A CONTENDER for the Liberal Democrat leadership has claimed he “can’t remember” writing an article advocating the use of hard drugs which appeared under his name in an Oxford student magazine in the 1970s.
Chris Huhne, who is one of the favourites to take over from Sir Menzies Campbell as leader of the Liberal Democrats, wrote in favour of Class A drugs in the February 1973 edition of Isis while he was an undergraduate at Magdalen College.
The article, published under the heading ‘Oxford Escapism’, presents a beginner’s guide to illegal drugs and praises those willing to experiment with them.
“There are a number of people who are open-minded about experimenting with drugs. This tolerance is welcome, and it is only with the aid of this tolerance that drugs can be put in their correct unsensationalist place as a social phenomenon with great and respectable antecedents,” it says.
The text, which is accompanied by a drawing of a hand holding a syringe, also discusses the enjoyable nature of taking opium. “Opium is available in Oxford and, in its natural form can be safely experimented with. Colours, movements and shapes are serenely beautiful, as beautiful as a dream and as realistic as George’s [an Oxford café] at 7.30 on a Monday morning.”
Of LSD Huhne writes, “Acid is manufactured in the labs and is the only drug which is getting cheaper. The considerable number of students at this university who drop acid are well-balanced, highly intelligent people. If one is able to live with oneself then acid holds no surprises.”
The piece, which Huhne wrote as an 18-year-old undergraduate, states that drugs such as opium, LSD, and amphetamines should be an “accepted facet of our society”.
Since then, however, Huhne claims to have no recollection of the article. He told The Times, “To be honest I don’t have any memory of it,” and while insisting that it was his private business whether or not he had taken any of the drugs mentioned, he stressed that “the views that were [expressed in the article] are certainly not my views as they are at the moment.”
He added that he was not entirely responsible for the article’s content. “I was basically putting together large hunks of that, so God knows who wrote it and did anything and I wouldn’t attribute it to me if I were you. I may have edited the piece but as I say I was just bringing together whole loads of stuff.”
His exposition on the benefits of hard drugs was published as part of a longer article on how to “escape” the trials of being a student at Oxford.
Huhne studied at Magdalen College and gained a first-class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He started writing for Isis early on in his university career and eventually became Co-Editor.
Extracts from the article have been printed in national newspapers as Huhne goes head-to-head with his rival Nicholas Clegg for the Lib Dem leadership following Sir Menzies Campbell’s resignation.
Huhne is one of several political figures whose past has recently come under scrutiny for drug-related reasons.
Earlier this year Home Secretary Jacqui Smith earned the nickname ‘Jacqui Spliff’ after she admitted to smoking cannabis a number of times while an undergraduate at Hertford. Smith later said that her behaviour had been wrong and urged people not to use the drug.
Conservative Party leader David Cameron, who graduated with a first-class degree from Brasenose, also admitted to smoking cannabis as a student at Eton, and speaking to the Independent, a friend recalled him “occasionally [having] a joint or something” while a student at Oxford.   Cameron has repeatedly refused to answer questions on whether he took drugs while at Oxford.

Back in those halcyon pre-Oxford days, the library was a place one might  quite easily walk past every day for twenty years and never enter. Local libraries entertain a smattering of blue-haired old women seeking out the latest Mills or Boon and a couple of over-eager children with a lack of social life; they have never been exactly one for pulling in the masses. At university, though, things change. Much as we hate to admit it, the Bodleian is quite simply the place to be.

With its grand total of 38 libraries, and over 6.5 million books kept in those mysterious, Harry Potter-esque caverns stretching under Broad Street alone, the academic reasons for paying the odd visit to an Oxford library seem pretty obvious. What magnetic force, however, has us working there non-stop is a rather more difficult egg to crack. Is it simply the rather sadistic pleasure we get in seeing that it’s not only we who are desperately attempting to struggle through Ulysses before Monday morning? Or is it a staged mating ritual in which sitting opposite someone in the library provides the perfect opportunity for that inter-college branching the club situation can’t always provide? 
There’s certainly an element of voyeurism involved in library working; more than one of us has whiled our morning away wondering if the girl sitting on the far corner got her coat from Topshop, or debating whether the student opposite’s use of colour pens could benefit one’s own work ethic. At the same time, however, the library forces us to work without the temptations inherent in working in one’s rooms; it is, at least theoretically, rather more difficult in a library to a) spend half your day on facebook b) have a massive tantrum about one’s workload or c) talk to one’s current flame on the phone for an hour (though all, I will declare from eyewitness evidence, have been managed by certain individuals within library premises at least once.)

