Saturday 30th May 2026
Blog Page 1319

Pembroke summer school criticised for access efforts

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Cherwell has learned that Pembroke College currently hosts a £3,995 summer school, the Oxford Summer College, and its subsidiary, the Oxbridge Admissions Programme, which purports to aid “high-achieving students aged 16-18” with their Oxbridge applications. Both courses claim on their websites that “Oxbridge academics” are involved in the schemes, a claim which has been questioned by members of the University.

The two week Oxford Summer College costs £3,995 to attend, whilst the Oxbridge Admissions Programme, a four day residential course, costs £985. On its website, the Oxford Summer College states it “provides expert tuition from Oxbridge academics”. The Oxbridge Admissions Programme claims, “Top Oxbridge graduates and University tutors have designed our course.”

Greg Auger, a St John’s student who ran for OUSU VP for Access and Academic Affairs last term, told Cherwell, “This company is conning applicants. Their homepage consists of a video in which the first sentence claims their course ‘has been created exclusively by Oxbridge academics’. So you might be surprised to discover that James Gold, their founder and director, has no expertise beyond having graduated from Cambridge (though he does plug his MA where he can, despite the fact that this is just a title conferred on Cambridge BA holders after two years). Although I think Oxford could do more, the information needed to make a competitive Oxford application is available freely online. The natural implication is that companies selling application advice are conning applicants, mostly international applicants in this case.”

James Gold informed Cherwell, “Both programmes at the Oxford Summer College are designed and taught by our academic teaching staff. The team at the Oxford Summer College includes those who currently teach at Oxford or Cambridge University, Oxbridge graduates and current undergraduates.”

In response to the claim that Oxford academic teaching staff were involved in the paid summer school, Alan Bogg, Professor of Labour Law at Hertford College, commented, “I would be very surprised to learn that employed academics in the collegiate university are engaged in external paid employment in the provision of admissions guidance, where potential applicants are paying a fee for the privilege. Quite apart from the ethics of it, it would be an arguable breach of the implied duty of fidelity in the main contract of employment with the University. The University might also instruct its employees not to earn outside remuneration from activities that are fundamentally antithetical to its institutional commitment to outreach and principles of fair access. A failure to obey such an instruction would also be a breach of contract.”

A spokesperson for the University said, “Oxford University is aware that organisations approach our students and staff to work for them, and may use college premises (just as academic conferences and other summer events lease college rooms and facilities). The University does not endorse any commercial operations or publications offering advice or training on our admissions process, nor do we guarantee the accuracy of any such company’s information.”

Gold, the Director of the course, described the Oxford Summer College to Cherwell as “a not-for-profit company with the aim of expanding access to Oxbridge for students from non-traditional backgrounds”. He went on to say, “The first programme is a two-week course aimed at overseas students who want to experience studying in the UK. The focus of the programme is the academic study of two subjects although we do include some Oxbridge admissions advice for the minority of our international students who are thinking about applying to Oxbridge. Most of our international students will be considering applications to top universities globally and come on our course to help them decide if the UK is right for them. We offer scholarships to academically gifted international students from non-traditional backgrounds as we believe that access schemes to top universities such as Oxford and Cambridge should not just be limited to UK based students.

“The second programme is a four day course aimed at UK students who would like to apply to Oxford or Cambridge. Last year, at least half of the places available on this course were provided as full scholarships to students from non-traditional backgrounds and we will do the same this year. To support our scholarship programme we spoke at over twenty non-selective state schools last year as part of our outreach work to encourage more students from diverse backgrounds to apply to Oxbridge.”

Cat Jones, the OUSU VP-elect for Access & Academic Affairs and a student at Pembroke, commented, “I am aware of these summer schools and I agree that they are problematic. There are so many people within Pembroke and throughout Oxford that are working tirelessly to try and break the longstanding link between income and Oxford offers. I personally feel that this is undermined by schemes that claim to increase the likelihood of gaining an Oxford offer if you can afford the thousands of pounds for the course. As a former Pembroke Access Rep, and current Pembroke student, I am uncomfortable with Pembroke lending its facilities and therefore legitimacy to these summer schools.”

