Rapturous applause resonated around OUSU Council this week after a coalition of three comprehensive schools committed to a landmark ‘outreach’ programme with the University. Labelled the ‘Real People Programme’ (RPP) and supported with £75,000 of government funding, the three state schools plan to “reach out” to some of the University’s most culturally inhibited students.

According to the official website, the programme’s three main aims are to widen social horizons, garner a sense of perspective, and encourage individualism. Trial runs were rolled out across Cambridge and Durham Universities in 2014 with great success, and now the state comprehensive missionaries have set up shop in the city of dreaming spires.

Programme leader Arnold Simpkins passionately told reporters, “The principal observation from our outreach work thus far has been a chronic lack of ambition. There are a number of students who are ambling down the same welltrodden path forged by their parents, attending the same Sixteenth Century boarding school, matriculating into the same Oxford college and ultimately joining them in the City for a career in finance.

“RPP is committed to ‘breaking the chain’ of innovation poverty and explaining to these young minds that there is a world beyond the Home Counties, that life’s journey can indeed deviate from the commuter belt and that there are jobs and lifestyles beyond those already explored by their parents.”

RPP’s second-in-command, Johnny Head, outlined some of the difficulties faced by the organisation. “Reaching out to the underprivileged presents a myriad of unique challenges. We find that many of the students we work with are the human equivalents of a Set Menu – extremely limited and often bland. Only yesterday I was asked, ‘Why think outside the box, when sitting firmly within it will earn me £28k a year, a free zones 1-2 travelcard and private healthcare?’ This type of candour is indicative of the humble backgrounds from which many of our mentees hail, though we feel we are making steady progress nonetheless.”

A representative from OUSU told us, “We’re delighted to be working with RPP and I really believe it will benefit many of our students to no end. Having travelled around India for three weeks last summer, I know better than most about the benefits of being open-minded and worldly-wise. In addition to RPP’s mentorship, I’d fervently recommend my peers spend a period of time travelling overseas – just make sure you go to a place where the people speak English.”

Not everybody shares OUSU’s positive view, however, and RPP has evoked its fair share of criticism. Terence Brush, a student with an opinion, told us, “Considering that 93 per cent of the UK population is state educated, it almost goes without saying that comprehensive schools and universities working together is undeniably valuable, necessary, and worthwhile – but shouldn’t this be underlined by a genuine sense of partnership? The rhetoric surrounding ‘outreach’ sounds more like handof-God interventionism than a mutually beneficial partnership.”

The second year History student was quickly shouted down by RPP, who this morning tweeted, “You don’t know what you’re talking about – outreach work is brilliant for your CV and highly valued by employers.” RPP’s first group workshop ‘How To Deal With Regional Accents’ is to begin in 1st Week of Trinity. 

Most people at this university are preoccupied with their own concerns and their own life goals. People can spend longer agonising over applications for nonsensical internships than they do speaking to their own grandparents. That Philosophy student poring over an Ethics book isn’t doing it to become a nicer person. Even when there are ‘big’ protests about some issue, the vast majority of the student rank and file is unaware (often wilfully so) of what is being done in their names. You need something big and personal to get students to the barricades.

Let’s scrap the tutorial system.

My modest proposal could mobilise anger here like nothing since tuition fees. A trawl of the student press will reveal that we have few sacred cows. Oxford is stuffed with absurd institutional practices, and whether it is high table at hall, our Vice-Chancellor’s ‘generous’ salary or the collegiate system itself. But everyone is terribly fond of the tutorial system. It makes us special, after all (along with the supervision system at Cambridge – our sinister doppelgänger). Let’s put this fiercely defended educational privilege up for review. It is ineffective and a waste of money. It makes us think we are special when we are not.

First, the money. Tutorials are expensive. The large college endowments which we enjoy here are used to cover most of the costs in a way not available to all but the elite institutions at the top of the Russell group. Extraordinarily, this system is then topped up with specially allocated public funds. In total, Oxford and Cambridge receive £6.9m of ‘special funding’ that is not available to other universities to support interviews and the tutorial system. If I were to write a list of things that the government should do with a couple of million pounds going spare, “enhancing the educational advantages of massively privileged institutions” would not be on it.