From that first anxious trip to the intimidating industrial-sized photocopier, to that tentative attempt to negotiate the purgatory of telnet and make a stack request, Oxford libraries are certainly – for the novice at least – a habit which is at first hard to understand. By the end of your first year, however, be assured that you will return home as a hardened library snob, happy to march into your local library and express contempt over their lack of copies of whatever obscure text is on your summer reading list. Now, isn’t that a nice thought?
 

PEMBROKE JCR are hunting for a group of students who scrawled offensive messages on photos of freshers pinned up in the JCR.
In an email sent out to students last Tuesday, JCR President Chris Bennetts explained that he was forced to take down the photos after upsetting messages were graffitied over them.
“It was to be expected that there would be some jokey amendments made to the photos, this happens every year and is absolutely fine, but some of the comments and drawings on this year’s pictures crossed a line,” he said.
Bennetts added, “It was a very stupid and inconsiderate thing for someone to do and we are investigating who is responsible.”
One Pembroke student, who wished to remain anonymous, said he was disgusted by what had happened. “I heard that people went round and wrote on girls’ pictures stuff like ‘virgin’ and on one guy’s picture they‘d written ‘never seen a clit’,” he said. “For freshers who’ve just arrived in Pembroke, it gives a pretty awful first impression, and those responsible are obviously completely idiotic or just plain malicious.”
Others expressed concern about the impact of the incident on the College’s reputation. “This doesn’t look very good for the College’s image, harassing the freshers like this. If that’d been me I’d have been properly messed up and really upset,” said one second-year.
Another member of the JCR agreed, saying, “It’s not a very Pembroke thing to happen. Whoever did it is clearly an arsehole and should man up and apologise to the College.”
The JCR Committee have said they will not tolerate such behaviour and are trying to encourage a more united student body. In his email to the JCR, Bennetts warned, “This is not something we are prepared to tolerate. A key message coming from the JCR this year is one of inclusion: everybody should feel able to participate in the JCR’s work and activities. The comments posted on the pictures ran contrary to that aim and were totally unacceptable.”
JCR OUSU Rep Chris Thursten said that the culprits’ identities were currently unknown, but that if discovered, they would be disciplined by JCR members. “This is basically people being twattish. We’re trying to get rid of this ‘cliquishness’ and push for a more inclusive college. Some of the things that were written were really nasty. If we find out who it was we’ll be having words with them,” he said.

This house believes that children need heterosexual parents:
A packed and glorious debate.Though not one whose outcome was ever in question – as opener James Dray puts it, ‘we live in Oxford; everyone’s gay’ – you might expect the Proposition to muster a more forceful argument than that children might get teased a little at school. Alas, they do not, leaving the evening void of any real intellectual titillation. Luckily, the debate’s aesthetic merits more than compensated.

Dray, clearly not believing his own argument, serves up ten minutes of charming banter before adopting his serious voice, and then it all goes tepid and tenuous. He did at least trot out the line ‘some of my best friends are gay’ with superb irony, speculate on Tryl and Omkar’s ‘exquisitely dressed’ hypothetical progeny and introduce the terms ‘rimming’ and ‘fisting’ to the debating chamber.

Opposition opener Wan also amuses, but is incisive along with it; like a whippet armed with a rapier, he plays on personal emotions with aplomb and carries all before him. This lad will go far.

Archdeacon Norman Russell favours the rhetorical tactic of attrition, and subjects the floor to a long and dreary siege. Maybe he hopes disease will break out in the opposition ranks – the coughing certainly becomes more widespread. Rev. Gaston answers with a staccato delivery like the bursts of a machine gun across an abandoned battlefield. And the battle is certainly over.

