Colleges are funny places. They inhabit a mixed identity: as historical institutions with timeless characters, as groups of modern individuals and as hierarchical structures. An atmosphere can change for no easily grasped reason.

Reports of intimidating behaviour, although rare, were increasing in Somerville. As Women’s Officer, I was increasingly aware that different groups in College felt either intimidated or unfairly implicated, and members were talking at cross purposes. Cases of harassment were being reported anonymously, making it difficult to take disciplinary action.

But action we needed to take, and the question as to how now reared its head. To tackle the issue, Somerville needed to simultaneously employ its hierarchical structures for disciplinary action, come together as a college and take a stand against harassment, and change the behaviour and attitude of individuals.

This became an issue of two questions: how do you tackle sexist behaviour, and how does a college acknowledge, condemn and tackle such issues? The Principal sent an email to the student body about the decrease in an atmosphere of tolerance, and we held a JCR meeting to condemn the actions, also donating £200 to Oxford Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Centre (OSARCC). The rugby team wrote an open letter following that meeting in support. And we received national press coverage, some of it unkind. I felt buoyed by the action of college students and leadership, but I couldn’t help but feel helpless. I was not sure whether these actions would convert into actual change. As Women’s Officer, I felt powerless. A failure.

Mostly I felt unspeakably sad that any of my peers had experienced harassment, as well as intensely furious that I was not sure how best to prevent such behaviour.

But soon after the JCR meeting, we received an email from OSARCC thanking the JCR for the donation and for the action College was taking to stand up and condemn sexual harassment. This email gave me the hope that we had taken a step in the right direction. Our Principal was also flooded with similar emails from alumni, students, fellows and acquaintances praising her for her actions. I by no means think that we hit upon a fail safe formula for implementing change in colleges.

Students are now asking questions, raising awareness, and thinking more carefully about how they act and speak. The atmosphere is changing simply by articulating the issues College is facing. I am sad that this seems to be required, given how difficult this must have been and continues to be for survivors for whom such awareness raising may be painful. I hope students will go about this process tactfully. Peer to peer conversation is a potent way to educate, to show support for survivors and also to make clear that harassment has a very human cost and will not be tolerated. It is difficult for a college to change. It is difficult to scrutinise yourself when you are a body made up of over 400 individuals. Ultimately, it is bloody difficult to fight sexism.

Somerville is beginning a process of evaluation and change. I have faith that we will deal with these issues with compassion and sympathy. I am proud of the individuals who have led the campaign over the last few terms to tackle this behaviour and especially admiring of the welfare and decanal team. And I am proud of the historical character of Somerville as a college which has traditionally pioneered women’s rights. I’m proud that, as a united front and as a college community, we faced harassment head on. It’s only in this way can we learn how to implement change, target unacceptable individual behaviour, work together, and look after one another. 

This week it’s Summer Eights. If you’re new to Oxford, or just not into the rowing scene, you can expect to see a whole lot of activity down by the Isis and, on Saturday, a wide array of parties at each college’s boat house. The college men’s and women’s boats will be out to ‘bump’ (read: hit) the college in front’s boat, and carnage is guaranteed to unfold. I’ll be somewhere out in the melee, at the bow seat (back seat) of Trinity College’s second men’s boat.

Rowing has been much maligned for its reputation as an elite and boorish sport. Events like the Royal Henley Regatta, the Boat Race and the social world that revolve around them mean that people associate the sport with upper-middle class consciousness. Equally, within Oxford, peoples’ experiences of the ‘lads’ and ‘gals’ cultures that are supposedly reinforced by the gender binary social set up of rowing crews put them off. From crew dates to OURCs blazers worn to night clubs, college rowing has not always presented a positive image of itself to those on the outside- I would like to address this.

I started rowing when I came to Oxford at the start of Michaelmas term this academic year along with almost everyone else on my boat. None of us had the elite training a public school rowing club could have offered us, nor do we represent a homogenous white middle class group. Over the last three terms I have rowed with crew members from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Romania, Poland, Zimbabwe, and from across the UK. The guys that will be starting with me this week will have come from completely different backgrounds, yet they will have been brought together by a single desire to compete together as a team.

