Wednesday 2nd July 2025
Blog Page 17

Former Hertford Principal urges action “to prevent genocide” in Gaza

Conor Walsh
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Former Hertford Principal urges action “to prevent genocide” in Gaza

Tom Fletcher, the former Principal of Hertford College, addressed the United Nations (UN) Security Council on 13th May. In his new role as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, Fletcher urged the Council to “act – decisively – to prevent genocide” in Gaza.

As Under-Secretary-General, Fletcher leads the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the UN body responsible for coordinating international responses to complex emergencies and natural disasters. This includes the delivery of aid to Gaza.

In his speech, Fletcher briefed the Council about the ongoing aid crisis in Gaza. He emphasised that, in the last ten weeks, little aid has entered the territory, 70% of which is either within Israeli-militarized zones or under displacement orders. As a consequence, “every single one of the 2.1 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip face the risk of famine. One in five face starvation.”

Fletcher began by asking the Council “what action we will tell future generations we each took to stop the 21st century atrocity to which we bear daily witness in Gaza.” This remark has subsequently sparked an open letter by the parent of an Oxford student who faces disciplinary action following the occupation of Vice-Chancellor Irene Tracey’s office on 23rd May 2024.

The letter appealed to Fletcher to call on the Vice-Chancellor, in the same way that he appealed to the Security Council, “to consider how future generations might judge her decision to prosecute students acting on their moral indignation about events in Gaza and to terminate the university’s proceedings against them.”

Fletcher went on to describe the dire state of Gaza’s medical system before urging the Council to let OCHA and other aid agencies resume humanitarian aid distribution. He said: “we have a plan. We have shown we can deliver, with tens of thousands of trucks reaching civilians during the ceasefire. We have life-saving supplies ready, now, at the borders. We can save hundreds of thousands of survivors. We have rigorous mechanisms to ensure our aid gets to civilians, and not to Hamas. But Israel denies us access, placing the objective of depopulating Gaza before the lives of civilians.”

Fletcher also reminded the Council of Israel’s obligations under humanitarian law, and drew attention to the growing violence in the West Bank where he described the situation as “the worst in decades” with “the use of heavy weaponry, military methods of war, excessive force, forcible displacement, demolitions and movement restrictions”.

In his concluding remarks, Fletcher said: “Humanity, the law and reason must prevail. This Council must prevail. Demand this ends. Stop arming it. Insist on accountability.

“To the Israeli authorities: stop killing and injuring civilians. Lift this brutal blockade. Let humanitarians save lives. To Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups: release all hostages immediately and unconditionally. Stop putting civilians at risk during military operations.”

Since his address last Tuesday, Fletcher has been criticised for using the term “genocide” to describe the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In an interview with the Associated Press (AP), Fletcher defended his use of the term, saying that he wanted to “make sure that we aren’t making the mistake that was made with previous massive breaches of international law, where it hasn’t been called out soon enough”.

He told the AP that: “I’m not a lawyer. I’m a humanitarian. My job is to get the aid in, to get the attention of the world, to help create the conditions to get that aid in and save as many lives as possible before it’s too late.”

Danny Danon, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, addressed the media after Fletcher’s address to the Security Council last Tuesday. He said that “instead of admitting that the existing distribution system has failed, the UN insists on preserving Hamas’ supply pipeline.”

Danon went on to say that “This is not neutrality – this is support for terrorism. Israel will not cooperate with a mechanism that strengthens those who kidnapped, murdered, raped and tortured our citizens.”

The UN has stressed, repeatedly, that only a court can make the decision that genocide has been committed.

Fletcher was Principal of Hertford from 2020 to 2024, where he completed his undergraduate in Modern History. Before returning to Hertford as Principal, Fletcher was a diplomat and British foreign policy advisor, serving as British Ambassador to Lebanon between 2011 and 2015.

Oxford study to examine brain injuries in young athletes

Georgia Campbell
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Oxford study to examine brain injuries in young athletes

Oxford University’s Biomedical Engineering department is recruiting volunteers to participate in a two-year study exploring the impact of head injuries to the developing brains of 11-18 year-olds. 

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a leading cause of death and disability amongst young people, but research into the area remains limited. It is estimated that up to 30% of children who suffer brain injuries experience medium or long term symptoms, with TBI proven to increase the risk of dementia, according to Alzheimer’s UK. Standard clinical imaging, such as CT scans, might miss key signs of injury that could prevent these long-term impacts.

Study author Isabella Lovgren told Cherwell: “At the moment, we struggle to predict how well young people will recover following a head injury. We’re hoping that our advanced research MRI scans will be able to detect injury that would otherwise be missed”.

The researchers will look specifically for microstructural injury to nerve cells and changes in levels of brain chemicals. Through understanding the extent of the injury, they hope to ensure that the necessary support and care can be provided sooner, to “maximise each young person’s chances of making the best recovery possible”. 

Professor Natalie Voets, another researcher leading the study said: “Despite the potentially important long-term effects, paediatric head injury has remained heavily understudied. We’re deeply indebted to the Podium Institute and our collaborating clinical and sports teams for their enormous support in helping to make this challenging research possible.”

