Experience of fining varies hugely between colleges. Whilst most issue monetary fines, others prefer to punish students by non-financial methods. There is also much discrepancy between colleges in how often fines are imposed, their value, and what behaviour is deemed punishable. Students on the wrong side of this have expressed their resentment to C+.

A few colleges do not exact financial fines. Balliol JCR President, Dan Turner, told C+ that, “The punishment regime in Balliol generally is very soft and liberal. Rule-breaking would be treated more as a pastoral issue than a punitive one. People don’t really get fined, and the worst punishment you could expect would be a ban from the bar.”

In contrast, colleges such as University College only issue financial fines. JCR President Abigail Reeves commented, “Fines, if issued, are financial… Community service is not issued as a punishment, but if individuals create too much mess they are strongly encouraged to clean up after themselves. The main form of punishment is being sent to see the Dean, discipline issues rarely go further than this.”

Keble is a college where fines were in the news last Michaelmas after a crackdown on “Keble Blinds” drinks. However, JCR President Tomas Ford told C+ that “the Dean will often make the first fine delayed, so you only pay it if you do actually re-offend”, and noted no recent controversies about Keble’s policy.

Whilst many individual respondents to the C+ survey were critical towards their college’s fining policy, JCR representatives contacted by C+ did not note any particular controversies or larger problems with the college’s stance. Although one individual at New College labelled its attitude to fining “ridiculous”, New College JCR President Kath Nicholls commented, “The JCR on the whole doesn’t seem to have particularly strong opinions either way on the subject of fines. No-one has approached me to suggest I look into the fines system at New College… A fairly small number of students receive fines, and I believe that the College would waive a fine if the student were in any kind of financial difficulty.”

Fabian Apel, Magdalen JCR President, said, “I am not aware of any recent controversies; it is rare that people feel that they have been treated unfairly, although there have been occasional cases of people feeling their fines were too high.”

Abigail Reeves, the University College JCR President, suggested the introduction of “some form of cap, to ensure that people can’t be caught off guard and also to make sure individuals are given the opportunity to speak to college about the reasonableness of the fine issued”.

As such, JCR Reps are split over the effectiveness of fining, and the debate will continue, although it appears that the University will not change their policy any time soon.

This article forms part of this week’s C+ investigation.

In Michaelmas term, I was fined a small amount of money by my college for a drink related incident. I vaguely understood my college’s point of view, even if I didn’t agree with it. The sum of money was reasonable, even if I couldn’t afford it. I coughed up the money, even if not quite on time. Fine (quite literally). What annoyed me, however, was the way in which I was treated.

There is something decidedly demeaning about standing outside the office door of a middle-aged man with the epithet ‘Dean’, alongside a few other 19 to 21 year olds.

With each of us dressed in a bizarre mis-matched outfit reflective of our respective essay-crises – for me dungarees – and formal gown, sheepishly waiting to be called inside in order to let the dean, the human embodiment of the abstract ‘rules’ which govern our day-to-day lives, give us a good telling-off for a crime that no student really considers a crime.

I was reminded of the time when, as a five-year-old, I’d been taken to the office of my primary school’s draconian headmaster to be berated for doing poorly in a spelling test. Even as a five-year-old, I had felt the same sense of acute injustice (what, really, is the difference between ‘wee’ and ‘we’ – they sound the same) that I felt as a nineteen-year-old.

Had nothing changed in fourteen years? Was I really the same repulsively irresponsible shit at nineteen as I’d been at five? I didn’t think so. I could vote, I hadn’t added a superfluous ‘e’ to the first-person plural for at least ten years, and as far as I was concerned I drank entirely responsibly.
The truth is, we’d been outrageous enough to hold a party; even more outrageously, we’d invited some freshers.

Now, I know what you’re thinking – this was some hideous, Black Cygnets-style invite whereby we’d only invited the most attractive freshers, or forced them to play ridiculous drinking games, or simply tied them down and waterboarded them with vodka. That’s not quite what happened.
You see, every fresher in college was invited to a party that night. Those who wanted to come came. Those who did not didn’t. Those who wanted to consume alcohol consumed alcohol. Those who did not were supplied with juice and coca-cola (admittedly, the latter could well have wreaked havoc with their teeth – college, I apologise for ever having doubted you).