The audience subjects Stephen Green to an immature but effective sally of interruptions; Holmes and Truss deliver sound and sober speeches in opposition; Edward Leigh MP makes up in fist-clenching and citing ‘our heart of hearts’ as a legitimate statistical source, what he lacks by way of a rational thought process. A decisive victory for the opposition, with many audience members moved by the eloquence of the arguments delivered
Adoption crises; rafts of statistics; UN conventions; the opposition have all the points, but what makes this debate so one-sided is their utter conviction. Future speakers take note: believing your own rhetoric really does make a difference.

So you’re a year older than everyone else and twice as mature? That’s a good start to being a Gap Year Bore.
Got a deep mahogany tan and natural highlights? 52 grubby woven bracelets on your wrists (which will be entirely white when you eventually cut said bracelets off)? Been to South America? Thailand? Australia? Or all three? Great. You’re a star candidate for a Gap-Year Bore.

Now all you need to do is take every opportunity to bring up your amazing experiences washing lepers / breastfeeding orangutans / educating shanty-town orphans. Wearing your battered Havaianas and badly dyed pyjama trousers to lunch in the rain might create an opportunity to bring it up. Or you could just compare everything to its Third World equivalent: “this Red Bull is nothing like the Thai original. It’s laced with LSD, it’ll blow your mind!”  Or even “I just can’t get used to the taste of Coke after drinking only Inca-Kola when I was in Peru for a year…” While it’s lovely that you went out there and broadened their horizons, the rest of us are quite happy with our narrow little Oxford worldview. Keep your dreadlocks and ethnic scarves. We don’t care.

Even worse than hearing all about the Gap-Year Bore’s experiences is being stuck in a corner listening to two of them talk to each other. Inevitably they’ll have been to the same beaches and met the same people – fellow travellers called Brett and Jonty, probably Australian or Irish – God forbid anyone should talk to actual Thai people, you know?

If you do manage to wriggle out of that corner, though, and find pale wintry people in normal attire, you should be on your guard for another type of GYB – the Corporate Gapper. While others were gallivanting around the world the Corporate Gapper was beavering away building up an enviable CV at a blue-chip management consultancy or accounting firm, slaving away 9-5 with perhaps the odd awkward lunchtime strip-club outing with the Junior Partners. No endless stories here – that’s because there are none. Yes, you were paid £10 an hour for a bit of photocopying and a lot of idle facebook, and yes, you came out with a sky-high boredom threshold and shedloads of cash but you’re lacking in terms of amusing anecdotes. Luckily you can make up for it by offering your pals several years’ worth of recruitment spiel. “You get a nice fat bonus for every new innocent you corrupt, with fancy dinners at Freud’s thrown in!” Sounds fab. Unfortunately these lose their appeal once you’ve been to one and realised the hidden price – sharing your evening with the dullest people you’ve ever met. Beware children! You’re only a free cocktail away from eternal damnation in the bowels of the City.

Still, even if you resisted the charms of the Travel Gapper and the Corporate Gapper there are others, for example the Stayed-At-Home-And-Watched- Jeremy-Kyle Gapper. If you’re one of these, you won’t bore your new pals with what you did on your gap year, but will probably be so boring anyway you won’t have the opportunity. Although you will have an astonishing knowledge of relationship dynamics among the dregs of society.

Didn’t take a gap year at all? Don’t fret, you can be a Pretend Gapper. You feel so left out you’ll eagerly try and join in with tales of how you found yourself on the terrible-test-of-endurance that was your Outward Bound expedition in Year nine Easter half-term.

But beware, if you’re still reading this, perhaps feeling oh-so-smug and superior to all those silly, shallow gap-year types, you may be an Anti-Gapper: one of those who is so bitter about their own lack of interesting experiences that they will spend hours bitching about everyone who does have something to enthuse about. Gap years may not make you bigger or more clever, but they’re probably a lot of fun (or, if you went the accountancy route, at least they’re lucrative). So don’t dump on people’s stories, and maybe (possibly) they won’t dump on your own less spectacular offerings. If they do, tell them, in the words of GCSE poetry guru Simon Armitage, that “it ain’t what you do, it’s what it does to you.” And if you still feel left out you could always take a gap year of your own.

