Academics and staff from across the university walked out in a row over pay yesterday. The move, part of a nationwide day of industrial action by higher education staff, came in response to the decision to raise pay by only one percent this year: unions believe that this constitutes a pay cut given the present rate of inflation is at three precent.

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Student group ‘Support Our Staff’, marching from Carfax Tower in solidarity with the strikers, peacefully occupied Exam Schools for an hour and a half yesterday. In a speech to protestors, first-year Wadhamite Barnaby Raine said, “It is about a broader struggle. We are here today because we believe that education is a public good, because we believe we are learners, not consumers, and because we want an education that is free for students, pays staff properly in recognition of their importance to society, we want a different kind of society that doesn’t believe private is good and public is bad.”

Raine continued, “We are here today to send a message to the government that we will defend our schools, our universities, our hospitals, striking workers, and that we will not have money spent on war and nuclear weapons when it should be spent on public services.”

A UNISON striker told Cherwell that he was there to “stress the importance of the support staff and lecturers at the university in providing a full student experience to all students.”

He added, “The university has lost sight of the fact that it’s not the buildings, or the artefacts, or the Ashmolean that makes the university, it’s the staff and the students that create the university, and they have lost sight of that fact, and are not allowing a pay level which will recruit the best quality staff to maintain their world-leading status.”

It remains unclear exactly what proportion of staff took part in the industrial action, but the University and College Union (UCU) expected 50% participation.

At the sit-in, campaigner Nathan Akehurst told Cherwell “I am impressed by the turnout today. There was a real show of strength for our staff and for the concept of well-paid, publicly-funded education. We’ve had so far motions passed at OUSU and several common rooms, we know that when we march here, we represent a huge sector of the university, and we have sent a strong message to Andrew Hamilton, the UCEL and the government that we will not take cuts to higher education lying down.”

Akehurst continued, “Staff are getting a pay rise in money terms, but in real terms it amounts to a pay cut. According to independent government sources, university staff are experiencing the longest sustained pay cut since the Second World War, essentially a 13% pay cut since 2008.”

On Wednesday evening, college JCR and MCR representatives at OUSU Council voted 45-5 with 15 abstentions to back staff industrial action. OUSU was subsequently mandated to encourage students to reschedule Thursday tutorials and not to attend lectures on the strike day.

Speaking on Thursday, OUSU President Tom Rutland told Cherwell, “I supported last night’s motion out of concern for the living standards of University staff, but also out of concern for our students whose lecturers and tutors have faced a real terms pay cut of 13% since 2008.”

He added, “There is a threat to the student academic experience when steadily declining pay may impact on staff motivation and productivity. It is right that University staff are properly supported and remunerated for their invaluable contribution to our education and wider society.”

Rutland, who attended the protest, is not believed to have taken part in the sit-in.

The Universities and Colleges Employers Association – the body which represents Higher Education employers – said in a statement that unions have overlooked incremental pay rises, which actually put total wage rises nearer to 3%, and say that only 4.7% of the total Higher Education workforce voted for strike action.

A spokesperson for the University of Oxford told Cherwell, “The University respects the right of individuals to take part in lawful industrial action. Contingency plans are in place aimed at minimising any disruption or inconvenience such action may cause to students, staff, and visitors to the University.”

St Anne’s JCR has unanimously passed a motion to give singer Cher, the “Goddess of Pop”, the status of honorary member.

The proposed motion noted that, “there is currently a lack of honorary JCR members, and a lack of glamour in JCR meetings.”

Cher is the first person to be granted the distinction of honorary membership of St Anne’s. The college was one of the first establishments in Oxford to offer education to women and remained an all female college until 1979.

Andrew Hall, who proposed the motion, claimed that Cher has “pioneered autonomy for women in the entertainment since the 1960s”, thus making her the ideal candidate for membership of St Anne’s JCR. However he also admitted that the proposal was mostly humorous, adding, “Let’s face it, honorary motions are just a bit of fun to liven up standard JCR meetings.”

The motion was passed without opposition. As Oscar Boyd, former St Anne’s JCR president, who seconded the motion, put it, “Are there any Cher haters in the world?”

However he himself was apparently sceptical about the motion at first, but conceded that “After Andy [Hall – the proposer] performed his Cher routine I was convinced.”

Yet there were some amendments made to the motion. There is to be a life sized cardboard cut out of Cher on display in the JCR room but until this arrives then Hall himself is required to dress up as Cher for JCR meetings.

Cher has been an incredibly successful artist since the 60s selling over 100 million solo albums worldwide. She has also had success in her other ventures including winning an Oscar for her acting work in the film Moonstruck.

This year she has released another studio album. The versatility and longevity of her talent will hopefully be reflected in St. Anne’s. Hall said, “After the nuclear apocalypse all that will be left will be cockroaches and Cher – I want that kind of durability for St Anne’s.”