These were subject welcome drinks. They have been held in my college for time immemorial and never before been objectionable. On the night my subject group and I held our drinks, at least half a dozen other welcome drinks events were taking place. And yet we were the only group to be fined that night, the reason being that this chap, ‘Dean’, had decided to pop up and investigate our staircase first.

If we’d been one flight along, or even a few minutes tardier in our alcohol consumption, we would not have been punished. The fact is, we were used as scapegoats – as a warning to others. It made me feel like I was in a boarding school. It made me feel like a five year old again.

So college, if you decide to fine a group of consenting adults for consuming alcohol in future, oblige me in two things: firstly, ensure that they’re actually consuming alcohol, rather than the unfortunate-tasting bile known as Tesco own-brand lager. (Reports that it is simply horse urine are exaggerated, but only just.)

Secondly, don’t be so bloody judgmental. Many, many teenagers drink alcohol, and doing so at university should not be met with any kind of sanction. The majority of students do it, and the majority of students are involved in the sort of ‘party’ I was fined for on a regular basis.

Skin Deep is an online Oxford based race forum. It was created with the intention of giving matters surrounding race a platform. On the forum, people are welcome to discuss issues of race, racial representation and racial identity. It is a space in which we can explore why race is important and why racial equality is paramount, whilst challenging how race is represented in literature, the media, business, and education.

The forum is open to anyone and it is the equal responsibility of every member to share and encourage a conversation that educates cand informs people to recognise the value of heritage, taste, style, racial sensibilities, stories, traditions, imaginations and cultures and their contribution to society and civilization as a whole.

The forum was initially set up to encourage conversation amongst Oxford students, as this is where we felt the gap in a racial discourse to be most prevalent. However, it seems to have grown beyond that, especially since the ‘I, too, am Oxford,’ campaign, which was inspired by an ‘I, too, am Harvard’ article that was shared on the forum.

There seems to be a desire to transform our University towards becoming the most inclusive environment possible, something that the ‘I, Too, Am’ movements as well as other forms of race resistance within and outside of the University have called for.

There is a lot of room for change in the representation of race in the curriculum, the student and staff bodies. In an attempt to move the discourse further, a conference is taking place at Lady Margaret Hall as a follow up to the ‘I, too, am Oxford’ campaign, entitled ‘BME conference: Dissidence in an Era of Diversity’. This feautres panels focusing on activism in the age of new media, diversity in the academy and multiculturalism in the media. The conference is meant to be a place where students can explore solutions for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) issues and hear from people who are attempting to tackle these issues in a more active manner.

Again, the organizers welcome everyone to join in – the more perspectives the better. These are the kind of conversations that should be encouraged and Skin Deep seems to have been a good way of circulating these ideas and initiatives, as well as cultivating a safe space for people who may in the past have been uncomfortable talking about issues of race.

Very few pieces on Skin Deep, if any, have been written by Oxford students or any of the members themselves. What we think would be even more engaging would be to explore what we, as members of Skin Deep, think about race, sharing lived experiences, ideas and theories. In response to this, we are creating a ‘zine’ this term, and have put a call for submissions for writers, artists, photographers, designers, creative types, anyone interested in continuing this open conversation about race and racial identity.

The online forum tends to maintain itself, and I am sure it will continue to do so in the future. The zine, however, will take a lot more work, but hopefully the result will encourage people to get involved with it as a long term project that can continue the discourse on race in Oxford.

On the 14th of April, at least 300 female students were abducted from a boarding school in Chibok, a rural town in the state of Borno in north-east Nigeria, by a group commonly referred to as Boko Haram. This is a fundamentalist Islamic group – the name ‘Boko Haram’ roughly translates as, ‘Western education is forbidden’ in the local language of Hausa – which violently promotes a version of Islam where it is forbidden for Muslims to take part in any activity that is associated with Western society, including secular education, participation in elections or wearing Western dress such as shirts and trousers.