Participants aged 11-18 years are invited to attend two research visits at the Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, based at John Radcliffe Hospital. The visits take place six months apart and include a 30-40 minute MRI scan, some questionnaires and a short paper task. The study is partnered with the medical team for Oxford United, as well as the NGO Podium Analytics, amongst other groups, and will be completed around the summer of 2027.

September 5: Journalism drama doesn’t question the facts enough

Janik Peeters
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September 5: Journalism drama doesn’t question the facts enough

Set during the 1972 Munich Olympics, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 tracks the ABC Sports crew’s coverage of the Israeli athlete hostage crisis in the Olympic Village: the first terror attack broadcast live to the world. It’s determined to give us a realistic depiction of the journalists’ work, led by newly-promoted Geoff Mason (John Magaro). 

Near-everything happens in the team’s broadcasting rooms, whether it’s the painstaking editing of tapes smuggled through Olympic Village security, or Mason cueing shots from a bank of square monitors. There’s a deep reverence for the physical work these journalists do, coupled with a powerful hit of nostalgia from constant close-ups of wires and machinery – unflinching commitment to historical accuracy. 

The film largely disregards the politics of the event, as Fehlbaum has said he was focused on the act of journalism, not politics. It’s hard to begrudge him for that artistic choice, especially knowing the film was fully edited before the October 7 attacks and the atrocities that followed. Having said that, placing such heavy emphasis on his film’s depiction of journalistic work means Fehlbaum may have ended up creating a rod for his own back. For September 5’s perspective on journalistic ethics in many ways falls just as short as its politics.

Geoff Mason is at the heart of the film’s attempt to tackle those challenges. It is his decision to track the police’s first rescue attempt with a balcony camera, realising too late that the captors are watching their footage on TVs in the athletes’ rooms. They’re lucky it doesn’t result in a death, but still he presses on. It is also his choice to lead on news of a successful rescue before he receives confirmation from other sources, directly against the words of his superior Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin). These are both significant failures. They lead directly to the devastating moment presenter Jim McKay turns to camera and says that the hostages were not in fact rescued, but killed in a police shootout.

Fertile grounds for examining the ethics of broadcasting, then. But it never feels like the ABC crew has to reckon with those mistakes. After their filming sabotaged the first rescue attempt, German soldiers storm in and order their broadcast to be shut down. Within minutes, they’re back to reporting, with no consequences, and no second thoughts about the effects their coverage might be having. The film seems to assume we’ll be on ABC’s side, but it’s difficult to argue with the Germans’ attempt to keep their operation viable. 

One journalist’s later decision to hide from a police search of the surrounding buildings escapes comment entirely. And, though we end with a shot of Mason slumped over his car’s dashboard, his flawed approach is in fact rewarded: Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the head of ABC Sports, leaves us with no uncertainty about Geoff’s impending promotion.

In some ways, the film’s devotion to the historical record seems to restrict it at moments like these – it ends up being about the broadcast, and little else. The minor characters display a little of the effects of that relentless focus. The crew’s translator is given a thin anti-sexism plotline; Bader’s Jewish heritage is briefly mentioned: otherwise, near-total silence. The impression we get is ultimately that the news matters more than the stories. ABC’s journalists are beyond reproach, for they are simply recording history, not making it.

September 5 is in many ways a frustrating watch. It’s a frantic, tense, and exceptionally well-crafted film. But in its attempt to perfectly recreate the events of the 1972 Munich massacre, it forgoes a far more foundational aspect of the craft it so reveres: holding to account those with the power to shape the narrative.

Periodisation and the problem of now

Ava Doherty
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Periodisation and the problem of now

Periodisation is the act of dividing literature into eras like Romanticism, Modernism, or Postmodernism – neat, bounded categories based on unifying characteristics, themes, or historical shifts. It is how we order the chaos of literary history. But what happens when the chaos no longer submits to order? When literature refuses the boundaries we try to place on it? I doubt anyone knows what period we’re in now and here lies a crucial point.

Today’s literary landscape feels like an open field rather than a walled garden. We trespass mythic boundaries, slipping between grass verges and across stylistic and ideological thresholds. We hang in a liminal space – between the softness inherited from post-1960s idealism and Gen Z’s digital-era defiance. And yet, in an age of self-publishing, algorithms, and Twitter threads that read like flash fiction, how can we honestly claim to define this moment in literature by any single unifying trait?

To be a writer or reader today is to exist in a space that actively resists classification. Our present increasingly disavows binaries in gender, sexuality, and belief systems. Why should literature remain shackled to essentialising periodisation? The act of periodising demands the rigid structure we’ve been taught to interrogate. Literature has long been a space of ambiguity, of multiplicity. It is intertextual by nature, always pointing to something beyond itself. When Joan Didion titled her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she invoked Yeats’ The Second Coming. But what did she mean by it? Was it just a poetic allusion? Or a cry of yearning? Or perhaps it is a coded invocation of cultural collapse? The beauty lies in the not-knowing.

If this moment needs a name, it might be ‘anti-period’. It is a time not defined by invention but by un-invention. It is not an arrival at something new but a shedding of what no longer fits. The lingering influence of Romanticism, with its grandeur and ornamentation, hasn’t been replaced by a distinct new mode but by a rejection of form itself.

