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.