Tutorials are an essential part of the Oxford mystique. There is a happy vision of wisdom imparted by some wise old don in a very personal, tailored, and companionable sort of way. Here is one tutor’s description of a bad tutorial: “[if] they simply cobble together an essay before walking into the tutorial. What happens? The rather irritated tutor ends up taking the students through the basic material to achieve some sort of minimal understanding with no time for the more interesting material that digs deeper. The tutor talks too much, since the students have little to say apart from the odd clarifying question, so it’s not far off a lecture delivered in the most uneconomic way you can think of.” Sound familiar? That’s from Economics, a technical subject. In more humane subjects (and yes, Economics is very inhumane) I think the problem is when they go off-piste into wonderful tangents, which then leaves the student without any structured overview of the topic. Conversations are for experts, and undergraduates are certainly not that.

I am not saying that tutorials cannot be wonderful. I have had some excellent tutors and some enlightening conversations. But they are too often a way of teaching material that could be done in a class more cheaply and just as effectively (for the technical) or in a more structured way (for the introductory). And what the system makes up for in student-tutor ratios, it lacks in contact time. At the moment, Oxford humanities tutors are to their students as sailors are to their lovers: you hardly see them at all, but when you do it is fucking intense. I do not want to see the tutorial flushed down the toilet of history, but I do want the tutorial system scrapped as the default way of doing teaching here. Let’s teach with more seminars and have a couple of tutorials at the end of a term when we can argue back sensibly.

The existence of the tutorial system is also used to justify the frankly infamous ‘interview’, source of urban myth and a lot of damage to access from candidates intimidated out of applying. Oxford should be open to every bookish high schooler regardless of class, school background, and stage fright. We shouldn’t be recruiting performers, we should be recruiting nerds.

Yes

Tom Robinson

Voting is perhaps the cornerstone of our democracy. However else we want to furnish the concept, at its heart is a notion that the people can have their say at the ballot box. That say must be without qualification.

I understand why some people might wish for votes to be made public because it would force people to justify their decision. When it is so easy for people to selectively hear the news they want to hear, when the media can whip up resentment with such ease, we might be concerned that some people vote for a party or MP without really considering the consequences.

And why should we be reticent to tell people for whom we vote? Surely, if we are ready to vote for Labour or the Tories, we will have a set of reasons for doing so and won’t be afraid of telling others those reasons?

While this is a valid complaint, there are so many more important reasons to keep votes private, not only legally, but also in how we treat the subject in conversation. It’s not just the case that votes should be kept private, but rather that they must be kept so.

Asking for votes not to be kept private is akin to asking for people to justify their vote. But asking for this justification suggests that some votes are justified and others are not. We might say that the person is confused or has misunderstood an issue, and having to justify their vote might help them realise this. But this assumes that votes need to be based on fact. What if one votes on how they feel, or simply on their preferences (rational or otherwise)? Should we disallow motives like these because they don’t stand up to justification?

It may be disheartening when somebody votes for a party just because they felt like it. We may feel uneasy when someone votes out of fear or prejudice. But there really is no way to prevent this. Democracy and private voting is not perfect, but its probably the best option we have. We cannot and must not stop people from voting. It is that institution that ties citizens to the politicians who represent them and the democracy under which they live.

That doesn’t mean we can’t implore people to consider their votes more carefully. But changing the rules and norms around privacy is not the way to do this. Pragmatically, forcing votes into the open is going to be a disincentive for those already less inclined to vote.

It is precisely the engaged and politically active members of society who are less hesitant about letting people know for whom they voted. But for those who are less engaged, who don’t enjoy ‘talking politics’ the privacy surrounding the ballot box is probably a welcome break.

In essence, talking about politics is not the same as caring about politics. For whatever reason someone might want to keep their vote secret or private, we should allow them to do so. Voting is important and it should be taken seriously, but it should not be daunting or intimidating.