We are no longer tracing the arc of Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey – this idea that a character (or writer) must leave the familiar, undergo a transformation, and then return home no longer the same. We, and our characters, are not returning at all. Writers of this generation are like that gap year student who never comes home, stops replying to emails, shaves their head in Bali, and quietly evaporates into another life. The journey isn’t circular anymore – it’s porous, meandering, recursive, or without a destination.

The clean lines of the modernist structure have dissolved. Grammar is loosened. Punctuation is optional. Think of Sally Rooney, whose dialogue flows without quotation marks and evokes intimacy and immediacy. Sentences stretch or shatter, as in the work of Claudia Rankine or Jenny Offill, where fragments mirror fractured psyches. It could be rebellion. Or laziness. Or something more profound – a quiet resistance, a refusal to be boxed in. Instantaneous fame, viral visibility, micro-narratives – these fragment the literary canon. The Instagram poets, the autofictionists, the substack essayists: each chip away at the idea of a singular voice or form. Perhaps fragmentation is the most honest form of literature we can offer.

Think of Toni Morrison, who famously resisted traditional chapter structures and narrative clarity. In Beloved, the refusal to use conventional formatting mirrored the distortion and dislocation of memory under the weight of slavery. It wasn’t just a stylistic choice – an act of deconstruction, a challenge to the Western, white literary tradition, and a reminder of older oral traditions where the story was fluid, shared, and evolving.

Even here in Oxford, where tradition looms large and norms feel carved in stone, there are undercurrents. Between Bodleian stacks and essay crises, students are quietly subverting inherited forms. Some stick closely to the classics; others remix them. Footnotes live beside fanfiction. Shakespeare shares desk space with Emily Henry. Despite modernism’s slow creep into our syllabi, there’s often resistance to naming the new. As though if we acknowledge it, we also have to dismantle what came before.

But do we need to periodise to understand? Or can we accept what Keats termed ‘negative capability’: the capacity to dwell in uncertainty and doubt without feeling any itch for fact and reason?

Keats’ concept, centuries old, feels radical now. In a world where information is instantly accessible and truth must be verified, dwelling in ambiguity is countercultural. But perhaps that’s precisely what literature demands of us: the courage not to know, to sense, to feel, to intuit meaning. We didn’t need to understand Jane Eyre to feel its resonance fully, nor did we need to dissect Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea line by line to understand the echo and tension between them. We recognised something intuitively.

This may be what defines our era: an era of resistance to era. It is a moment when the label “post-postmodern” no longer satisfies, where the urge to categorise gives way to something looser, stranger, unstable, more human.

The paradox is that even as we resist periodisation, we continue to toy with it. Critics and academics will eventually try to name this age. They’ll trace its borders and identify its tropes. They’ll assign it a prefix. But the literature – fluid, fragmented, chaotic – may not care.

As Oxford students, we live with this tension daily. We write in the shadows of tradition yet are urged to innovate. We cite thinkers who rejected authority in essays judged by those who epitomise it. We are at once inheritors and rewriters of literary time. And perhaps that is the only unifying characteristic of now: the refusal to be unified.

St John’s President Sue Black on skinning rabbits, AI, and working in a war zone

Laurence Cooke
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St John’s President Sue Black on skinning rabbits, AI, and working in a war zone

CW: Violence 

Professor Lady Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome certainly has a title which precedes her. The President of St John’s made her name as an academic and forensic scientist who worked to identify victims in conflict zones including Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and then later the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. I sat down with Sue Black and asked her to give me a “whistle-stop tour” of her life and career which, given an experience which stretches from an Inverness butcher’s shop to the red benches of the Lords, might have been the most difficult question I asked that morning. 

First of all, Black paints a picture of someone whose childhood remains an integral part of their story: “I’ve always got stories”, she says. “Both my grandmother and my father were great storytellers, and so everything I have is a story, and it has been really useful for me that as you get older, you get the chance to stop, to turn around, and to look at the life you’ve taken”. Born in Inverness, Black grew up on the Scottish west coast, a native speaker of Gaelic. It is a far cry from the expensively-furnished college quarters where I sit with her now.  

Yet that upbringing planted the seed of her future career. “My father, as it happened, was a tremendous shot. I was his little shadow. And so when he would go out shooting [to eat, not for sport, she reassures me], I would carry home the dead rabbits and pheasants. I would sit at the back door with my father and he would teach me how to skin them.” 

There was little surprise about a career in forensics, then, when from a very young age, Black “thought nothing of having blood up to my elbows. It felt completely normal”. At thirteen, when her father, ever the Presbyterian, asked her what job she would get, she decided to work in a butcher’s shop. “So when all my friends were selling makeup in the chemists or selling clothes, I was up to my elbows in blood and guts and gore and loved it.” 

University wasn’t a consideration until a Biology teacher told her she had to go. “I lied to my parents. I told them I got a full grant, which I didn’t because at the age of 17, I decided that my parents couldn’t afford to support me: total arrogance. So I ran three different jobs at the same time as being in university because I’m not afraid of hard work.” 

Once at university, Black didn’t like zoology, genetics, chemistry (“my god”), or botany. But anatomy, that’s just the butcher’s shop: “I walked into the department and knew I was home”.  There was never any doubt: “My Biology teacher said I was going to be a scientist, so I had to be a scientist. There was never any doubt about that.” 

