Marshall Scholar. Oxford Blue in lacrosse. First American Editor of Cherwell. Kidnapped in Iraq. Reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Kenya, Congo, Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia. Pulitzer Prize winner for International Reporting in April 2012, for his coverage of East Africa. Jeffrey Gettleman has been places. When I caught up with Gettleman by phone, he was three time zones to the east in Nairobi, and far removed from his journalistic origins amid the dreaming spires.

Expecting to hear graphic stories of rape and death — the unavoidable images which flow so morbidly through his articles — I was relieved when he began with a recollection of journalistic stories from 1994-6, when Cherwell was still produced by creating metal plates of each page and sending them off to a printer.

Gettleman regaled me with narratives of how he “practised” his interviewing skills on such names as Prince Charles, Desmond Tutu and Oliver Stone. In Trinity term 1995 Salman Rushdie, who had been living in hiding since the issuance in 1989 of a fatwa calling for his death because of his depiction of Mohammed, made an unannounced visit to Oxford. Thumbing through the Cherwell archives, I found Gettleman’s article, in which Rushdie declares, “I will not accept the idea of a sacred language which cannot be questioned.”

In May 1996, Gettleman had a massive and exclusive story to cover: OJ Simpson’s first public appearance after his October 1995 acquittal on charges of murdering his ex-wife and her friend. Simpson spoke at the Oxford Union, which did not permit non-members, excluding outside reporters from hearing Simpson’s explication of his innocence. The American media “was dying to hear what he had to say.” Gettleman, sensing an opportunity to promote his work and to profit, found himself in “a freelancing dream, where I was in there as a student journalist, and all of these papers wanted the material, so that night I made over a thousand bucks freelancing it to a number of American papers.”

Reporting outside of the Union chamber has proven much less glamorous, and significantly less safe. I paused before asking the ominous question: “Can you tell us about your kidnapping in Iraq?” Gettleman obliged, with the pitch of his voice remaining remarkably even-keeled throughout his description of his kidnapping by Sunni militants in April 2004. Characteristic of his writing, Gettleman employed no hyperbolic adjectives, as his stories don’t require any.

“Everything is fine until it isn’t. We were driving to go cover a bombing, and we were in a rural area outside of Baghdad, took a turn down a road that we thought was safe, and all of a sudden we were surrounded by 50 armed guys that blocked our car, and had rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.

“They dragged us out of our car. This one guy took the safety off his gun and held it up, and I was standing there looking at him and really thought at that point ‘he’s going to shoot me and I’m gonna die’,” Gettleman said. “They hated Americans, I had an American passport in my pocket, and I thought this guy was gonna kill me. I was just kind of calm, and I was totally hopeless that I could talk my way out of it, or anybody was going to rescue us, or anything else. I just thought, ‘This is it. I hope it doesn’t hurt.’”

“And then after that happened, some other guy said, ‘oh no, don’t shoot him,’ and they took us to a house and they interrogated us, and I took [the] passport that I had in my pocket, gave it to the woman who I was with, and she put it down her pants, thinking they wouldn’t search her, and they didn’t, and they interrogated us for hours and I was telling them that I was Greek, and I told them ‘I’m Greek, I’m Greek, I’m Greek, I’m a journalist,’ which was true—and I didn’t like to lie. At the end, I got really exhausted, being interrogated at gun point for hours and hours; just as I was kind of losing it and the sun was setting — we got kidnapped early in the morning and it was late in the day —some elder came in and then he decided that it was okay for us to go back and they let us go.”

This brush with death did not deter Gettleman from pursuing further risky assignments, nor did it induce him to return to reporting in the safer cities of the US (earlier in his career he had worked for various newspapers in Wisconsin, Florida, Atlanta and New Jersey.) Gettleman moved to the Times’ Nairobi bureau in July 2006, where he has been since, winning his Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Sudan and Somalia.

What keeps Gettleman away from a cushier assignment in Washington? His almost religious belief in his work: “It’s really important to find something that means a lot to me personally and I feel that if I didn’t do it, these stories might not get told. And maybe that’s an illusion, but I think it’s important to try to look for stories that are original and which nobody’s doing, and that’s where you as an individual can really have an impact. And there’s a lot of that in Africa.”

Beyond the content of his writing, Gettleman has also been praised for his sparing writing style. “I try to write as visually, and as viscerally and emotionally as I can,” Gettleman explains, adding, “A lot of what I do in this job is combining a human interest element that gives you some sense of the emotions and the people and the humanity.”

Unsurprisingly, Gettleman cites as influences VS Naipaul, South African writer JM Coetzee, Faulkner, Hemingway, and the journalist Dan Eldon. His favourite novel is Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men.

Despite his successes around the world, Gettleman initially struggled at Oxford. He described feeling “a bit of an outsider” as an American. Professionally, Gettleman was ambivalent: “When I arrived at Oxford I didn’t really have a career plan,” he admits, though he did have a passion for photojournalism.

Writing and editing Cherwell was the catalyst that pushed Gettleman’s oscillating life in the direction of a career in foreign journalism: “I really didn’t know what I wanted to do and it wasn’t until that second year at Oxford that I got this idea – ‘I want to be a journalist, and I want to be a journalist in Africa’ – and then I began this long, long road from Cherwell.”

This week I came across the advice of an American billionaire, philanthropist and investor known as the ‘Oracle of Omaha’ (don’t squirm just yet) in an article from a few months ago. Warren Buffett believed he had the answer on how to solve our 21st century educational problems. “Make private schools illegal,” he said.