Pembroke has previously been criticised for its access record. Between 2011 and 2013, it had the lowest average of state school acceptances out of all Oxford colleges, awarding only 46.2 per cent of undergraduate places to students from a state school background.

When questioned about the summer school, a spokesperson for Pembroke College told Cherwell, “The Oxford Summer College is a client of Pembroke’s conference and events business. Facilities are hired by them under the same terms as apply to all other clients, and Pembroke College is not involved in the organisation of their programmes.”

Pembroke JCR President Ben Nabarro refused to comment, while OUSU VP for Access & Academic Affairs James Blythe had not provided comment by the time of print.

Proposals in Exeter and Pembroke to appoint BME Officers

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Exeter and Pembroke are a step closer to appointing JCR Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) representatives after JCR meetings held last weekend.

Exeter JCR passed a motion last Sunday proposing that BME drinks be held to gauge interest in creating a BME Representative, and to create such a position if there was sufficient demand. Charanpreet Khaira, a second year English student, proposed the motion.

Speaking after the meeting, Khaira told Cherwell, “There is a very obvious minority of students of colour amongst Oxford undergraduates, and I think that it’s important for colleges to show that they are aware of this and would like to change it by having a BME rep.”

Pembroke JCR also passed a motion to appoint a Racial and Ethnic Minorities Representative. The role would include liaising with OUSU representatives, as well as working in collaboration with the JCR LGBTQ, Gender Equality, and Disabilities representatives. As a constitutional motion, the matter has to be voted on again at the next JCR meeting before it can be enacted.

Anna Simpson, who proposed the motion, told Cherwell, “We believe that liberation and representation are essential components of every society and that JCR bodies should reflect that. The Pembroke motion mirrors our commitment to promoting these values throughout our undergraduate community, by making sure that everybody feels they have a voice that is listened to in college.

“The motion has already passed the first stage of voting and was met by overwhelming support from our students, proving that Pembroke remains an inclusive and welcoming environment for everyone to live and study in.”

The actions of Exeter and Pembroke JCRs are part of a University-wide effort to appoint BME representatives, encouraged by Nikhil Venkatesh, OUSU’s BME Officer. Speaking to Cherwell, Venkatesh said, “It was a pledge in my manifesto that I would do my utmost to ensure that all common rooms had properly resourced BME Officers of their own, and it is fantastic to see people across Oxford introducing these roles in their colleges.

“BME Officers can be an important voice to represent an often overlooked minority at Oxford, and also provide support to BME students who experience the problems of racism. Each common room will want to go about the process of introducing a BME Officer in a slightly different way, and anyone who wants advice and help in doing so should get in touch with me.”

According to OUSU, 12 JCRs and one MCR have official BME representatives. Jesus JCR President, Jessica Parker-Humphreys, told Cherwell, “As a college, we feel that the significance of having a BME rep is to demonstrate that marginalised voices should be and will be heard and listened to. It’s essential that these voices have platforms whereby they can voice concerns or share ideas that could improve BME students’ time in Oxford.

“I think that BME reps have a particularly vital role to play with regards to access, due to the fact that Oxford’s student body is overwhelmingly white.”

Loading the Canon: W. G. Sebald

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Refusing to be easily categorized, Winfried Georg “Max” Sebald’s intricate masterpiece, The Rings of Saturn, borrows a French quote from Joseph Conrad and a Brockhaus Encyclopedia entry on the Roche limit as epigraphs, contains a table of contents straight out of a travelogue, and features a black and white photograph of a netted window looking into a monotone blankness on the second page.

The eerie mood of the picture and its jarring inclusion in what is ostensibly a novel begin a feeling of melancholy that impregnates the book, described in the first sentence, “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” For Sebald, hope is not easily found, but must be clung to whenever it is unearthed.