Furthermore, privacy sometimes allows you to make a more considered decision than if your vote weren’t private. Consider election privacy in JCR and society elections. If you have multiple friends running for the same position, it is difficult enough knowing for whom to vote. Privacy at the ballot box means that you can make a proper decision, without fear of upsetting anyone. The privacy afforded to you, both formally and in that you don’t feel pressured to answer when asked, enhances the democratic process rather than hindering it.

No

Tom Carter

In 1872, the secret ballot was introduced. Until then, voting was a public affair, with everyone – your boss, your spouse, your MP – knowing how you voted. The results of this introduction were dramatic, especially in Ireland, where the nationalist cause prospered as a result of the landlords no longer being able to intimidate their tenants. Change was in the air, and it felt good.

Fast-forward to 2015: a general election is less than ten weeks away and the question of which party to vote for is increasingly coming up. Are you a dastard Tory or a soft-hearted Lib Dem? A head-in-the-sands Labourite or a guilty UKIPer? The question will only get more pressing as the approaching election looms larger and larger.

However, in amongst all this election fever, there lies the possibility for an enormous social faux-pas; namely, asking people how they intend to vote. Such a question can induce instant scorn, and even a little a bit of outrage, that someone could ask such a personal question. It’s akin to asking about someone’s sex life or religion in terms of crassness.

But why is this the case? After all, voting is in many ways the most public act a person can carry out. It is certainly the act which most directly affects others: your vote helps to decide who gets to tax other people and who is in charge of vital services those people need to survive, such as health or education. It even decides who has the ultimate power over other people’s lives, whether on the battlefield or in the prison cells. The direct correlation between your actions and its effect on other people is abundantly clear.

As such, the notion that voting is a private decision is ludicrous. It is not something that you should feel entitled to conceal, especially when it has such an important impact on the lives of so many people. Rather, in the ideal world, it is something you should feel comfortable telling most people who ask, and indeed justifying to them why you voted the way you did. Such honesty is the start of political debate, which is healthy and necessary for a democracy to work.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t have a secret ballot, far from it. A secret ballot is necessary to stop voter intimidation. Indeed, historically it has been a great cause of liberation, allowing people to vote for progress, secure in the knowledge that they would be free from recrimination in the workplace or elsewhere.

But the fact that you are rightly not forced to tell people whom you vote for is not a reason not to tell people. In the vast majority of situations, slight judgement is the only possible adverse side effect, and, given that the decision you are making affects them also, such judgement is something you should be willing to endure.

Our right to vote is cherished as the hallmark of our society, and yet we exercise that right too lightly. The rhetoric of rights and responsibilities is clichéd to the point of self-parody, but as with every cliché, it holds a kernel of truth. We must honour the responsibility society has given us by thinking long and hard about how to exercise that responsibility. Part of this includes exposing our ideas to potential criticism, and justifying those ideas to fellow citizens, whose future every vote helps to decide.

So, next time someone asks you for whom you are going to vote, engage with them. This isn’t religion or sex, it’s politics. And remember, your vote affects them just as much as it does you.

“Oxford Student Disability Community accepts people for who they are. We don’t see disability, although we adapt to it without question; we see the person,” Hannah Prescott, President of OSDC, tells me.

Vice-President Sam Pugh expands on this. “Having a disability can often be very isolating, but having the opportunity through OSDC to meet people who are in exactly the same boat has been invaluable.”

OSDC aims to bring together students with disabilities socially, while campaigning for more understanding and treatment of disability. We advocate on behalf of, and support, students with disabilities at Oxford. We view disability as self-definitional, regardless of official recognition. We also welcome students without disabilities who are interested in disability.

One undergraduate told me, “It’s great to be around a bunch of fantastic people who just ‘get it’, because they share aspects of your lived experiences which your non-disabled friends cannot necessarily understand. OSDC is so valuable because it makes you feel not alone as a disabled student at Oxford.”

Oxford has over 1,200 students who have declared a disability and the University states that it is “committed to making reasonable adjustments and addressing any individual support requirements to ensure that students are able to participate fully and enjoy a fulfilling university experience.“ While there are cases of good support, this is not yet every disabled student’s experience.