Our sagacious friend is however an example of a problem that is far more profound. As private schools have become a taboo in British politics, so a culture of criticism of independent education for the sake of it has become embedded in our society. Some (many, even) may think this is fair but I for one do not. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether our private schools really do deserve the reputation with which they have come to be associated.

The answer is, at least as far as I can see, that they do not. Our great independent schools are great because they provide an excellent education, both academically and in terms of inculcating the wider skills needed for life. Many of our private schools add to our national culture and way of life; they have become institutions embedded in our history.
Furthermore (and most forgotten) is that so many schools, through financial support schemes, enable children whose disadvantaged background would otherwise prevent them from attending such a school, to do so. And that is without even considering the extensive community outreach programmes that are at the core of what many of our independent schools do.

The problem then is too often looked at upside-down. The solution is not banning private schools but making them, and their methods of education, more accessible.
Many of the things that independent schools get right, whether that be in terms of scholarship or wider education, should be adopted into our education system. But most significantly, private schools should be made more financially accessible – an aim pioneered by the Sutton Trust – and be open to all, regardless of financial background. Whilst many of our schools are good at providing bursaries, many are not, a failure that is inexcusable for many such institutions with the resources (and alumni) they have at their fingertips.

It is bonkers that as a country we should so often vehemently criticise what is in effect something good. What we really need to do is accept that in Britain we have an excellent legacy of education and build upon that, making it accessible and profitable for everyone.

Now actually, I rather like the Oxford Union. For all the stick it gets from us in the student press, what harm does it really do? True, it drains the bank balances of eager-but-naïve freshers. And it consumes the lives dozens of hunched and desperate hacks, clinging to their last cracking, desiccated vestiges of humanity. 

I am not a member, but I am still glad that the place exists. Partly, I admit, this is because of its similarity to the world of student journalism. There’s a reason we both get called hacks. We also like them because they provide so much fodder for our news stories: minor corruption, in-fighting, big events.

All (cynical political student) life is there. More generously, my friends assure me that they do good things for Oxford, and really work for their members. This they said as they stood eager and wide-eyed upon the precipice, dreaming of the plunge into Seccies’ sweet delights. I must admit that I prefer the controversies.

The Union has not had a spectacular few weeks. We had ‘ballot-gate’ – the scandal that literally no one was talking about – in which the it was revealed that, unthinkably, the Union President, after spending weeks organising an event, might quite like to have some of his friends come along as well.

The Union has also been the object of one of the periodic media blizzards that are wont to blow up around its more controversial invitations. To their credit, they have actually handled the Assange issue well thus far, solidly putting the case for free and open debate against a band of passionate but suspiciously illiberal-looking no-platform protesters.

Now we have Nick Griffin’s non-invitation to add to our list. At first glance this seems like only the latest addition to a catalogue of inept institutional cock-ups. The explanation given is that one member of Secretary’s Committee – the most junior rung on the Union’s ladder – ‘arbitrarily’ invited the BNP leader.

You could just picture the scene, the mad email exchanges and discarded vacation work, as the world’s most prestigious debating society, and the clueless undergraduates who run it, scrabbled around for people to invite and fill up debates only weeks away. Then a hopeful fresher, eager to please, thinks: “Nick Griffin? That won’t cause any problems.” The Union was certainly swift in revoking that invitation when the news broke. The Union giveth, and the Union taketh away.

But there is more to this story than an embarrassingly miscued invitation sent to a man whom I shall here politely call ‘controversial’. For the Union did not simply withdraw the invitation and leave it at that. It came out all guns blazing against the only Nick in Britain now less popular than the Deputy Prime Minister. A Union spokesperson stated: “The Oxford Union does not wish to be associated with the BNP in any way whatsoever. We strongly disagree with their views.”

I always thought that the Union was meant to be a neutral debating platform, a Switzerland where opponents could gather to hammer out their differences and have their points freely heard. Its only value should be that of free speech. Its job is to live up to Harold Macmillan’s impossibly, splendidly hyperbolic claim that it represents “the last bastion of free speech in the Western world.”

Last week, this bastion started adopting corporate political positions, not only disowning nasty Nick, but also supporting his opponents. The Union “commends the work” of Hope not Hate, an anti-fascist organization backed by The Daily Mirror. Hope not Hate is certainly an attractive cause, adopting unifying positions like anti-racism and anti-hate, albeit with a somewhat partisan support base very much to the left of the spectrum. The Union’s debating chamber may pass as many politically transient motions as it wishes.

But when the committees and executive – the guys who actually set up these debates – start becoming political, then the Union begins to lose credibility fast. For those of you who fondly imagine that the chamber over which Gladstone once presided still holds some place in our national life, this outburst was as wrong, as transgressive of basic principles, as if the BBC were to adopt a policy of not covering particular viewpoints.

And don’t kid yourself that this is an abstract, academic point, borne of some priggish fetish for correct and decorous conduct. In fact, it directly undermines the case which the Union had been making so well just the week before, in defence of the Assange invitation. You might not agree with the reasoning behind it, but it was perfectly coherent.

A Union invitation does not condone. Guests can be cross-examined. The Union is neutral. The idea of the Union adopting a political position or pursuing an agenda goes brazenly against this principle. Now it seems that the Union’s invitations are motivated by political opinions and specific agendas after all. And if that is really the case, then the Assange invitation starts to look more like a vote of support. The Union stops being neutral.