Each chapter of The Rings of Saturn starts in the guise of a memoir; indeed, the reader follows the thoughts of Sebald himself. But soon, mimicking the imaginative leaps of the mind, observations about his travels through the British countryside morph into esoteric history lessons. Seeing a fisherman leads into a discussion of the European herring trade, and fish’s tendencies to school – and die – in great masses. A diminutive train supposedly built
for the Emperor of China gives rise to a series of musings on the Taiping Rebellion, imperial power, and the cruel Dowager Empress, who demanded daily blood sacrifices to appease her silk- worm colony. Even a simple walk to Oxford Castle provokes tales of British World War II scientists secretly devising nerve gas and a biological weapon that could boil the North Sea. Although these myths start from peaceful origins, they decay rapidly into destruction and death, which Sebald identifies as a recurrent motif in human history.

Sebald’s father served Germany in the 1939 invasion of Poland; these oppressive memories certainly inform the shadowy human horrors that haunt his sentences. Yet rather than concluding that “life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder,” as the narrator suggests, threads of hope weave mesmerisingly through The Rings of Saturn, popping up, like Thomas Browne’s quincunx, in the most unexpected places.The Roche limit, for example, is the smallest distance that a satellite can orbit a planet without being torn apart by tidal forces, a fate clearly shared by some of Saturn’s early moons. But unlike those rings, we have the power to resist our entropic predilections. Sebald gives us that power, and is therefore worthy of a place in the literary canon. 

Alice Oswald: the modern epic poet to rival Homer

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Reworking ancient epic, myth and tragedy has been a concern of Twenty First century writers no less than previous generations. If anything, the modern era seems to be witnessing an expansion of genres and forms considered suitable for writing about the classical world – in particular the fraught but inspired Brand New Ancients of rapper-rhapsode Kate Tempest.

Performance is no less important to Devon-based poet Alice Oswald, as exemplified by the recent work Tithonus, her own take on the myth about how the goddess of the Dawn fell in love with a mortal man, kidnapped him, and asked Zeus to grant him immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Oswald’s poem was designed to be performed in real time to musical accompaniment in the exact length that the summer sun takes to rise, as recorded by Oswald in her field-work research for the poem. It’s a seemingly difficult premise, but one pulled off with incredible poetic dexterity.

I first became aware of the importance of the performance element in the work of Alice Oswald – a former student at New College – in a fairly stressful situation about two years ago. Having mentioned her in my personal statement, the tutor interviewing me informed me in a closing conversation that she had recently performed her Iliad-inspired work Memorial in Oxford, reciting it purely from memory. In retrospect, (I think I was too anxious to make much of it at the time) this seems like a serious commitment to recreating the circumstances of the kind of oral and extemporaneous composition that heavily influenced the Iliad. It is this faithfulness to her poetry’s sources, whether ancient epic or contemporary interviews, which makes her stand out among modern poets.

Critics often contrast the magnificent plots and vivid characters that drive Homer’s sweeping epic with Oswald’s emphasis on the experiences of individual soldiers in Memorial. This is satisfying to note, as it demonstrates just how successful she has been in rescuing the Iliad from becoming a “public school poem… a clichéd, British Empire part of our culture”.

This does, however, do Homer some injustice. He was an innovator in the innately conservative tradition of oral epics, handing crowd-pleasing poems and elevating sections of them into some of the finest and most influential literature ever written. He does not achieve this by glamorising and dramatising the emotional dilemmas of a few main heroes to the detriment of other soldiers. Instead, he rescues the patronymics and epithets that would have made up vast lists of the dead from meaninglessness through ingenious narrative detail, through the creative possibilities presented by fathers and sons, armour and gifts, and their ability to suggest a story worthy of epic behind the fate of every soldier.

Oswald, too, achieves something in this tradition, bringing similes and epithets to life in a way that haunts my every reading of the IliadThe typical “long-shadowed spear” of the Homeric warrior becomes, from the perspective of the victim counting down to his death, “a sundial moving over his last moments”. The murmurs rippling through crowds that are described as being like wind over the sea or through the cornfields, and are used by Oswald to conjure up the desperation and disappointment of grief. “When the west wind runs through a field/Wishing and Searching/Nothing to be found/The corn stalks shake their green heads.”