Going beyond this, the idea that the rowing world is dominated by an Oxbridge elite is a total misrepresentation of the truth. It was Oxford Brookes, not Oxford University, that won the most prestigious university men’s eights cup in the world last year; the Henley Temple Challenge Cup.

What attracts me to rowing is not the crew dates, not the ‘rowing lad’ chat, nor even the vulgar blazers, it is the importance of collective work in a team. In a successful eight man or woman boat, the focus is not on the ability of a few star rowers, but rather the cohesion of the group. Too often, the intra-university media focuses on the presence of a single Blue in an elite boat, yet forgets that the boat will only move forward effectively with the collaboration of eight men or women in perfect sync with each other. Eight blades must hit the water at the same time with an evenly balanced amount of power between the two sides for the boat to make any impact on the race. This means that the interests of the collective in the boat are put above that of the individual. For once in our Oxford lives not everything is about ourselves; we learn that sometimes there are more important things than the lone ‘I’.

As a rowing boat speeds down the Isis, it needs to remain balanced. Without balance, none of the rowers will be able to apply the maximum amount of power through their blades into the river. To maintain balance in a boat, everyone needs to keep their oars level, to ‘tap down’ (read: push your blade down at the end of a stroke) at the same time. Rowers, therefore, need to be aware of their team mates. They need to be sensitive to the issues facing their comrades and they need to respond to them. In a constant drive to make the most efficient body movement to shoot the boat forwards together, rowers have to know and care about those with whom they are racing. For the two kilometres or so of the Isis course, rowers strapped into a boat together become a single organism – they endure the pains and elations of the race together.

Instead of constantly criticising rowing culture, looking at our society as a whole, we should try and learn from the sport. If the most capable at surviving in the capitalist system cared for the balance and harmony of our society as much as a rower cares for the harmony of his/her boat, imagine how much further we would move as a nation. If ordinary people tried to row in time with each other, giving time to community projects for example, we could have a more cordial society.

Globally, we face races to feed and house a growing population, protect the environment, and stave off future conflicts to name but a few. Maybe if we thought more like rowers, and less like self-indulgent individuals, then humanity’s boat might just win.

McKinsey and Company. It is a name that echoes around board rooms across the world. Described by some as the most influential management consulting firm in the industry, McKinsey works with more than 80 per cent of the world’s largest organisations. The Bank of England, the Catholic Church and the NHS have all at some time called upon McKinsey. It was with this in mind that I looked forward to meeting Dominic Barton, McKinsey’s Global Managing Director.

Barton, a one-time Rhodes Scholar at Brasenose College, is keen to stress the impact that his days as a student at Oxford have had on his career. Describing Oxford as an “extraordinarily special place” in terms of the architecture and the history, he nevertheless suggests that it was the challenging workload that had the most significant impact on his character.

“I will never forget being so shocked just coming here and asking my supervisor for a reading list. He said, ‘I’m not giving you a reading list, that’s your job,’ and I said, ‘What the hell are you paid for? You’re the teacher, come on’ and he said, ‘No, you figure it out.’ And so learning how to learn in that way was one thing, the other aspect was the cross studies view. I didn’t do Philosophy but Amartya Sen was here and I went to his lectures… that was amazing.”

Barton adds that he also treasures the friendships he made at Oxford. “There were so many different groups you could be part if, yet it’s small enough that you don’t feel like you are in some massive campus so I just loved it. The closest friends I have are from here; some you study with, some you interact with. They weren’t all Rhodes Scholars.”

Having touched upon the social and academic aspects of life at Oxford, I ask him about what for many is another significant part of University life: student politics and activism. Much of the attention of progressive movements in Oxford is focussed on inequality and a lack of diversity higher up in some of the country’s largest companies. Barton expresses a strong belief in the value of diversity for a company like McKinsey, arguing that it is critical that the firm continues to hire people from a variety of backgrounds.