The top 16 teams in Britain and Ireland have qualified to compete in the cup, with Oxford being the only Quidditch Club to have 2 teams qualify: The Radcliffe Chimeras and the Oxford Quidlings. The top teams in the competition will qualify to compete in the European Regionals, with the chance to win a place in the world cup in April next year.

The game, made famous by the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, has been especially adapted for ‘muggles’, who have to run around with a broom between their legs at all times. 

As Matthew Weston, of the Oxford University Quidditch Club explained, “It’s actually a very important handicap, comparable to only using your feet in football or having to dribble the ball in basketball. It means you can’t run as fast and have to throw and catch with one arm.”

The quaffle is made by a slightly-deflated volleyball which allows it to be caught in one hand, and bludgers are dodgeballs thrown at players.

The snitch, in contrast, is not a ball at all, but a person in a yellow jersey with a tennis ball in a sock down the back of their shorts, who has all of a predetermined area to run and hide in. The human snitch can have their own tactics when it comes to hiding from the Seekers, including what are known as ‘snitch spectacles’, which might even include the use of decoy snitches. Catching the snitch and retrieving the ball only gets thirty points rather than the 150 in the books.

“It’s going to be a really big event, with scouts from QUK (Quidditch UK) and the IQA (International Quidditch Association) there to look for players to form part of the UK team to compete in the international cup early next year,” said Ashley Cooper from The Oxford Quidditch Team.

There has also been suggestions that the Oxford University Sports Federation should award Quidditch players half-blues for playing for the university, particularly as the sport does have a governing body in the form of the International Quidditch Association.

“I don’t think they should be awarded half-blues,” said one fresher from Exeter College. “You only get a half-blue for playing ice-hockey and it would devalue the whole thing. I don’t think that quidditch should be seen as more of a sport than ice-hockey”.

However, in their defence Western said, “this isn’t just some kind of immersive Hogwarts reenactment, people are being drawn to the unique tactics and culture of the sport. Furthermore, not only is Quidditch a mixed-gender sport, but we judge gender in terms of identity rather than biology, making it probably the most progressive sport in the world in terms of welcoming gender identities.”

At the tournament there will also be sessions for spectators to have a go at playing quidditch for themselves, for both adults and kids.

The so-called ‘Great Storm’, which hit some southern and western parts of the country with winds up to 90 miles an hour, had a limited impact on Oxfordshire. Its middle of the night approach meant that only the most drunk or dedicated of students were aware of its presence.

Despite this, the storm, dubbed #cherwellgreatstorm on Twitter, prompted concern amongst Oxford students.

St Anne’s welfare rep, Cai Gwyn Wilshaw, took to Twitter to raise concern about the panic-consumption of Mini Rolls in the wake of the storm’s onset, tweeting that “Panic-buying followed by panic-eating descends on St Anne’s Welfare Tea as #cherwellgreatstorm approaches…mini-rolls have officially run out.”

This was later confirmed by Wilshaw, who told Cherwell, “Hysteria set in very early on here just south of Birmingham (St Anne’s) and me and my fellow Welfare Rep recognised that it was our duty to ensure our college could weather the storm.

Masses of panicked students flooded the JCR, and within a few short minutes, we encountered a serious lack of mini-rolls. We waded out into the storm once more, and returned to the Welfare Tea with further supplies, but sadly the mini-rolls were the first casualty of the nationwide panic-buying that preceded the tempest.”

The storm also caused damage to student housing. Sam Bumby, a student at Balliol College, expressed his dismay on nearly losing his back gate, telling Cherwell, “Our back gate was ripped out of the wall by the wind late on Saturday night. There were fears that the ‘great storm’ would carry the gate away before our landlord could fix it on Monday, but they proved to be unfounded.”

Concerns were also raised on twitter that the OULC co-chair Helena Dollimore had been caught in the storm as she travelled away from Oxford. One Oxford student tweeted, “Worried about @helenadollimore getting stormy up north. Will she return from Manchester by 6th week? #cherwellgreatstorm”

However, it was later confirmed that Dollimore was safe, as she posted on twitter, “Woke up & panicked grey outside coach windows meant we were in a #storm hurricane funnel. We were actually in a tunnel. #cherwellgreatstorm”.

Controversy descended on Broad Street last week, as a leading anarchist campaigner’s speech was cancelled amid security concerns raised by Thames Valley Police.

Ian Bone, a prominent anarchist blogger and founder of the far left party ‘Class War’, was invited to speak by the Left Caucus at Balliol. He had planned to discuss the view that, ‘The greatest contribution we could make to equality in this country would be to burn down Oxford University’.

However, preparations for the event were interrupted when the police sent a letter to the Left Caucus and the college authorities warning about the security risks. The talk was cancelled as a consequence.

Thames Valley Police claimed that they would have to administer appropriate security for such an event and the bill for this would fall on either the college or the Left Caucus. They claimed that the expenses would be in the thousands rather than the hundreds, and could feasibly extend to ten thousand pounds. Balliol were unwilling to pay such a fee and the Left Caucus did not possess sufficient funds.