She is particularly adept at writing about nature, a skill influenced by close observation of the natural world during her training as a gardener, and her chosen subjects put this familiarity to excellent use. Her poem Dart was made partly using interviews with riverside workers and inhabitants, making it a richly coloured, abstract tapestry of nature and history, told through the diverse voices of the river’s people and creatures. The moments of pure description interwoven throughout this poem are made incomparably beautiful by the background texture, becoming, among various accounts clamouring to be heard, moments of reflective quiet in which the effect of each word can be appreciated on its own. “A/Lark/ Spinning/Around/A/Single/Note/Splitting/And/ Mending/It.” 

It is no exaggeration to say that the river Dart itself is the central character, in keeping with her determination to inhabit the mindset of her chosen subject with maximum closeness and accuracy, whether a river, the dawn, or a long dead soldier – a remarkably ambitious mission statement for an exercis in empathy, and all the more remarkable for her success in doing so. She has absorbed the spirit of equality in Homer’s work, recognising the importance of each tale being given a space for its telling.

Oswald is frequently cited as Ted Hughes’ natural poetic successor, but there are times when I think that her work invites comparison with far longer-lived literature, particularly ancient writers such as Homer and Virgil. She is equally comfortable and evocative in the close-up details of private lives as in the expression of sweepingly universal plights. More importantly, she also permits a plurality of voices in her work without making it seem chaotic, letting everything speak for itself rather than attempting to control, confine, or concretely define experiences.

Alice Oswald will be reciting from a selection of her work at Keble College on February 13th.

Review: Plenty

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★★★★☆

Four Stars

Plenty opens with a sprawled, flagrant, brazenly naked Andrew Dickinson, arm flung out in defiance and blood trailed marvelously across his body. ‘How theatrical,’ you might think – and you wouldn’t be wrong. The ‘staginess’, however, feels less a blatant vie for attention (although that was no doubt in director Luke Howarth’s mind), and more a counterpoint on which the rest of the play rotates – a moment of vulnerability and exposure that underpins our interaction with the remainder of the work. Like much of the play, it becomes meaningful when viewed through the lens of recollection.

Plenty is all about artifice. 1950s banality jostles against the artificial emotional high of the war, bourgeois decadence and conventionality that warps and reflects supposed love. Characters display themselves in ‘honest’ monologue until we feel they never can be quite naked. Gráinne O’Mahony, as the lead, manages to strike the perfect note in this stilted landscape, giving a remarkable performance of Susan’s descent into madness as she distills the move from poignant naivety to ultimate desperation. Her performance is cogent, haunting, forcefully charged; it is a brilliant depiction of the ultimate search for meaning.

Aoife Cantrill, as Susan’s debauched sidekick, is almost equally impressive in her portrayal of a troubled, blasé new bourgeoisie. She conveys the moving but inherently flawed love of a mutable best friend. Cantrill heads an overall highly impressive supporting cast, with Andrew Dickinson and Archie Thomson bringing acutely sensitive portrayals of Susan’s doomed love interests. However, it feels at times that Dickinson is overwhelmed by the tour-de-forces of Aoife and Grainne. Highly intelligent comic performances from George Varley and Shrai Popat were also memorable for impeccable timing and how they lifted the work’s otherwise somber mood to give moments of some poignant light relief.

These intimate portrayals, however, would be devoid of much of their emotional potency without the play’s set design. We moved easily between the conventionality of a living room, the brutalized fields of war-torn France and a seedy hotel room, as the designers monopolized the Keble O’Reilly space to maximize dramatic effect. One particularly sensitive detail lies in the transition into an otherwise unused part of the stage when Susan is reunited with her one ‘true’ love, a soldier from the war who she knew only for a night. The move subtly juxtaposes the forced artificiality of the living room and its characters with the poignancy of an anonymous bedroom, tacitly enhancing the work’s intricacies in a way that could have easily been overwrought.

