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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.

The University of Oxford’s Centre for Justifying the Use of Fossil Fuels has released a study proving once and for all that fossil fuel companies are the most ethical corporations in the world.

Banking was found to be the second most ethical industry by the study. The research centre, which is entirely independent apart from being wholly funded by oil and gas companies, reached their conclusions by examining how many positive stories there had been in the press about different industries between the years 1984 and 2014. The study did not look at how many negative news stories there had been about fossil fuel companies in the same period.

Key events cited as “triumphs” of ethical capitalism in the study include the efforts of BP to preserve wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which the writers found “significantly enriched the local birdlife of the region”. The report also praised the contribution of oil and gas companies to international development through the payment of bribes to key decision-makers in countries throughout the developing world. In particular, the study singled out the generosity of the British oil company SOCO International for its donation of £27,000 to a Congolese military officer in 2014 as an outstanding example of good corporate governance.

The study builds on previous findings by the professional services firm Ernst & Young that one-fifth of prosecutions in the UK for bribery and graft (otherwise known ‘alternative development aid’) between 2008 and 2012 involved oil and gas companies.

Landon Carter, Director of the Centre for Justifying the Use of Fossil Fuels, told The OxStew, “We believe that this study demonstrates that alternative development aid is the future of corporate responsibility. Our study, which covers a period of thirty years, has empirically proven what oil and gas executives have been saying for a long time – that fossil fuel companies are the most ethical in the world.”

“What really separates the oil and gas industry from other sectors of the economy is its unparalleled commitment to developing impoverished countries, this varies from buying government officials speedboats to helping local law enforcement hang environmental activists. Students considering a career in international development should definitely consider oil and gas companies first.”

Lucy Heywood, an Oil Scholar studying for a degree in Chemistry, commented, “I am really excited by the prospect of having a career in the oil and gas sector. I hear that fossil fuels are helping to make sunny beaches for people to go on holiday to all over the world.”

“I have no idea what fossil fuel companies actually do!” she added enthusiastically.

Meanwhile, an anonymous spokesperson for a major fossil fuels company said, “We’ll stop procuring it when you stop buying it. We would be a renewable energy company if it were profitable – never mind economical. Frankly you students should be grateful that we even donate to universities. If you don’t want it we can always give our corporate executives a pay rise or give a fat wad of cash to our shareholders instead.”

The American Dream, wrote James Truslow Adams, is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

It is that dream of land in which every generation will do better than its parents’, and where, for any and everyone who works hard enough, success will come. It is that dream of unlimited upper mobility, socially and economically, where the son of a pauper can end up the father of a multimillionaire.

And it is a conviction held by hundreds of millions, which, although it might have been coined in 1931, dates back hundreds of years, dates back to when Thomas Jefferson wrote down his self-evident truths – foremost, that all men are created equal.

That was, and still is, the great goal of American democracy: a society of innate equality, free from the aristocracy and hierarchy of the European ones, where the first Secretary of the Treasury could be an immigrant, and the man whose face now adorns the hundred dollar bill started as a penniless runaway.

But is that goal now hopeless? Given rising income inequality, low levels of social mobility, and the indisputable disadvantages faced by minorities, is it time to declare the American Dream dead?

To both of these, I answer a resounding no. In fact, it is better and stronger than ever before. To argue that the American Dream was once real, but is now unachievable, is to fundamentally misunderstand it and what it represents to American society.  It is so much more than many might think.

There is an inherent contradiction, for instance, in claiming that the Dream once thrived but is now gone and dusted. To say so is to paint a halcyon image of the past. Because there is something else to the American Dream: it must apply to everyone, regardless of sex, race, or sexual orientation.

So take Jefferson’s America. It was an America that incorporated slavery into its very Constitution. It was an America led by a group of almost exclusively upper class, land- and slave-owning white men, who by and large only let other land-owning white men vote. Its dream was a dream stillborn, un-actualised for all the slaves, women and poor living in the country.

Nor, even in the soaring heights of postwar American economic growth, could one say that the American Dream was alive and well. It was certainly not in 1963 as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail; as a man, imprisoned for his race, wrote that the actions of protesters were the actions of those “standing up for what is best in the American dream.”

And was it a dream fully realized for homosexual men and women until just this summer, when millions were finally given the right to participate in the millennia-old institution of marriage? Opportunity for each is not solely about money, as Willy Loman learns at the cost of his life in Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman. It’s about fulfilment as well.

Even, however, if we judge just by economic opportunity, James Adams’ American Dream was also stillborn. Stillborn, because in 1931, the only economic mobility in a country roiling in the middle of the Great Depression was down and further down still.

And though real wages have barely risen for the average worker since the 1960s, there was a market failure of a different sort at that time: barely over 33 per cent of the labour force was comprised of women in 1960. At least between then and 2010, that number rose to 47 percent – and the wage gap has closed considerably as well.

So what do we make of this? That the American Dream was only ever a myth, a mirage? That not only is it dead, but it was never even really alive? Exactly the opposite.

Because above all, the nature of dreams is that they are not reality. They are hopes, prayers, and aspirations. And our loftiest dreams – the ones about which we declare, “I have a dream!” – are ideals. We strive for them, believe in them, and in our belief, make fiction into fact. This is a gradual process – and every step brings us closer to our destination.

The American Dream is not, and never has been, a state of existence. There is no point in the textbooks to which we can point and say that “here, right here, we have equal opportunity for all”. It is instead an ethos, and a commitment. Even if we waver in our obligation to uphold its values, it remains part of the American national consciousness – the American identity – in a way that is impossible to shake.

The United States is at a precarious point in its history. It faces threats – social, economic, and political – both within and without, but at the end of the day, they are not existential ones. Great concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, a sluggish recovery from economic calamity, discrimination against immigrants, and divisive party politics in Washington have all been met and dealt with before.

There is a tendency to say of the present moment that it is the best of times, or the worst of times, when really, it is neither. History’s tide pushes forward, and though Americans’ belief in our Dream falters today, today won’t last forever. A nation that has had so firmly ingrained in it over the course of centuries the mentality that success should be obtainable by all will eventually overcome, as it always has.

In the meantime, let’s celebrate the progress made and wait for the next chapter in the American Dream, that dream of a land in which life is rich and full and where the streets are paved with gold.