It is thought that the group took the girls, who were a mixture of Christians and Muslims, into the remote and inaccessible Sambisa forest which borders Niger, Chad and Cameroon, although this hasn’t been confi rmed. They have subsequently released a video showing around 130 of the girls in full-length hijabs, and another threatening to sell the girls as ’slaves’. It is still not known for certain where the girls were being held, although it seems that around 50 were able to escape on the initial journey. The Nigerian government did not comment publicly until the 4th of May, two weeks after the kidnappings, and President Goodluck Jonathan took almost 20 days to offi cially promise to find the girls.

The government silence following the events in Chibok fuelled a great deal of confusion and growing public anger. Several sources gave conflicting reports of the number of students taken, with numbers ranging from 100 to more than 300, whilst the Nigerian military back-pedalled on the reported rescues and claimed that, whilst they had not actually rescued any of the girls, their original report had not been intended to “deceive the public”. As media out- lets rushed to cover the story, people across Nigeria protested against the apparent government indifference to the situation and took to social media to express their anger and distress. On the 22 April Ibrahim M Abdullahi (a lawyer in the Nigerian capital of Abuja) sent the first tweet featuring the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. By 7 May this hashtag had been tweeted 1 million times, reaching its daily peak three days later where it was tweeted 434,910 times in 24 hours. High profile political figures such as Michelle Obama, David Cameron and Pope Francis have joined the campaign, along with large numbers of celebrities.

As #BringBackOurGirls exploded across the internet, so too did scrutiny of just how effective such ‘digital activism’ can be in tackling real world issues. It has been two years since “Kony 2012” – the viral video that called for the arrest of LRA militia leader and war criminal Joseph Kony – a campaign that is perhaps most notable for the huge contrast between the global buzz it created and the subsequent lack of
any discernible results. Similar concerns have been voiced about the current campaign, particularly by conservative commentators who believe that outrage on social media has little offline currency and serves mainly as a balm for the conscience of the West. At the height of the movement Republican Senator John McCain stated that, “Tweets and hashtags are appreciated. They may make people feel better but they do not liberate prisoners”, whilst his onetime running mate Sarah Palin posted, “I kinda-sorta doubt a tweet will intimidate the kidnappers much.” The backlash was perhaps not helped by a picture posted on Instagram by model Irina Shayk – where the girlfriend of footballer Cristiano Ronaldo poses topless with a sign featuring the hashtag – which has been heavily criticised for attempting to seek personal publicity from the crisis. Can ‘hashtag activism’ actually be a useful form of protest? Is the West just tweeting while the rest of the world burns?

It would be ungenerous to argue that the #BringBackOurGirls campaign has had no effect at all, particularly when the events that followed the abduction are viewed in the context of terrorism in Nigeria over the last decade. Boko Haram has killed over 2000 people since 2009 and is by far the most long-lived of any terrorist group in Nigeria, operating since 2002. Violence against schools in the North-East of the country by the group are commonplace (it is believed that one of the reasons why so many students were at the Chibok school was that many other schools in the region had been forced to close), for example in March another school attack saw 29 male students killed. Such incidents are frequently ignored by the Nigerian government and the terrorism of Boko Haram is often subsequently unnoticed by the international community. Now, however, global attention has pushed the Nigerian government into unprecedented levels of action which has included accepting foreign assistance – a subject Nigeria is notoriously prickly about. The UK, US, France, China and Israel have all now sent counter-terrorism teams to Abuja, undoubtedly in response to international pub- lic pressure. There is also hope that the negotiations between the Nigerian government and Boko Haram might soon come to fruition. In the last week, reports have appeared stating that the group is willing to conduct a gradual release of hostages in return for the freeing of Boko Haram prisoners in Nigerian jails. This appears to be a significant concession from the original demand for the group’s top commanders to be released.

It seems, therefore, that hashtag diplomacy does have some uses. However, if the allegations that it is chiefly an exercise in allowing the West to feel good about itself are to be dismissed, then complacency over small victories must not be allowed to set in. It may have done some good but a week after its peak, #BringBackOurGirls is already disappearing from social media (it was only featured in around 40,000 tweets on May 19, less than 1/10 of its highest level) and the Nigerian schoolgirls have not, as yet, been brought back.