Howarth’s production invigorates this world of barren hope and emotion, bringing freshness to the surprisingly relevant tensions of the post-war period.  And if that isn’t enough, it is, quite simply, worth watching for the cast.

Anger at Corpus’ damaged LGBTQ flags

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Corpus JCR has passed a motion of condemnation against unidentified students who tore down LGBTQ pride flags in the college on Saturday evening.
The incident provoked outrage within the Corpus community, especially among its LGBTQ members. Jem Jones, Equal Opportunities Officer, told Cherwell, “As a JCR and a community, we were shocked and angered by these events. That this would happen in Corpus, and in LGBT history month, honestly beggars belief. Whilst the perpetrators may not have any experience of being in a minority group, their opinions are clearly and thankfully in the minority in our JCR.”

An article in The Oxford Student stated, “The Abbotts [sic]… [were] accused of ‘offensive’ and ‘unacceptable’ behaviour after removing the flags”. However, Cherwell understands that there is as yet no sufficient evidence to condemn the all-male drinking society, The Abbots, and that the motion resolved to “condemn the individual(s) who removed the pride flags”, without speculating as to who this might be.

There was an Abbots event being held on the night in question, but it is unclear whether the event was still going on, or whether any members of the drinking society were in college at the time that the flags were defaced.

The defacing of the flags has also provoked a reaction from the wider LGBTQ community. Otamere Guobadia, President of Oxford University’s LGBTQ society, condemned the perpetrators, commenting, “Some belligerent wanker has actively decided to make a mockery of the attempts of a marginalised group to resist their oppression and celebrate the very difference that makes them targets of this kind of bullshit every day.

“I have no idea the extent of the society’s involvement in this stupidity, but frankly the patriarchal, overprivileged groups like these do tend to breed narrow-mindedness.”

The emergency motion, which was passed by a large majority in Sunday’s JCR meeting, also dedicated £75 for the purchase of new flags, as well as ring-fencing a third of Corpus’ annual charity budget for LGBTQ causes.
Many members of the college have praised the motion, and the general reaction of the Corpus community, as a highly positive step to ensure the safety and comfort of its LGBTQ students.

Speaking to Cherwell, Luke Mintz, Corpus’ LGBTQ rep, said, “The actions of this group were unacceptable and potentially very offensive to LGBTQ students. I am glad that Corpus JCR has sent out a strong message of solidarity with its LGBTQ community. I am currently working with our excellent Equal Opportunities Officer to get more pride flags around College during LGBTQ History Month.”

Sandy Downs, Corpus student and Secretary of Oxford University LGBTQ Society, was also very happy with the response of the JCR. She commented, “The queer culture here [at Corpus] is really special. The actions from last Saturday were unusual, and the response of giving £1,000 of our charity levy to an LGBTQ charity and a commitment to display more LGBTQ flags is great.”

Bethany Currie, JCR President, also emphasised that the College will continue to strive to be as LGBTQ-inclusive as possible. She commented, “What happened on Saturday has only stiffened our resolve to work even harder to make Corpus the place that its students believe and want it to be.”

The Dapper Side of Denim

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Fashion Matters

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After tearfully emerging from my hovel, having sat through the infamous ‘vegan-turner’ documentary, Earth- lings, and swearing off meat forever, I was forced to take a second look at some of our lifestyle choices. I have never agreed with wearing fur. One of my earlier memories is condemning the mink fur family heirloom to a life of solitude in the depths of the attic. It doesn’t take a raging vegan hippy with hairy armpits to be against fur either. Many people with their heads screwed firmly on their shoulders will argue that as we don’t kill these animals to eat them, they should not be killed for our own vanity, particularly when there are some pretty convincing faux options out there.