University came with challenges, though. Black’s parents, while loving, didn’t understand why she needed to go. She adds: “My mother believed I would leave school, I’d get a job in an office, I’d meet somebody and get married, I’d have children, and I’d live five minutes away from her… So when I went and did something different, she cried”. She was proud all the same, Black tells me, but “never understood” what she did for a living.

Black too sometimes wonders how she made it to where she is now: “I still have huge imposter syndrome [that says] my governing body is going to wake up and realise what a mistake they’ve made… so I never get to a point where I think, my goodness me, I’ve really made it.” When I probed to ask whether this makes her a good model for first-gen and state comp students for whom the idea of Oxford seems so alien, she just expresses her amazement at the students who “are all so much smarter than I am. I’ve got here through hard work, not through raw intelligence. You guys just intimidate the living daylights out of me.” 

She marvels at the intensity of the eight-week terms, and how people can balance their studies with other roles, whether at Cherwell or any other society. We’ve talked about jobs, so I mention what happened in Kosovo. There, Black was one of the first to work on identifying victims of war crimes committed in the Balkan Wars. Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević later became the first sitting head of state indicted for such crimes. 

Shielded by the UN, her team entered across the Macedonian border. Scottish to her backbone, she never realised she was British until she saw the union jack painted on a tank coming right towards them and felt “the sheer sense of relief that says it’s ours”.

That didn’t end the nightmare, though, for their job was to enter a crime scene. 43 dead bodies, people rounded up into rooms “sprayed with Kalashnikov fire”. She tells me that “they [the criminals] stood at the window, threw in straw, threw in petrol, [and] torched the building. [The one survivor] had to lie underneath the dead bodies of his friends and his family who were burning above him because he knew if he came out he would be shot as well.” Black and her team had to return to that scene six months after the event, in 38 degree heat: “a boiling mass of maggots”. 

I ask how she can possibly work with such a sense of moral disgust. The solution: block it out. “It’s not your fight. You’re a scientist. Your job is to find the evidence, recover it, analyse it, report on it, and go home. And so I can’t allow myself to empathise and sympathise with those who are present. I can’t allow myself to get angry with those who are responsible. There are other people for whom that is their job, and if I bleed into their job, I’m not being the unbiased, impartial scientist I have to be.” For Black, “all focus is on the courtroom”. 

After a lengthy conversation about Kosovo and how it changed her personal outlook, I don’t really see how to proceed from here. How can you ask about such trivial matters as the House of Lords when you’ve just heard about such atrocities? When I ask about the Lords, I expect the usual answer about people being out-of-touch, of not doing real experience in the field, as Black does. 

The answer I get, however, comes as a surprise. She recognises the perception of “old people asleep on benches and having a nice lunch”, which she also had on arriving in the role, but claims “that was totally wrong”. She applied after being told that more scientists were needed in the Lords, and more women scientists in particular. “I put my CV in thinking, but it’s not going to happen anyway, so it doesn’t matter.” 

Of course, Black was successful and became the Baroness Black of Strome. Perhaps, she claims, it was her disdain for politics and power that landed her the role: “I was interviewed and one of the questions was ‘if you were offered a ministerial post, would you accept it?’ I said: ‘oh, for goodness sake, I couldn’t think of anything worse’. And they all burst out laughing. And apparently that was the right answer.” 

“Blown away by the breadth and depth of knowledge” in the House, she believes Crossbenchers in particular can offer important oversight. I press, though: should the Lords be abolished altogether? Surely the system is not fit for purpose, especially with regard to hereditary peers. Black has changed her views on the House, and sees “a genuine commitment to trying to do the right thing”, especially when they sat till 3am to debate the Rwanda Bill, a remarkable feat given the age of some parliamentarians. But of course, she adds, “I suppose if that’s what we vote for, that’s what we vote for. And of course I go with it.” 

Black does not vote often (she has no interest or knowledge of football, so why should she vote on it, she asks), but her record is noteworthy all the same. Two which stand out are support for amendments to the Safety of Rwanda Bill and the Elections Bill which opposed the then Conservative government. 

Being surrounded by death in her line of work, I figure Black will have some thoughts about the Assisted Dying Bill. She will vote in support, provided she is “convinced that the safeguards are in place”. She highlights the experiences of members of her own family and friends, as well as the importance of autonomy: “I feel that I am sufficiently comfortable with death, that when it is right for me, I want to be able to have that choice.” She cites studies from Ohio, where there is a history of legalised euthanasia dating as far back as 1906. “They’ve had the pill for a very long time”, Black adds, and “over 60% of those who have it don’t take it because [the value is in] knowing they have it.” She again repeats that if the safeguards aren’t sufficient, she will vote against. It may also take a lot of time, since there will be so much scrutiny. On the prospect of the Bill being passed quickly: “I really don’t think that’s a given”. 

Having moved quickly through a long career history with just a few stops, I feel obliged to mention St John’s. My own college, and the one Sue Black has presided over since 2022. In part, she tells me, because of the pain that is the West Cost Mainline. It became difficult to do House of Lords work while also living near Lancaster University, where she was Pro-Vice Chancellor for Engagement, and the commuting to London was impractical. A self-described “rainmaker”, Black had her eyes set on bringing in more big projects, which a small university like Lancaster would not necessarily be able to handle. 