A MAGDALEN student was temporarily banned from Facebook after uploading a photo of a Brasenose fresher’s penis taken during a drinking game.
The explicit photo was snapped during a naked run around the Radcliffe Camera earlier this term after a night of heavy drinking in the Brasenose bar. This involved a ‘bleep test’ during which, for every two pints a participant failed to consume, that student had to remove an item of clothing.
At the end of the game students then ran around the Rad Cam. While three students took part in the run, only one was fully nude. One of the other students used a sock to protect his modesty while the other kept his boxers on.
The Magdalen second-year, who wished to remain anonymous, found her account had been disabled by an administrator after uploading the photo.
She said, “I tried to log in and it said that the account had been disabled. Someone had to have complained about the photo. I was banned.
“We were playing drinking games and later on we decided to do a ‘bleep test’ with shots of beer. There were thirteen levels and people who lost had to run around the Rad Cam naked.”
She added that she only regained access after writing letters of complaint to Facebook.
Another Brasenose undergraduate added, “He didn’t seem that drunk and backed out quite quickly, he wasn’t pressured into it. Some of the other colleges have quite a bad reputation whereas we didn’t force anyone. A lot of people had told him he didn’t need to do it, and loads of people refused to do it. But he didn’t seem that bothered about it. He did it after the whole thing was finished.”
The student involved, who also preferred not to be named, said, “We had been at formal hall where we had some wine and then went on to the bar. I vomited at stage five, and most people did at some point. After the bleep test, as we were heading off to Filth, the forfeits were naked runs around the Rad Cam. I was meant to do three laps and did two.”
He added, “I think it was quite funny, but I have no particular desire to be tagged in the photographs. I might not have done it if I was sober.” He said that he did not complained to the Facebook administrator and had not even seen the offending photo.
Earlier this year then Union Secretary Ben Tansey received a £50 fine after being caught wrestling naked with two other men.  Tansey was discovered by a porter at Lincoln College during the late-night antics.  The former secretary had returned from sports drinks and was according to a witness, very drunk.  The incident was the second time Tansey has been caught wrestling naked.

Here’s a random fact: 99% of women want a man in a plain white t-shirt or a plain black t-shirt, v-neck or round-neck, along with a pair of jeans – although that part is almost irrelevant. Personally, I would opt for white. It is effortlessly chic, makes boys look tanned, if not already emphasizing a tan, and for some reason gives them the appearance of having an amazing body (regardless of what it is actually like) all because of the connotations associated with a simple white t-shirt. Think about the man in the Diet Coke ad during the 11am Diet Coke break and how he drove the girls in the office crazy. It has nothing to do with his muscle bound physique – trust me. It’s the effect of the white t-shirt.

Let us go back to basics – we are talking primitive. How many episodes of desperate housewives do you have to watch to see that clothes sometimes associated with menial work are attractive. Marlon Brando in A Street Car Named Desire. James Dean in A Rebel Without Cause. Iconic films, iconic images, iconic men – iconic white t-shirt. A white t-shirt in the right fit costs nothing. It has no social associations with it. Anyone could wear it. The emphasis is on the man himself, not the clothes, the accessories or the pretense. It takes confidence to rely on nothing but a plain white t-shirt – and everyone knows that confidence is every man’s best accessory.

The idea of something that is accessible to all and yet so good is summarized in the philosophy of Andy Warhol…He talks about Coke in the same way that we can view the ‘White T-shirt’. Slightly paradoxical that I should be using an artistic genius with a confused sexuality’s ideas to illustrate why men should dress a certain way – but here it goes. Replace ‘Liz Taylor’ with ‘James Dean’, ‘Coke and Coca Cola’ with ‘White T-shirt’ and ‘Drinks and Drinking’ with ‘Wear and Wearing’: “America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it….”

The idea that anyone can wear a white t-shirt, and everyone looks good in one, is the same as the idea that anyone can drink a Coke and everyone (ok, almost everyone) likes the taste. Fashion is all about perception and associations. What do we associate the White T-shirt with? White t-shirts on men is like the underwear as outerwear trend for women. Cool, so un-metrosexual it’s great, the white t-shirt is a non-statement piece that makes a statement, or if you prefer, the statement piece that doesn’t. Nobody would ever think that a man is wearing it because of any of the above, even after reading this article, but when they do, the effect will be almost lynx like.