With the ghost of a still-living flayed fox still burning my retinas, I brought this topic up with some of my (admittedly rather upper middle class) contemporaries. They surprisingly sang its praises, taking the opinion that “if I shot it myself, I can wear it myself”. I found it accompanied their Barbours in quite a satisfying manner. Alright, fur is very warm and yes, people who live in the arctic rely on it to stay alive in the winter, but while the UK is unreasonably cold at times, we don’t need a fur to see us through the cold, unheated nights in student accommodation.

For those who still live innocent, carefree, pre-Earthlings lives, let me gently fill you in a little about the fur industry. After living their days in tiny confined cages, going crazy and circling day after day, the animals are killed as cheaply and efficiently as possible (or in some cases, just skinned alive). The cheapest way to kill animals is, to put it politely, an electric shock administered up the rear. If, even after that, you need another con for your anti-fur list, you smell like a wet dog if you get caught in the rain.

I’m not here to preach to you. You can find out more for yourselves pretty easily. But after lecturing myself hoarse to some pro-fur friends, they looked pointedly at my zip-up Vagabonds with raised eyebrows: Is leather any better? We tell ourselves that it is acceptable because cows die for food any- way, so really we’re just making sure that nothing goes to waste. I would like to point out now that if you happily tucked into a steak last time your parents came to visit, you might not necessarily feel guilty about your fabulous new boots, and fair enough, because that would be a little hypocritical. But actually if you move past the animal rights to the tanning process, which uses extremely toxic chemicals, its not such a faultless system either.

Still, how about setting aside our weeping consciences and buying fur vintage? These animals have been dead for ages and you’re not supporting the industry because those heartless men with the electric probes have probably retired and are sitting warming their leather booted feet on a sheepskin rug. This is a question yours truly has not quite resolved yet. Plus me and my Vagabonds are a romance akin to Elizabeth and Darcy or Christian and Anastasia (maybe not quite, although that brings a number of other misuses of leather into question), and I’m not sure I’m ready to buy vegan footwear. Unless it is Stella McCartney.

Did you clap Le Pen’s speech?

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Oxford students have been struggling in the past couple of weeks with the question of where we should stand on fascism. Apparently, the old antifascist answer – that the best place to stand on fascism is on its neck until it breaks – has become somewhat passé for the Oxford liberal elite. This unwillingness to aggressively smash fascism, whenever it rears its ugly head, reached its logical conclusion last Thursday night – with dozens of Union hacks lined up in the chamber of the world’s most famous debating society, seemingly breaking out into applause for the world’s most powerful fascist politician, either out of ritual or sinister admiration.

Lots of the debate around the invitation of Marine Le Pen has focused on ‘Does she have a right to a platform?’ or ‘Is this denying free speech?’ and crucially, ‘Will this invitation contribute to increased violence towards Muslims?’, but I would rather ask a different, albeit loaded, question: given that Le Pen’s invite has almost certainly contributed to a rise in legitimacy for the National Front and her brand of fascist politics, what would motivate her invitation?

It would appear, given the history of antifascist organising, that inviting Le Pen was never part of some elaborate antifascist strategy to discredit her. Listening to some right-wing students’ experiences of the event, one suspects that she was invited precisely because of her politics, rather than in spite of them.

In much of the commentary on this subject, students have referred to Le Pen as “a prominent politician”, but can never quite bring themselves to say what she really is: a fascist thug who wants to expel migrants and in 2012 attended an event organised by neo-Nazi group the Olympia Society, which bans Jews and women from its membership. When I challenged students on this in the queue, some said they agreed with her on immigration.

The photos of the Oxford Union members breaking out into applause for this defender of ‘free speech’ tell all. Far from challenging Le Pen, and in a symbolic act of respect, she was clapped into the chamber.

A recent witch-hunt against the OUSU demonstration has challenged students to prove their love of liberty by asking, ‘did you support the protests?’ I think a better question for those who attended the debate within the chamber would be, ‘did you clap Le Pen?’ 

David Browne has written ‘Why we clapped Marine Le Pen’ in response to this article which can be found here.