The application to St John’s came across her desk, and much to her surprise given outside stereotypes about Oxford, “humanity, humility, and a strong moral compass” were the desired qualities. But surely this wasn’t for her, she said, for “they take pedigree”. Why would she have thoughts on the tutorial system when she never went to Oxford? 

That honesty carried her all the way to the role. Even bluntness seemed to help. In a video each candidate had to make as part of the selection process, Black said “I feel really sorry for St. John’s, how awful it is to be known as Oxford’s wealthiest college. Wouldn’t it be better to be known as its most welcoming or its most innovative, or its most enlightened, it’s most diverse. Anything has got to be better than being the wealthiest.” 

The process was, nonetheless, a long one. “I said to them, you need to understand I’m a Scottish Presbyterian. I’m never going to throw money at anything. So if we’re going to solve problems, we’ll solve them properly. And I thought that’ll be the end of that. And they invited me back again. So I’m thinking by this point, what can I say that’s going to put these people off?” As it turned out, nothing. 

I ask her for the weirdest thing she has to do as President. 

“Oh, lordy. President of St. John’s College. [Today] I’m going to go away and look at new samples for chairs in the chapel, and then later on in the week, we will go for a perambulation up to Bagley wood, and later on in the summer, we will go and have a perambulation to one of our farms. It’s the most ludicrous job I’ve ever done in my life!” 

Searching the crypt in the chapel was another job where Black’s previous experience was useful. “I’ve got responsibility not only for the living, but for the dead on these premises”, she tells me. Fortunately, “it’s the best kept crypt I’ve ever been in my life. And there are seven individuals buried down there, and the crypt is in perfect condition, never needs to be opened again for another a hundred years.”

I warned at the start of my interview that there would be some difficult policy questions, and it was at this point that I shifted my focus to buzzwords in Oxford: AI, free speech, and similar. Having attended the inauguration of Lord William Hague as Chancellor, I too heard him talk up the potential of artificial intelligence as a tool for exceptional change at the University. I ask Black if it’s more of an opportunity or a risk factor. 

While “a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to technology”, she notes that AI has changed the face of her own line of work. “We have trained the computers to identify where the hands of the perpetrator are in a video [of child sexual abuse]. I don’t need to look at the video anymore so it can extract the hands. Then we’ve been able to train computers to identify what is the vein pattern on that hand? What is the freckle pattern, the scar pattern, the skin crease pattern, and extract those, convert them into a multimodal biometric… we would never have been able to do manually.” 

This, however, is “white box” AI, where the reasoning process is still visible to human engineers. What is more concerning is “black box” AI, where the computer does not show its working. All the same, Black is “supportive of AI in a way in which it will help us to do things that we have not been able to do before, just by the limitation of our own ability. I couldn’t look at 5 million images. I simply couldn’t, but the computer can.” What that isn’t is letting a chatbot write your essay. “Are you cheating yourself when AI writes your essay for you?” she asks – “you are.” 

AI done, free speech next. Hague mentioned the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act in his admission address. With a perception in some quarters that higher education needs more protections to ensure that people can speak freely on university campuses, I’m curious to know what Black’s experience across Dundee, Lancaster, and Oxford has shown her. 

“I fully believe that people should be able to voice their opinion as long as it is not inducing hatred or aggression of any kind, because we all have our views and it is really the most rewarding of places in a debate, where you have these different views. It’s one of those great human freedoms of being able to listen to a tapestry of perspectives and views, in a way that educates you to come to your own decision.”

“If at any point that freedom is suppressed, then you hear a disproportionate voice. I think we run the risk, with legislation, of altering that dynamic. It’s such a difficult topic because it’s so emotive as well, depending on what you’re talking about. But people should be emotional about things that matter to them, because if they’re not then they don’t matter to you.” 

“But as long as you don’t persecute somebody for it, as long as you don’t become aggressive or hateful about it, in a place like Oxford, where there are so many intelligent people, we should be in a position to hold those difficult discussions, with respect for everyone’s perspective.” 

“We just need to watch that the legislation doesn’t impact negatively on that ability. But I support it, 100%.” For Black, free speech is a vital enabler of the student experience: “you’re never going to be more critical of institutions than at your age. That’s what being a student is all about!” 

With that, I head out to my lecture, and Black switches gear again, to go and inspect new chairs for the chapel. 

Small Claims Court: Tools to Organise and Present Your Case

External Contributor
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Small Claims Court: Tools to Organise and Present Your Case

No one enjoys a legal tussle.

But if somebody owes you money, trashes your car, or fails to live up to an agreement, small claims court can be a fast, affordable way to get made whole. You don’t need a lawyer. You don’t need a law degree. And you don’t need to spend a fortune to get justice. You just need a decent case. And you need to be able to present it coherently and convincingly.

But just having the facts on your side isn’t enough. You need to be prepared. That entails getting your dates and documents straight and organising your presentation in a way that judges can follow, often in just a few minutes.

The good news? You don’t have to figure it out on your own. Today’s smart tools and a little preparedness can help make you look like a pro the very first time you walk into a courtroom.