Barton describes McKinsey’s mission statement, suggesting, “We want to have a lasting impact with our clients, we want to make a difference in the world.” Given this, he claims that it is critical that McKinsey attracts, develops and retains outstanding people. “People come in diversity,” he adds, so McKinsey will not meet its mission statement unless it hires a diverse range of people.

Furthermore, adds Barton, “The clients want diversity, they want variety. We have doctors, lawyers; we’re actually now starting to hire people who don’t even have a university degree. You know they’re talented people who did not have a chance for whatever reason. We can help train them and then get them into the system so it [diversity] is really important. We have to keep pushing that because if we don’t then we won’t fulfil our mission. It’s quite a performance measure.”

Diversity amongst its senior partners and junior consultants is evidently of great importance to McKinsey. But at the core of its operations is trust. “You can’t have a client,” suggests Barton, “if you don’t have trust.” McKinsey employees are privy to some very sensitive information and this can sometimes put the company in a difficult position, particularly when McKinsey operatives are serving two organisations that are in competition with one another. The potential for a conflict of interests reared its head with the Galleon Insider Trading Scandal of 2009, when two of McKinsey’s senior executives were convicted for sharing inside information with the owner of the Galleon Group hedge fund.

Barton describes how the Galleon Scandal “jolted the firm in a very big way”. He added, “To have that type of mistake made at a senior level – it wasn’t junior people, it was senior people – made us really rethink discipline and the edge to which we go. We brought in a lot of outside help and so we now have very rigorous processes regarding the use of information. No one is allowed to trade information and… we are very conservative on the rules regarding how long information is competitive.”

Having made the importance of trust between McKinsey and its clients very clear, Barton goes on to tackle the issue of trust between McKinsey and the wider public. A particularly contentious issue in recent years, or at least one that has been dramatised significantly in the media, has been McKinsey’s work with Britain’s NHS. Some are dismayed by the sight of a large American management consulting firm extracting profit from its work with the Health Service. I therefore ask Barton how McKinsey goes about ensuring that the public think that their work is motivated by a genuine desire to improve the healthcare system, rather than motivated purely by profit.

He suggests that most people “don’t join McKinsey to make money”, they join because “they want to make a difference, they want to change something”.
“A good chunk of our work is now outcome based, so we have no interest in doing work for a fee. And 70 per cent of our work is reference based, so people won’t hire us if there are not the results. We won’t do work, you will not get a McKinsey team unless we can have $300 million dollars of impact.”

The difficulty with regard to the NHS, for example, is the confidentiality issue. McKinsey have a policy of not talking to anyone about their clients. Indeed, despite the fact that McKinsey’s work with the NHS is public knowledge, Barton says, “We won’t admit to you that we serve the NHS, even though you may know.” Inevitably though, confidentiality gives rise to issues of transparency, “We can’t go out there and say it, so that makes it tough.” There is likely to never be full public trust in McKinsey given the inherent lack of transparency.

As an example, Barton describes some work that McKinsey are doing in the USA, “a major turnaround of a steel company”.

“If I were to tell you what the fees were, people would say, ‘What the hell, what are these guys?’ But if you were to then sit down with the CEO and CFO and say this is the impact, well the impact is just in multiples of it [the cost].”

Barton insists that McKinsey’s work with the NHS was born of a desire to “help make the system better”. He adds that the impact of McKinsey’s work with the Health Service has been larger than many people realise.

“Work we’re doing in Australia revamping healthcare, work that we’re doing in China, work we’re doing in Mexico: a lot of that leadership comes from the UK experience… but people here are not going to read about that, so that is part of the challenge.”

In addition to issues of trust and transparency, another challenge facing McKinsey as they move forward is technological progress. The challenge is twofold: helping clients to remain up-to-date with technological advances whilst also using technology to gain an advantage over its competitors. Barton explains that technological change is affecting McKinsey in a number of ways.