Style is in attitude. What a cliché, but it really is true.

 On a final parting note, I wanted to highlight a few more pertinent facts vis-à-vis the plain t-shirt. First, if you stick to white or black t-shirts – a girl I was speaking to about this today even recommended grey – you are guaranteed never to make a fashion faux pas. What I hear? “Fashion is about being daring. About trying out new things, about being original”. Well guess what! Wearing a white t-shirt is daring and original but for some reason, it still gives the impression that you just don’t care. Why? Because you are not a brand or logo slave – you see P-Diddy and Ashton Kutcher with their t-shirts saying silly things like: ‘I’m a teenage Millionaire’, ‘Jesus loves me’ and ‘Gucci’ or to bring girls into this ‘J’adore Dior’, ‘Team Jolie’, ‘Team Anniston’, ‘My boyfriend is out of town’ and ‘I’ve got the golden ticket’. Do you really want to look like some other kid in Hollywood? I’m even bored of ‘I love NY t-shirts’.

Anyway, I don’t want to slate logo bearing t-shirts too much, because they can be quite nice, and certainly fun and facetious. All that I am saying is that simplicity never goes out of fashion, and there is something natural and therefore attractive about it. By the way, I am half joking when writing this lauding article of an item of clothing that so many men take for granted, but boys: if you don’t believe me about this whole white t-shirt thing, ask the first girl you see after you read this. I dare you.

STATE school heads have warned that new Oxford entrance tests discriminate against their students.
The Association of School and College Lecturers (ASCL) raised concerns that the introduction of tests place state school applicants at a disadvantage, since they are less likely to have received extra teaching than their private school counterparts.
The ASCL’s Secretary-General, Dr John Dunford, said, “The increase in entrance exams is particularly problematic for state schools. There would be an expectation that schools put on extra classes to prepare students, but that is difficult for schools that send only one or two pupils to Oxbridge a year.”
Dunford suggested that although the use of tests was reasonable for courses like Law and Medicine, for other subjects access to individual A-Level module scores was sufficient to differentiate between candidates.
Oxford introduced aptitude tests for those wanting to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) as well as English for the first time this year. There are already tests for other heavily subscribed courses including History, Law, Medicine, Maths and Physics.
The University denied that the tests were discriminatory, claiming that aptitude tests help make admissions fairer by measuring the ability of pupils regardless of the their educational background.
A spokesperson for the University said, “We can’t rectify the problems in the school system but we can try to help by disseminating information about the tests and making information about them readily and easily accessible to all.”
She added that practice tests were being made widely available by the University for applicants. “We encourage students to look at the web to familiarise themselves with the format of the text. You can download a test and attempt to tackle the paper.
“There is no particular way of approaching or answering the tests, and the idea is not to develop right or wrong answer but instead to test the potential of the applicant. There is no right or wrong approach which means you cannot be coached for these tests.”
The criticism comes on top of renewed pressure on Oxford and Cambridge to increase numbers of state school applicants. Oxford is set to miss its self-imposed state school admission targets for 2011.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which has recently criticised Oxford for what it claims is the under representation of state school pupils who achieve straight As at A-level, said that the usefulness of the tests would depend if they redressed the balance of state and private school admissions to the University.
Richard Darlington, media manager at IPPR, said the think tank would refrain from judgement until it became clear what impact the tests had on Oxford’s state school intake. “The jury is still out on them and we won’t know until we can analyse the impact they have,” he said. “What matters is whether these tests change the type of students who attend Oxbridge. We’re not prescriptive about the process but the university needs to be more proactive in attracting and admitting more state school applicants.”
OUSU has supported the tests on the basis that they assess aptitide only and help to distinguish between large numbers of candidates.
James Lamming, OUSU Vice President for Access and Academic Affairs, said, “The tests must meet careful criteria where there is a demonstrable need for the test to distinguish between large numbers of applicants and that the tests examine aptitude.
“This should benefit the most gifted students whatever their background as it will allow their academic potential rather than the quality of their education to stand out.”
He added, “If these tests are demonstrated to be a hurdle too many we will be concerned about their use, but we believe that the University has made every effort to ensure that its as easy as possible for every student to take the test.”