Start with a Solid Story

Your brief is more than just paper; it’s a narrative. Who did what, when, and why it matters. Create a compelling script, one that’s easy for the judge to digest. Direct the action as if you were making a film. Setting. Characters. Conflict. Evidence. Drop it when the jury least expects it. Keep it linear. Judges follow plots like everybody else.

Organise Like a Pro

Do this simple thing: bundle all your evidence according to the issue. Texts, emails, pictures, and everything should be in script order and collectively labelled. And never, ever, bury the lede. Annotate, add notes. Make your evidence do the heavy lifting. 

If you really want to impress the court, consider using smart legal tech like a small claims resolution platform. It helps you organise your documents, link evidence to claims, and build a clear, logical case that’s courtroom-ready. Think of it as your digital paralegal.

Bring Copies—And Then Some

There’s an old saying that you probably know: when you show the judge something, they need a copy. And the other side does too. Bring three copies of everything. One for yourself, one for the judge, one for the other side. Put it in a nice little binder or folder. With tabs and summaries of key evidence on the front, with bullets. Those little things are good for the judge to know you appreciate their time. They remember it.

Watch the Clock

You don’t get hours on the stand to plead your case. Small claims court trials are brief. It’s common for a trial to take as little as 10 or 15 minutes. That’s your window of time to speak persuasively. So be concise. Eliminate unnecessary details. Focus on the facts. Let your evidence do the persuading.

And the best way to stay focused? Use a case outline. Drop your facts into a simple form, attach your evidence, and print a concise summary to take to court. 

Real Talk: What Happens If You Lose?

Even people who are organised sometimes lose. The judge may also not like your style, or your opponent may have a strong case. That’s why you get ready like you’re going to win, and be clear on your Plan B. Ask about your rights on appeal, and understand the limitations (and your rights) of small claims court. 

Winning Your Small Claims With The Right Platform

Winning in small claims court isn’t a game of who can shout the loudest or who’s the angriest. It’s about who is most prepared. Tell your story. Show your receipts. Keep your cool. All you need is a plan, some tech, and a whole lot of heart.

Town and Gown charity races set to raise £300k

Arina Makarina
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Town and Gown charity races set to raise £300k

The Bidwells Oxford 10k charity race is set to raise £300,000 for Muscular Dystrophy UK. 6,600 people took part in the annual “Town and Gown” race on Sunday 11th May. The race sold out for the second consecutive year, reaching the largest number of participants in the event’s history.

Town and Gown Series Events Officer told Cherwell that around a third of the registrants self-identified as “Gown”, which comprised both University of Oxford students and staff. 

Several local schools, such as Summer Fields School, also took part in the junior 3k race. Ian Barrett, Assistant Head of PE at Summer Fields said the event “is a real highlight in [their] school calendar.” This year 180 pupils from the school entered the 3k race.

Teams completing the race included a group of scientists from Oxford Neuromuscular Centre, who raised over £1,200. Also of note was an Oxfordshire fire crew, who took part in the race dressed in full fire-fighting PPE and whilst carrying a 50 kg casualty mannequin, raised over £1,100 for Muscular Dystrophy UK and The Fire Fighters Charity.

Jessie Keighley, Events Manager at Muscular Dystrophy UK said: “This is a true community event, and we’re delighted that it continues to grow, selling out in advance for a second year running.” The money raised will be used to “continue funding groundbreaking research and supporting those living with muscle wasting and weakening conditions.” 

Nick Pettit, Senior Partner at Bidwells said that partnering with Muscular Dystrophy UK to run the race allows the firm “to champion the charity and its cause, while also giving back to the local communities that are central to [their] work.”

Diligencia, Penningtons Manches Cooper, Oxford United Football Club, and David Lloyds Clubs supported the “Town and Gown” race alongside Bidwells. 

Muscular Dystrophy UK is a charity supporting 110,000 people in the UK with one of over 60 muscle wasting and weakening conditions. The race in support of the charity was established in 1982 inspired by Daniel Cleaver, a local boy with muscular dystrophy, who died at the age of 12.

What the UK-EU deal means for students

Elizabeth Hamilton
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What the UK-EU deal means for students

The UK and the European Union have reached a new agreement setting out post-Brexit relations on areas including fishing rights, trade and defence. For students, the main point of interest was the EU’s proposed “youth mobility scheme” for 18- to 30-year-olds, which would allow stays of up to four years without a visa.

Although no such scheme was finalised at the recent summit, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer told press that the UK and the EU had “agreed to co-operate” on a “youth experience scheme”, which would allow British young people to travel and work ‘freely’ in Europe. The initiative has been labelled a youth “experience” scheme rather than a youth “mobility” scheme to emphasise the restrictions which would be put on it, and would mirror existing arrangements the UK has with countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

Starmer also announced a commitment to work towards the UK rejoining the Erasmus programme, an EU initiative which provides funding for student exchanges and training across Europe. The UK’s membership was first established in 1987, but it left the scheme in 2020 as part of the Brexit deal. The government now appears to be working with European leaders to allow the UK to rejoin the programme, although has clarified that the planned “youth experience scheme” would be “capped and time limited.”

The question of youth mobility, especially for students, has been a crucial one in negotiations; the UK’s prestigious universities, including Oxford, have long acted as a draw for European young people, providing an incentive for EU member states to secure positive relations with the UK.