Restrictions had already been made by the college on the nature of the talk. In order to limit any potential for trouble, the Dean of Balliol had ordered that the event was only to be open to University members who had acquired a ticket beforehand and that it was not to extend beyond half past seven or exceed the hour it had been granted.

Questions have subsequently been raised over the legitimacy of the police’s fears, and Ian Bone has been outspoken on the matter. He told Cherwell the tactics of Thames Valley Police were “fucking diabolical… cunning and underhanded.”

Bone stressed the fact that he was willing to comply with all of the restrictions that Balliol had imposed upon the talk, and intimated that the police had acted in a coercive and persecutory manner. He has now resolved to deliver the same speech next on 1st May, outside Balliol, and protected by the right to protest.

Bone said that he thought the police were exaggerating the potential danger. Whilst controversial movements on the far-right – such as EDL marches – often cause great public expense, Bone insisted that an hour-long indoor discussion wasn’t even remotely comparable.

Claudia Blake, President of the Left Caucas at Balliol, chimed with Bone’s sentiments and expressed doubt over the security costs requested by the police. She called the ten thousand pound figure “ridiculously high” and said, “I don’t know where the figure came from – they were pretty vague about it but said it could cost that much.”

Ms. Blake expanded upon this statement and articulated concerns over the political implications of the police’s involvement. He commented, “I think there is a problem here regarding both freedom of speech and freedom of association. The police have the power to decide if an event “needs” policing (and they did not feel they had to justify this decision to me), and also, it seems, the power to name an arbitrarily high price.

“Together, these two powers mean that they can effectively prohibit events like this, which means that any even slightly controversial speakers can be prevented from putting their views across.”

Thames Valley Police have released a statement regarding the reason for their estimations. It read, “Thames Valley Police risk assesses any event using a standard procedure which takes into account a number of factors. This is a standard practice – unless there is an agreed level of police deployment available we are unable to accurately quote a figure.”

Balliol JCR President, Alex Bartram, who was working in tandem with the Left Caucus to facilitate the speech, has stressed that the college authorities are not at fault and said that Balliol were very accommodating throughout the process.

However, Bartram also alluded to the police’s unshifting stance on the matter. He said, “Once the police were involved, there was little that I could do, but I tried it: we argued every which way that the event was highly unlikely to pose any sort of security risk, that the comparisons being drawn with previous sit-in protests by Ian Bone were not accurate, that comparisons being drawn with Tommy Robinson at the Union were off the mark too, that very few people would actually care about the speech other than those interested in hearing Ian Bone voice his opinions.”

Bartram also noted that he was ultimately unqualified to challenge the police authoritatively on the matter.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, students at Merton College spent the hour gained as the clocks returned to Greenwich Mean Time walking backwards around Fellows’ Quad in full subfusc in an effort to restore a balance in the space-time continuum.

The Time Ceremony, as it has been known since its introduction in 1971, is popular with Oxford students. Porters were forced to lock up the college and the event was limited to students of Merton College in an attempt to control numbers.

Tradition dictates the students drink port as they walk around the quad. Both Sainsbury’s and Tesco are reported to have sold out of the fortified wine by early Saturday evening.

Fortunately for many attendees, the JCR were on hand to provide support and assistance to those who, in the words of JCR President Christian Ruckteschler, were “a little worse for wear”.

The validity of the science behind the hour-long mass drunken backwards walk has never been proven conclusively. Several physicists have argued that the science of the ceremony “makes a weird kind of sense,” pointing out that the universe has indeed continued to function and the world has continued to turn after every ceremony performed in the last 40 years. “Better to be safe than sorry”, one medic insisted.

One second year commented, “As happens so often, saving the universe is a responsibility that falls to Mertonians.”

A group of freshers also pointed to the Time Ceremony as proof that, counter to its reputation, Merton does have a fun side.

A PPE student commented, “So this is how Mertonians enjoy themselves… Odd. Personally I’d have chosen to drink rum and coke.”

John and Edward Grimes, better known as ‘Jedward’, were in Christ Church on Wednesday morning.

They were filming their new TV programme, ‘Jedward’s Big Adventure’, to be aired in January.

Once they’d finished filming they went over to watching students, took out a hand held video camera and started asking them questions such as which subjects they took, what they thought was the best thing about Oxford and why no one is allowed to walk on the grass.

One second year History of Art student who was pictured with John, commented, “John grabbed me by the waist in noticing we were wearing the same coat, and said I was his ‘Oxford girlfriend’. Upon leaving, he shouted ‘Bye Oxford girlfriend!’, blew me a kiss then proceeded to do a cartwheel! They were lovely.”

Jake Downs, also pictured with Jedward, added, “They were really sweet; clearly the fame hasn’t gone to their heads. Certainly one of the most surreal moments of my time in Oxford so far!”

Jedward are famous for their stint on the ITV show ‘The X Factor’, and for representing the Republic of Ireland twice at the Eurovision Song Contest.