David Lammy’s article in the Guardian today, revealing that 21 Oxbridge Colleges failed to admit any black students this year (and that Merton hasn’t done so for five), is a much needed wake up call for this university. Lammy’s article was inflammatory, and deliberately so. He made far too much melodrama over the efforts he went to in obtaining readily available information, and did more than a little bit of statistical fiddling. Much of his point was anti-elitist, and that much of it was wrong, but the rest was what we needed to hear.

Lammy was misguided in so far as he blamed the university for actively doing something wrong. I don’t believe for a moment that Oxford is racist – that tutors decide not to admit applicants on their basis of their skin colour. In this sense, the university is off the hook.

What is unforgiveable though, is that we see the wrong outside our walls and do nothing about it. It is not our fault that the state education system fails the black students that go into it. Oxford University is not to blame for the fact that over 60% of black Oxbridge applicants turned out not to get three As at A-level. Nor is it to blame for the likely cause of their failure at interview – a lack of intellectual confidence and experience in thinking about new academic problems.

But we are to blame for doing nothing to correct this. The University’s access operation is woefully inadequate, and often even perverse. How anybody can justify spending more access funds on Manchester Grammar School than any of the hundreds of schools desperately in need of academic inspiration is beyond me, and is something the University seriously has to answer for. That a single penny is spent at Eton is bad, that far more is spent running lectures series is absurd.

The University has and will argue that its job is not to fix the education system, just to admit fairly and offer help to those who have less at their school. This approach of “it’s not my problem” is an embarrassingly selfish one from people who have been so lucky in life. There’s no use just running events for students whose teachers have pushed them to apply to Oxford when talent is falling through our schools like a leaky sieve. Poorer students don’t come here because they take the wrong A-levels, because they don’t have the confidence to believe they’ll get in, and because they don’t even realise how to apply. This happens because Oxford likes to stay put, let students come to it, and shrug its shoulders at the massive educational unfairnesses just beyond the College gates.

Like Lammy says, Harvard sends a letter to every high-achieving minority student in the US, and Yale employs access officers in each of the 50 states. Oxford targets its access at public schools. We might not be racist, but we are doing absolutely nothing to change a system of entrenched educational disadvantage. To sit back and watch the education system fail droves of pupils is not acceptable, and if it takes a melodramatic Guardian article accusing us of racism to change, then so be it.

Labour have targeted their latest battle cry at “the squeezed middle”, the vaguely defined concept of anybody and everybody who thinks someone above them is having it easy, and someone below is taking them for a ride. Attempts to pin this group down to a specific class or income bracket have rightly met with ridicule, but this is not because the squeezed middle is a bad strategy to employ. The best political strategies are ones that let voters choose how to define them, and make them relevant to their own lives. Obama succeeded because everyone had a change in mind, and everyone had something to hope for. Onto his campaign they could project these hopes, seeing in the candidate exactly what they wanted to. But if at any point Obama had to pin his change down, to say exactly who it was for, he would’ve collapsed – you can’t fit the majority of the electorate into any sensible definition.

What you can do is make it a mantra. Every policy creates a middle, and every middle feels squeezed. Tuition fee reform lets off low earners, gives a free ride to anyone with rich parents, but leave anyone earning above £30,000 noticeably worse off in the long run. Tax policy lets ‘scroungers’ off the hook, and leaves enough loopholes for the rich to domicile themselves in Belize (although this particularly loophole is now closing). Every policy is designed to protect the vulnerable, lest we become a heartless society, and to encourage personal economic success, lest we become even less competitive as a country. Given we need to fund the state somehow, the middle will always bear a high burden.

Labour know this. Their passionate support of often ludicrous universal benefits is a commitment to this middle. But having lost the brains that ran the Party for the last fifteen years or so, they’ve forgotten how to catch the middle’s eye.

The key is that the middle is not homogenous. Chris Bryant tried defining it in terms of an income of between £16,000 and £50,000 a year – hardly a united socio-economic group. If every policy creates its own middle, then every policy response needs to target that particular middle. Each generates its own injustices, and Labour can pick on them. These middles will often overlap, and could find Labour a core area of support, but this need not be at the expense of any others – individual voters affected by welfare, education or health reforms can at least become sympathisers.

Whenever a government is under fiscal pressure, someone has to suffer. The Coalition cannot cut off the vulnerable, but nor can they get a grip on those wealthy enough to squeeze through every loophole. During the Labour years, Brown and Blair managed to keep extending benefits to the middle, drawing them into the New Labour project. Now this is no longer possible, the Coalition risk the wrath of the working mother, the pushy parent, and the petitioning pensioner. They cannot afford to buy these groups off. If Labour want to seize their best chance in 2015, it has to be to harness this resentment.

Bacteria are everywhere. We know that so-called ‘good’ bacteria swarm the inside and outside of our bodies. And with all the upcoming Christmas dinners, we are all too aware of the microbial nasties causing illnesses such as Salmonella. But really, – bacteria. aAre. eEverywhere. Scientists have previously found them existing variously at temperatures down to -20°C in Antarctic ice, and up to 115°C in the Earth’s crust. They can withstand intense pressures of up to 1000 MPa (the equivalent of 40 km beneath the Earth’s surface), and can live in both very acidic (pH 0) and very alkaline (pH 11) waters. Similarly, high concentrations of salt, andor extremely sticky viscous fluids pose no challenge to specially adapted bacteria.