Additionally, such a deal could widen opportunities for those studying modern languages, whose degrees often involve international travel. In 2022, Cherwell published testimonies which described a “failure to adapt to Brexit” within the Year Abroad Office, at which point the Year Abroad Office itself highlighted the difficulties presented by the replacement of “one set of immigration regulations with 27 different ones.”

The number of students applying to Oxford from EU countries saw a significant decline after Brexit, dropping from 2,773 in 2019 to 1,572 in 2023. The loss of home fee status, along with complications related to health insurance and travel, made studying abroad less accessible for students in both the UK and EU. European research funding for Oxbridge also plummeted as a result of the Leave vote; Cherwell reported in 2023 that Oxford was awarded only €2m in the Horizon Europe 2021-2027 programme, compared to €523m combined from the same scheme in 2014-2020. 

Review: Death of a Salesman – ‘The Inside of His Head’

Sanaya Narula
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Review: Death of a Salesman – ‘The Inside of His Head’

To review Tiptoe Productions’ staging of Death of a Salesman, I must first contextualise my biases as a reviewer. By no means do I intend to offend – I believe that this performance was a promising first act for a newborn theatre company, and one which could quite easily be perfected. The cast and crew certainly had their moments of brilliance, but my experience as a spectator was perhaps skewed by the fact that hours of my life were spent rereading, highlighting, and mulling over the minutiae of this Arthur Miller play as a youthful A-level English student. With such overexposure to a play, one cannot help but form strong opinions on it.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is stunning. It is tense and excruciating, it is the final crumbling of an old salesman whose hallucinations swallow up his reality, an allegory for the despairing individual driven to insanity when the American Dream contorts into a Sisyphean nightmare. The drama is psychological: Miller’s working title for this play was ‘The Inside of his Head’, and his original concept was to have an enlarged skull on the stage with characters walking around inside it. It is significantly the tragedy of a ‘low man’ (although Miller’s pun on his tragic hero’s name, Willy Loman, was not intentional), of an ordinary mortal attempting to grasp at greatness and failing spectacularly. 

I adore the precision of Arthur Miller’s stage directions; he always knows exactly how he wants his plays to look. A gloomy mist enveloped the stage when I walked into the Michael Pilch Studio, successfully giving it “an air of the dream”, as desired by Miller. His other stage directions were not so faithfully followed: there was no “angry glow of orange” and the Loman household was not surrounded by “towering, angular shapes”. While Miller’s instruction for the play’s set to be “partially transparent” is difficult to achieve, his lighting directions are not so fanciful, and the towering shapes (crucial to the overall sense of physical entrapment) could have been projected onto the backdrop. The Pilch, which is quite literally a stuffy black box, made up for this absence with its claustrophobic conditions, but the play’s counter-motif of natural imagery (a contrast to its urban barrenness) was under-emphasised. 

The actors often played their parts marvellously. My personal favourite was Joe Rachman as Bernard, who was animated and expressive in his role as a nerdy, bullied schoolboy, his emotions ranging from indignation to true heartbreak upon witnessing his friend (Biff, Willy’s son) throw his life away. More than any other character, he reminded the spectators that they were watching a tragedy. He filled the stage with his presence and his pained gaze was particularly accentuated (by him taking off his glasses) in the scene where Bernard tells Willy that it was after Biff’s trip to Boston (where he learned that his father was having an affair) that everything started to go wrong for him. 

The role of Willy Loman seems challenging: he must at once be broken, insignificant, and a delusionally proud salesman. Nate Wintraub executed the role powerfully in his quieter, more vulnerable moments, especially when Willy is overwhelmed with emotion upon the realisation that – “isn’t that remarkable” – his son likes him. His last scene was surreal, and several spectators seemed to gasp when he screamed a rushed goodbye to his offstage wife, “I gotta go, baby. Bye! Bye!”, before hurtling to his death (the play’s title is quite explicit about the salesman’s death, so surely this is not a spoiler). Nate amplifies his voice quite impressively, which was suitable, in my opinion, for his role as the ‘bad cop’ in The Pillowman, but I feel that there is a depth to Willy Loman’s mental breakdown which cannot always be conveyed by simply raising one’s voice. Besides, one could shout in many different ways, depending on whether they are expressing their rage, anguish, authority, madness… This production’s Willy Loman almost seemed a little too sane, and did not strike me as a man who wanted to die. 

Miller’s characters are complicated. Linda, Willy’s wife, is both resigned and loving. Hope Healy’s Linda balanced these emotions well, holding herself at a weary distance from her husband while still looking after him with careful concern. Her words after Willy’s death – “Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry.” – were haunting, and were met with silence. Ollie Gillam played a bitter and brooding Biff, and Ezana Betru’s most convincing moment in his role as Happy was when he cried at his father’s funeral. The brothers seemed much more emotive and energetic when they played their younger selves in Willy’s hallucinations, whereas their performance of their adult selves seemed a little static. There was little movement in their first few scenes except the occasional puff on a cigarette, and in those moments I felt almost as though I was listening to an audiobook. 

The ominous Uncle Ben (Tristan Hood) was the only character for whom being glued to the spot worked well, because he is a figment of Willy’s imagination, a recurring hallucination who ultimately prompts him to kill himself. Cameron Maiklem’s stage presence as Charley was natural and charismatic, often drawing laughter from the audience. 