Number one is “big data”. Barton tells me, “The amount of information we can get today versus when we first started is radical. One of my very first projects was to figure out how many pieces of chicken to put in a lunch delivery for a fast food company. It took six months of work because there was not much information, you had to survey people and you had to look at competitors. That would take four days now.”

The second big change is computing power and data analytics. McKinsey employs a lot of “machine learning people”. Machine learning explores the construction and study of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data. “It is affecting the way we work and how people collaborate, using the various tools that people have to be able to work across time and space is something that is important.”

Technological change clearly presents some serious challenges for McKinsey. But it brings opportunities too. Barton is keen to emphasise the importance of seizing opportunity and taking risks, something that he says he feels he did not do enough of.

“I would have taken far more risk much earlier than I did; I was tentative and nervous. Your instincts are very good, I know that. They may not be tested, but they are going to be good.”

Perhaps it is partly as a consequence of working in one of the world’s most prestigious organisations, but Barton clearly has high expectations of Oxford students.

“One thing I’d say is there’s that phrase, I don’t know if it is a biblical phrase or one of those sayings, but it’s something of the order of, ‘For whom much is given, much is expected’. I would just say that being at Oxford is an incredible privilege: what are you going to do with it? I feel like it better be big. You want to be the best journalist in the world, you want to be an inventor, you want to run a business, I don’t know… but be ambitious, in a good way for the world. So that would be my advice, for whom much is given, much is expected.”

Barton is clearly an extraordinary man: highly driven, motivated and passionate about what he does. McKinsey’s influence in the world is by all accounts almost unprecedented. But under Barton’s leadership, that influence has the potential to be very much a positive force.

Whilst the term Specific Learning Difficulty (SpLD) can be used as a diagnosis in itself, it is often used to refer to diagnoses of dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, ADHD or ASD. The University of Oxford: Equality Report 2013/14 contains the university’s official statistics on admission and performance of students with SpLDs.

These most recent statistics state that, “As of 1st December 2013, 1,546 out of 22,116 students at the University were recorded as having disclosed a disability (7 per cent): 3 per cent had a specific learning difficulty (SpLD) and 4 per cent had another disability. These proportions were identical to those of the year before.” What these official figures do obscure, though, is the number of students who are diagnosed with a SpLD at the university. In our student survey, we found 59.5 per cent of students were not diagnosed until reaching Oxford.

This discrepancy has consequences on the acceptance rate of SpLD students. On the topic of application success rate, the Equality Report states, “There was no substantive difference in the offer rates for applicants with or without a disability, though those with “other disability” were less likely to convert their offer into a firm place, lowering their overall success rate. 97 per cent of applicants who had disclosed a SpLD successfully converted their offer into a place, compared with 90 per cent of students with no identified disability.”

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Most students spoke of the great assistance Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) had provided them so far. Benjamin Peacock told Cherwell, “The University has not only supported me but is part of how I made the realisation that what I was experiencing was not normal. It has been brilliant in diagnosing and support from that point forward.”

However, a significant proportion of the students we spoke to emphasised flaws in the current system. Jared Green told us, “The Oxford system is not only demanding in quality of work, but it is demanding in quantity. I have found that the sheer quantity of work was unachievable. The university offered me study skills tuition but it simply took up too much time on a science course and so I had to give it up just for those extra hours to cram work in. Whilst the extra time in exams compensates for dyslexia within exams, it needs to be recognised that dyslexic students are at a significant disadvantage generally on the course.”

Another source of dissatisfaction was tutors underestimating the effects of SpLDS. An anonymous student told Cherwell, “Oxford is intensive enough for the average student here, let alone those with SpLDs. I have the same amount of work, but it takes me far longer to read for and write it. I may get extra time in my exams, but nobody can give me extra time in the week. It may seem obvious, but I think it’s a fact that’s often missed and one that tutors don’t often consider.”

Similarly, one anonymous student stressed that whilst the University system was quite competent, often people have been quick to dismiss her SpLD, “The way Oxford deals with diagnosing and getting help with SpLDs is quite hard to work out – such as how to access support – but once you’re in, it is really good and free, unlike school.