“I have not found the University to be understanding of my illness,” says Hannah. “Students have reported the same negative circumstances for many years now – for example, delays in receiving adjustments and issues of confidentiality being breached – but not a lot has changed.”

A postgraduate student commented, “Oxford, unfortunately, is not very good at making all its events and opportunities accessible – not only core academic work, but also the panoply of other social events too… The Disability Advisory Service here is not always most effective at coordinating and facilitating inclusion.”

Our termcard is on our Facebook group, ‘Oxford Students’ Disabilities Community (OSDC)’, and any Oxford student can join.

The committee is open to all. It isn’t like other committees, and there will be an understanding that our disabilities come first and we can only do what we can do.

In the midst of the drizzle and pessimism of 4th Week at Oxford, I had the pleasure of meeting Denis Goldberg. Goldberg brought all the warmth of South Africa and passion of the campaign against apartheid with him to a small room in the Old Bank Hotel.

He travelled from his home in Cape Town to deliver a talk as part of the Oxford’s 10th annual Israeli Apartheid Week. The speech, entitled ‘The Prisoner’s Struggle: From South Africa to Palestine’, discussed his percieved similarities between the two states and how civil society outside of Israel/Palestine might support peace and justice in the region. Goldberg was the only white activist to be sentenced to imprisonment alongside Nelson Mandela in the Rivonia trial, serving 22 years in a Pretoria prison. He was a close friend of Nelson Mandela, describing “Nel” as a “tough old man”, and was present during his fi nal hours. Sitting across from Goldberg, I immediately admire him for refusing to retire from political activism. Aged 81, he has on numerous occasions condemned Israel’s systematic oppression of the Palestinians and is a strong proponent of the international campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

He describes the current situation in Israel as being a form of apartheid, commenting, “One must go back to the international defi nition of apartheid, which was based on the situation in South Africa, but generalised from it to say that where there are laws and administrative practices and decisions affecting a minority of the population or section of the population separately and to their disadvantage; this is apartheid.”

He offers an illustration, referring to the Law of Return, guaranteeing Jews the right to live in Israel and Palestine, which runs parallel to the policy of denying Right of Return to Palestinian refugees.

Goldberg himself is of Jewish descent, although he says he does not identify with Judaism as a religion. Despite this, he still vehemently condemns what he calls “the policies of the Zionist state of Israel”. Indeed, for Jewish critics of Israel, such as Barnaby Raine, President of Oxford Jewish Students for Justice in Palestine, Goldberg “epitomises the long and proud Jewish tradition of solidarity in the struggle against injustice”.

This stance is strongly linked to his actions in fighting apartheid in Africa, “As a white South African, I fought against apartheid because it was wrong. Like Nelson Mandela and the comrades I went to prison with, it was so wrong we were prepared to lay lives on the line for the rights of people. I would not be part of the oppression.”

He encourages people to take part in the campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, explaining how he thinks they are effective means of breaking apartheid. He refuses to shop at upmarket shopping chain Woolworths, the South African answer to Marks and Spencer, because they stock products imported from Israel. He half-jokingly concedes, “We are a land of wonderful fruits and theirs are the best of the best! But,’” he asks seriously, “what does it cost me to eat an orange with flecks on the skin against one without flecks?” Continuing, he challenges, “What are you afraid of? You have the power.”

I ask Goldberg how significant boycotts, divestment, and sanctions were in the campaign against South African apartheid. “International sanctions against apartheid South Africa were, in the end, quite effective. Not just economic sanctions, but also sporting boycotts, cultural boycotts, although they were often broken. But nonetheless people with conscience tried to uphold them. In the end, economic sanctions and the liberation struggle in Angola and Mozambique in particular were key to the weakening of apartheid South Africa.”

He went on to tell me his firm position on institutions investing in companies affi liated with apartheid states, saying to such companies, “I demand you divest. You are part of the oppression of people.” BDS against Israel is very much a live topic in the student community. A motion calling for blanket sanctions against Israel was rejected by OUSU Council in 2013, whilst as recently as Wednesday, OUSU Council voted against an anti-BDS motion.