Towards the end of the play, the lighting choices were incredible. A beam of light targeted Willy at precisely the right angle to make his shadow large and dramatic, allowing him to appear as the mirage of a great man one last time. At some point, the light illuminated nothing but the gas pipe, an agonising reminder of Willy’s suicide attempts. This production features an original score by James Pearson, which is an important role given the attention Arthur Miller pays to music in his script. Multiple characters have recurring musical themes in the stage directions, and the symbolic flute reappears to conjure an arcadian longing. Pearson’s music was dramatic and often intense, but it didn’t seem to rise to “an unbearable scream”, as it is supposed to in Willy’s final scene. 

While writing this review, I come to wonder about what makes a good reviewer. My crystallised expectations of how Miller’s characters should be portrayed are not necessarily appropriate; theatre is, after all, a collaborative art form. Characters are renewed by every actor who embodies them. That said, this production saw its finest moments when the cast and crew sprinkled this classic tragedy with their personal flair, and with a little more creative experimentation, their full potential could surely be unleashed. 

Oxford Union believes that Trump has gone too far

Archie Johnston
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Oxford Union believes that Trump has gone too far

The Oxford Union last night debated the motion “This House Believes Trump has gone too far,” featuring controversial American conservative activist Charlie Kirk on the opposition. At the end of the debate, 250 members voted in favour of the motion and 92 voted against.

Opening for the proposition was Union Librarian Anya Trofimova. Trofimova took aim at President Trump’s first 100 days in office. She criticised the US president’s foreign policy, stating that he has “bankrolled Israel’s Gaza genocide”. Trofimova also pointed to Trump’s domestic programme, describing how he has “tanked the American economy,” warning that “this is just year one” of his second term.

Vishnu Vadlamani, member of the Union’s Secretary’s Committee, opened for the opposition. In a slightly convoluted manner, Vadlamani argued that Trump was demonstrating to Europe and America the consequences of voting for the “radical right”. He also queried what the boundaries implied by the phrase “too far” were and sought to remind the chamber of the mandate produced by Trump’s electoral victory. He too criticised Trump, but argued that the president is a symptom of a deeper “malaise” in American liberal democracy and the Republican Party. Vadlamani said: “The real issue is not Trump himself, but the political climate that enabled his rise.”

The second speaker for the proposition was Serene Singh, a Criminology DPhil candidate. She broke down the negative impacts of the Trump presidency into three catchily alliterative categories: “division”, “distraction”, and “deflection”. Singh used a bit of theatre to illustrate her point about distraction tactics. She pointed out three people sitting on the floor at the back of the room, positioned there ahead of time. She said that just as attendees had up to that point ignored those people, the world was ignoring the Trump presidency’s negative impact.

Next for the opposition was Regent’s Park College student Daniel Ogoloma, who like Vadlamani alleged that the term “too far” was excessively vague. Addressing the accusation that Trump has disregarded the Constitution, Ogoloma argued that the president was in fact following it “forcefully and faithfully”. Ogoloma brought up the example of the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled to be illegal. He argued that this was an example of the courts successfully balancing executive power. The Trump administration has not facilitated Abrego Garcia’s return to the US, despite having been told to. 

Following this, speeches were taken from the floor, two each for proposition and opposition. Students arguing for the proposition claimed that Trump has flouted both democratic values and the US Constitution. Those arguing against spoke of Trump encouraging Europe to build up its armed forces and combat institutional “stagnation”.

The final speaker for the Proposition was Laura Smith, a presidential historian at Oxford’s faculty of History. Smith cast doubt on Trump’s electoral mandate, calling attention to criticism of the concept within political science. She compared Trump several times to President Andrew Jackson, who was impeached like Trump. She argued that unlike in Jackson’s time, America is not a “democracy of the white man”, also noting the difference in gender between the proposition and opposition benches. Shortly before the end of her remarks, she joked about Kirk taking notes on a sheet of paper. Kirk responded: “you’re going to love it.”

Beginning his remarks as the final speaker for the opposition, Kirk sought to undermine his opponents’ arguments by pointing to factual inaccuracies. He noted that Abrego Garcia was not a US citizen. Answering concerns around Trump’s association with the European far right, Kirk said: “I certainly hope Reform and AfD wins.” 

Kirk spent the bulk of his prepared remarks attacking the records of successive British governments. He called ‘Make America Great Again’ a project to “return America to its British roots” but said that British leaders had abandoned the principles that “made them great in the first place”. He referred to the “dying out of the British nation”, and of Christianity, attributing this to immigration to the UK. Kirk added: “Soon, Britain will have more practising Muslims than practising Christians […] I don’t want Americans to be replaced.”

For the remainder of his time, Kirk spoke about DEI, calling it a “cancer”, and referring to “DEI parasites”. He praised Trump for taking measures to combat DEI, as well as what he called the “toxic social contagion of transgenderism”. He concluded by telling the chamber: “If you want a Britain you can be proud of, you should all be wearing MAGA hats.” 

Before attendees left the chamber, Union President Anita Okunde called for a moment of silence to mark the recent death of Joseph Nye. Nye, an American political scientist, was originally going to be the lead speaker for the proposition.

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