life must ultimately be about love; if it’s not about love… well, it’s not about anything.”

This is the truth by which my father lived, and the truth by which Gerami works to bring the triathlon to others. This is ishq.

Just over a week ago the tech start-up I co-founded was presenting at the Advertising, Media and Marketing Fair in the Town Hall. From Amazon to Saatchi, companies piled up mounds of food and freebies trying to attract the best and brightest to their stalls. Go for the biscuits, stay for the grad scheme – so we hoped.

What always strikes me about these events is the enormous food wastage. Those mounds of leftover muffins, Jaffa Cakes and oranges standing half-excavated on tables and destined straight for the bin as the day draws to an end. This is astonishing even by Oxford’s standards – the city ranks fourth in the country for homelessness and the number of food banks in recent years has jumped from 29 to 251. Going on about homelessness and food banks to students tends to draw unflattering comparisons with the people standing around Piccadilly Circus yelling that the “End is Nigh” so not to waste a good PR opportunity we decided to gather up the leftover food and take it over to the Oxford Gatehouse homeless centre on Woodstock Road.

Asking for leftovers from pampered graduate recruitment officers at Ogilvy wasn’t exactly what I’d imagined I’d be doing four months after graduating from Oxford, but it got the job done. We gathered juices, baked goods, Haribo sweets (given to us begrudgingly because HR might need them for the next event), fruit and every variety of biscuits.

The Gatehouse greeted our start-up’s delegation warmly and accepted the donation. Dean, who helps to run the drop-in centre, told us that their work seldom receives coverage in the student press and so they get few student volunteers. Perhaps this isn’t entirely surprising given how full most peoples’ academic/social calendars get, but still that’s little comfort.

Food waste at the Advertising, Media and Marketing Fair however is just a small example of the way that we under-utilise our resources at university. In both my second and third year I lived out of college and was astonished by the inefficiency of the housing model. In Oxford and indeed throughout the UK, students renting privately are forced into 12-month contracts despite the fact that they live and study in their university cities for 6 months of the year. There are about 10,000 students living out in Oxford. Their rooms stand empty during Christmas and Easter holidays, not to mention over those long summer months. This represents £3,000 in wasted rent each year for the average student and does nothing to help Oxford’s reputation as the least affordable city in the UK.

The length of rental contracts is unlikely to change any time soon, especially while students continue to queue overnight to sign up to them. Legislative changes announced in the April 2015 Budget, however, would make it easier for students to make use of their empty spaces through subletting. This will not only help to increase the supply of medium-term housing but will also help to reduce the rising costs of student living. The legislation is by no means sufficient or the unequivocal answer to the housing problem. It is however a step in the right direction that will help us to use our resources more effectively.

If nothing else, it’s also a sign that some solutions to our everyday problems are closer to home.

The Prime Minister has written a letter to the Oxford University Student Union, leaked exclusively to The OxStew outlining concerns about OUSU’s finances.

The letter criticises the Student Union’s current financial strategy, and recommends a more “creative” approach to fundraising.

The letter reads, “Dear Rebecca, I wanted to write further to the 2015-16 Budget Briefing that your office kindly sent across. I have a number of suggestions to make that I am surprised you have not considered.

“My advisers tell me that many other student unions raise money through holding ‘club nights’ in the Union building (I hear that Hull has one which is extremely popular). I find it confusing that OUSU does not hold such events, but spends a lot of time and resources on hosting free debates and speaker events. If the Union building is large enough to host these sorts of events, I should think it could be an appropriate venue for some sort of disco.

“In addition, your initial £240 life membership fee might be off-putting to students considering joining the Student Union, and this may be something you wish to reconsider. If you do continue to charge this fee, however, you should make sure it rises in keeping with inflation.

“It is, of course, important to create a sense of community – a ‘big society’, if you like. A good way of doing this might be to introduce some sort of initiation process into the Union (any good butcher’s shop should be able to provide you with all the equipment you need).

“One final point – I would have hoped that the Student Union would have followed Conservative best practice in exploring legal and creative solutions. I note that you have not considered selling off student accommodation, establishing drugs rings or protection rackets. Plain theft is another extremely costeff ective way of raising money.

“I hope that the Union will move cautiously in setting out its budget plans, listening to both public opinion and the views of my fellow Parliamentary colleagues.

“Yours, David Cameron.”