A new study, carried out by researchers at Oregon State University and various other collaborators, and published this last week in a leading scientific journalUnsupported field, PLoS One, has claimed to further extend these limits with the discovery of a diverse ecosystem of bacterial life over 2 miles beneath the ocean crust.

Ocean crust, which covers around 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, is made up of three principal layers – a thin layer of sediments derived from the overlying ocean, underlain by a layer of rapidly cooled basalt that can be up to 2 miles thick. Below this is the ‘gabbro’ layer that, like the basalt layer, is derived from the mantle, but cooled more slowly. This gabbro layer makes up the bulk of the oceanic crust.

While some geological studies have been made of this layer, little work has been done to elucidate the biological activity in these rocks,. This is not only because it is difficult to get to rocks buried so deep, but also because little was thought to be going on. This new study has worked in collaboration with the Ocean Drilling Project to obtain cores of rock from the gabbro layer, which are exposed unusually close to the surface, due to uplifting and faulting at a site near the undersea mountain Atlantis Massif, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Cores of rock obtained from nearly a mile into this formation revealed a surprising and unexpected microbial habitat. A wide range of biological activity was observed in the very deep and old rocks, far away from any energy giving sunlight, and subject to intense pressures. Researchers found bacteria that were degrading hydrocarbons, and many appeared to be capable of oxidising methane.

Furthermore, the microbes seemed to be able to convert gaseous forms of nitrogen and carbon to stable solid and liquid forms.
The discovery of this busy subsurface microbial world is of interest to microbiologists, geologists and climate change scientists alike. Very little is known about the role the deep ocean crust plays in carbon storage and cycling, and such an active bacterial ecosystem in such an unpredictable place adds significantly to the limits of our knowledge. The researchers claim that the discovery can have important implications for the storage of carbon dioxide – one of the major contributing gases to the greenhouse effect and global warming. They outline the possibility of pumping carbon dioxide into the deep crust where the microbes can sequester it permanently. While the long term consequences of artificially high carbon burial in oceanic crust is not yet fully understood, the presence of this bacterial community could open up avenues of investigation into solving the climate change crisis.

This new discovery also potentially sheds light on the origin of the unexplained methane periodically observed in the atmosphere of Mars. While opinions currently differ between a geological source or a biological one, the discovery on Earth of a microbial ecosystem living deep beneath the surface of the planet (and thus out of sight of robotic explorers on Mars)opens new possibilities for subsequent exploration in seeking an explanation.

It is rare to make a truly novel discovery on Earth these days, where every conceivable area on its surface has already been explored. Now, the only places left to go are up or down, and it would now seem that down isn’t so boring after all. Who would have expected that, just as with our own bodies, bacteria would swarm the inside as well as the outside?

As we near the end of eighth week, a collective sigh of relief can be felt reverberating through the Oxford air. As snow lightly dusted our fair city and a wintry chill established itself as a permanent fixture, hats, gloves, and scarves became required garments in every student’s wardrobe ensemble, and all the holiday decorations I’ve been blathering about began to seem just a little more relevant.

And with the holidays here came an institution which I thought I was familiar with, but in fact turned out to feel quite foreign – the seemingly innocuous traditional Christmas carol service. Before any gasps escape from open mouths, let me hasten to assure you that I do indeed enjoy my fair share of Christmas tunes. But my expectations are more in the line of Jingle Bells, Winter Wonderland, Frosty the Snowman, and that good old standby Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

I was surprised, upon opening the pamphlets provided at college and university carol services, that these were not the songs soon to pierce the air. While I certainly recognize hymns of the season, Hark! The Herald Angels and Little Town of Bethlehem and all, they don’t comprise the soundtrack of the holiday season as much back home as they do here.

This difference begged a related query, which I proceeded to pose to friends; were our holiday books, or films, in fact divergent as well? They assured me that they had indeed been introduced to the wonderfully corny delights of The Santa Clause and The Polar Express (though many were shocked to hear that the latter derived from a classic children’s book). And of course it goes both ways, as I can attest to viewings of Love, Actually and The Holiday.

But when I probed further, beyond the holiday tales of recent vintage, I found that there were what I considered gaping holes in the holiday canon. I grew up reading (and then viewing) How The Grinch Stole Christmas, a classic Dr. Seuss tale whether in book, cartoon, or feature film form. I’m used to marathons of A Christmas Story every December, with Ralphie’s quest ostensibly ageless. Going back further in creation date, Miracle on 34th Street and It’s A Wonderful Life (a personal favourite) elicited some recognition, but nowhere near the level I expected.

As in all other seasons, and on all other occasions, the carol service reminded me that there are assumptions that just can’t be made when one is speaking in an American tongue. The one consolation is that on both sides of the pond, one can feel free to wish everyone else (including those of you reading this), a happy holiday season and New Year.