Goldberg explains to me how important it was for universities to use their influence in the campaign to break South African apartheid. He recounts a conversation he had over breakfast with trustees of the student’s fund. “The students had a campaign and I was asked to come and speak. I said why are you invested in IBM, they’re in South Africa? You should divest.” He purses his lips, recalling their reply. “Oh no, we can’t, they would remove the computers and so on.”

His response to this is characteristic of Goldberg’s boldness and outstanding commitment to justice. “Your job is to secure the money of the University, not to play politics. You should be charged in court for dereliction of duty… and if IBM threatened you, you would simply go public! The other big companies would have computers and software there the next day, they’d love it!”

Here lies a lesson for Oxford colleges, whom Goldberg challenges. “I know times are tough, but how about taking a stand on principles?” With news arriving at the final lecture of Isreali Apartheid Week that SOAS had voted by 73 per cent in support of an academic boycott of Israel, it seems that Goldberg’s hopes for the role of universities are materialising.

Goldberg embodies a commitment to empathising with others struggling to achieve their rights. This is something he encourages us to embrace. “I would like to see an understanding internationally that you can go on shedding blood forever or you can say, ‘I do care about the lives of Palestinian children brought up in refugee camps, in extremely diffi cult situations, and I care for their humanity.’” His compassion also extends to Israelis, as he claims that they are ultimately victims of ‘Israeli apartheid’ too. “I also care for the humanity of the young oppressors who become brutalised and de-humanised.”

Goldberg read Civil Engineering and during his imprisonment completed half of a Law degree. He clearly values the role of education in bringing about unity between people, expressing his desire for “our young people in particular because they are going to change the world – nobody else is going to do it – to understand the nature of the oppression”.

He goes on to highlight the importance of higher education. “I want young people to grow up knowing that it doesn’t matter what background people have, do you like each other? Can you be together? Can you enjoy each other’s company? I go to university campuses in South Africa which were once seas of white faces and now they are now the opposite, all our young kids can go. People are together.” He laughs, glancing at his lap as he considers relationships between young people. “In a way I rely on hormones to put things right – people can meet each other on much more equal terms!” Goldberg has spoken at many universities across the world, and blinked in surprise at the standing ovation he received from his audience of Oxford students at the end of his talk for Israeli Apartheid Week.

With 30 per cent of current MPs being Oxbridge graduates, Goldberg was keen to encourage integrity and morality amongst potential future leaders. “I would like to see young Oxonians, especially students of history, sociology, and politics understand that these are not theoretical subjects. They are about people’s lives. And as concerned human beings, one needs to take their knowledge and show their support against oppression. You can’t do this everywhere, at the same time, but there are enough of us with interests and connections to be able to pick our targets… Education is not just about facts and knowledge. It’s about values. What values are you upholding?”

In 1964, Goldberg was sentenced at the famous Rivonia trials to four life sentences. He was sent to a separate prison for whites, where he resided for the next 22 years. I ask him whether he ever felt like the outside world had abandoned him during these long years. He responds, strongly, “We knew we weren’t abandoned. We weren’t allowed postcards or Christmas cards for many years, and when they were allowed, each prisoner would get hundreds of cards from all over the world, from classes of children, trade union branches, churches, their leaders, and just ordinary people. It was very encouraging, I have to say. Eventually we were able to receive 12 cards and answer them. I’d always pick some I didn’t know… But to see a pile of cards like this,” he motions with his hand to the height of his chest smiling at the memory, “we were never forgotten.”

Goldberg has high hopes for the future of Israelis and Palestinians, picturing justice and peace. “I’m optimistic. If we can do it in South Africa after all those years of deep bitterness and psychological scarring, I think other people can do it as well.”

I shake hands with Goldberg, and step back out into the drizzle and swathes of tourists, snapping pictures of colleges. Goldberg had relayed intimately, in the space of half an hour, how ordinary people are instrumental in bringing about social change. It’s impossible not to feel a new sense of optimism and and empowerment as I walk away.