“They treat you a lot better than the counselling service in the same building – i.e. you’re offered tea and coffee. Part of the problem with having SpLDs in Oxford is that because you’re obviously relatively clever and did well at school, I always feel like a bit of a fraud, like I’m making it up to get free stuff.

“That’s partly how it interacts with my anxiety disorder though; my anxiety really affects my work a lot more. I think and I know I wouldn’t have got any extra measures to help me with my anxiety even though often it means I can’t really read and the words don’t string together. With dyslexia, reading might be harder but I’ve adapted to it more or less.”

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Miscommunication and misunderstanding between tutors and students with SpLDs was thus one of the main problems mentioned by the respondents of our survey. Emma Jones, a first-year biochemist, told C +, “I spent the first two terms sending hundreds of emails trying to find some help as I have been really struggling. Although I have the DSA support, with my reading speed being low I am having to work continuously just to hand stuff in and have found it extremely hard to gain information from lectures effectively.”

The quality of provision evidently bears on the quality of examination performance. With regards to Finals performance of students with SpLDs, the Equality Report states, “Of the 3,111 undergraduates who took Finals in 2013, 287 (9 per cent) had disclosed a disability. Students with a disability were less likely to gain a first class degree than those without: 31 per cent of students with no disclosed disability achieved a first, 19 per cent of students with SpLD and 24 per cent of those with ‘other disability’.”

A major complication in the support SpLD students receive are the planned cuts to DSA. As reported by The Times, “[Nearly] £150 million was spent on DSA for about 60,000 students in 2012-13, providing a range of specialist equipment, such as computer software for those with dyslexia.”
Indeed, provisions for disabled students at Oxford can be expensive, even for students with SpLD: according to the Study Support costings, revised by the Disability Advisory Service in March 2014, the hourly rate for Examination Support Workers – ‘examination scribes’ – and Study Assistants – ‘buddying support’ – is £26.50, whilst Specialist Mentors for those with ASD or SpLDs can be up to £82.50 an hour.

Essentially, for 2015/16 the DSA will be cut, mainly affecting students who require assistive technology: disproportionately SpLD students. Students will have to contribute the first £200 towards their laptop (which means many disabled students will have to pay for their laptop in full, while those who need very state-of-the-art technology only pay £200 towards it).
The more difficult cuts will come in 2016/17, which will mainly be aimed at making universities and colleges take on the responsibility for ‘reasonable adjustments’ so the government doesn’t have to, but this is incredibly vague, especially given the uncertainty in the government.

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Anwen Jones, Head of the Disability Advisory Service at the University of Oxford, told Cherwell, “The Disability Advisory Service works with students as individuals whose needs are considered on a case by case basis, taking into account the range of support that might be required. This can vary regardless of background. As with most issues, transcriptions only come under our remit if there is evidence of a disability. If there is disability-related evidence of illegibility, students might be offered the use of a computer, or some other reasonable adjustment, but this depends again on individual circumstances. We do not keep figures on the number of students deemed ineligible for support provisions.

“Unfortunately, at this point we do not have any firm information about the impact of possible cuts specifically to students with SpLD. The government’s policy remains unclear at this point. In early statements, there was mention of restricting DSA support for students with an SpLD to those with complex study needs, but the scope of this remains undefined.”

Members of Oxford Students’ Disability Community (OSDC) have suggested some improvements could be made to the current system, One anonymous member told C +, “Changing the system to be more accommodating of Modern Language students, because for some reason they seem to assume that SpLDs preclude studying languages, and this means they don’t give us text-to-speech software in languages other than English.”

Another anonymous member told us, “It would have been a massive support for me if I’d had an older, more confident student to talk through my academic panics and what have you. If it were to become institutionalised, training (how do different SpLDs manifest, what are good coping strategies, how to support somebody struggling with one, what things are available in the colleges/university/more widely that could help) would be amazing!”