POLICE officers arrested a drunken man who violently attacked students at a Wadham house party on Iffley Road last Saturday night.
The man, who witnesses described as shaven headed and in his early 40s, broke into a neighbouring property at around 10:30pm before climbing a wall and throwing bricks at students.
The incident came after vandalism at a nearby Volkswagen car dealership at another Wadham party the night before, during which a windscreen was smashed and car rooves damaged when bottles were dropped from flats above.
One student, who wished not to be named, was threatened with an £80 fine after police officers on patrol caught him urinating onto a car in Charles Street.
Wadham second-year Charlotte Houldcroft said of Saturday night’s events, “There were four of us walking in a group down Cowley Road, and this guy, was by the roadworks. He’d moved one of the barriers across the footpath, and was pretty obviously drunk, incoherently laughing and mumbling.
“He made some joke to us, but we just moved the barrier back out of our way and walked on, thinking he’d just had a few too many as he didn’t seem threatening.”
James Neale, a first-year at Wadham, said, “We were all pretty drunk when a man appeared on the wall, and he was even more intoxicated than us,” Neale said. “He didn’t have particularly good dance moves so someone threw gravel at him, then bottles and cans, and that made him really angry.”
After a bottle struck the man on his temple, he threatened students with a brick he had found on the wall while staggering around dripping blood.
Police arrived after two first-year students called the emergency services, using a taser gun to subdue the man before placing him under arrest.
A police officer attending the scene suggested that it was unlikely anyone would press charges as there was a “mutual” confrontation between the man and students.
Neale added, “It was probably the students’ fault for starting it. We could have handled the situation a lot better than throwing shit at him.”By Peter Wright 

TROUBLED PPH Wycliffe Hall has come under further pressure after the Church of England announced this week that it had brought forward a scheduled inspection earlier than planned.
The Bishops’ Committee for Ministry is to carry out its inspection next October, three months before the original date of January 2009.
Wycliffe Hall’s Principal, Dr Richard Turnbull, denied suggestions that the inspection had been brought forward because of concerns about recent events at the Permanent Private Hall.
He claimed that the earlier date of inspection “allows the normal inspection of Wycliffe at the beginning of a wider inspection of the Anglican theological institutions in Oxford”. He added, “There is no urgent or rapid inspection since there is no need for such.”
Inspections at the Hall, a leading centre for evangelical training, normally occur every five years.
The PPH, which can present students with Oxford degrees in the same manner as colleges, has become mired in controversy surrounding its leadership.
Earlier this year, three former Principals called for the resignation of current Principal Richard Turnbull.
In September, a University panel concluded that Oxford’s seven PPHs were at risk of not providing a broad liberal education. Referring to Wycliffe, the report raised concerns that it did not offer an “an Oxford experience in its essentials” and was not “a suitable educational environment for the full intellectual development of young undergraduates”. It recommended that school-leavers be barred from going to Wycliffe to study for their undergraduate degrees.
Last month Council member Clare MacInnes resigned, and five other staff members have also left in the last year.
Louis Henderson, a spokesperson for the Church of England’s Communication Office, said that it was unlikely Wycliffe Hall would lose recognition from the Church, which would advise on management and how to rectify any weaknesses.
Henderson said, “If an institution is failing so seriously, appearing unable or unwilling to rectify the faults identified by the inspection, the Bishops’ Committee’s ultimate sanction is to recommend the House of Bishops, to which it reports, to withdraw recognition of the institution for training for ordination. This, I might add, is almost inconceivable, and certainly has never happened in my time.”By Mohsin Khan 

 Millie Maler, DPhil Candidate, AstrophysicsA third year graduate student at Christ Church reading for a DPhil in Astrophysics, last year Millie took astrophysics tutorials at Exeter College. In her spare time, she says, her favourite hobby is definitely baking cakes – closely followed by making mischief. For grey autumn days, she recommends this simple vegetable soup with rice.Vegetable Soup and Rice12 Tomatoes
3 Bell Peppers
2 cloves garlic
5 small onions
2 pints vegetable stock
50g rice
Handful of chopped basil
Small pot of creme fraiche1 Preheat oven to almost as hot as it will go
2 Rinse all the vegetables off under running water and peel the onions and the garlic.
3 Bake in the oven for about 15-20 mins or until all the vegetables have hints of brown all over them removed from the oven and put on the kettle, then stick it all in a blender
4 Add the chopped vegetables to a large pot on the stove top, put on Medium heat, add 2 pints of boiling chicken or vegetable stock. Add the rice and serveWineA good bottle of rosé will go well with this soup – as will a full bodied red. Try Tesco’s ‘Finest’ range – especially their Cote de Province reds.

Known for cringeworthy music, precarious outfits and floors sticky with the spilled vodka-cokes and lager of over-excited or over-drunk students, the bop is as much a part of Oxford life as libraries, boaties and the emergency hiding of Shisha pipes. Like it or loathe it, the bop looks to be one of those things which will not go away.

The name alone suggests that this is an institution which has been running for quite some time.  A quick search on that other Oxford staple, Wikipedia, reveals ‘bop’ as a “party or club night at many British universities” but I have yet to find a friend from another uni who uses the word.  We’ve all been there, ridiculed in our home towns for letting slip the word ‘bop’ in company.  “Bop?” they laugh, derisively, rolling the word around their mouths, “how…quaint.  Will there be ginger ale and a jive competition?”  And we laugh along, all the while cursing them as we explain that, in fact no, ‘bop’ is just a word for a college party and we really are very cool indeed.  Worse still is when mothers or more often grandmothers begin to smile distantly, their eyes glazing over in reminiscence of bops to which they were escorted back when the word ‘bop’ – as well as ‘yonder’, ‘thou’ and ‘ye’ – was still in common usage.  “Oh yes dear,” they say, their carpet slippers tapping away to a half remembered rhythm, “I remember I met your grandfather at a bop in the town hall.  He came straight up to me…I was a looker in those days, you know, everybody said so…and he asked me to dance and he took me by the hand and we did the lindy hop until nearly eleven when my father came to fetch me.”  And we nod along soberly, thanking our deity of choice that our bops aren’t like that and wondering what on earth the lindy hop might have been.
We have email these days and, sometime early in the term an email arrives containing the first bop theme.  Somewhere within the title the word ‘naughty’ appears.  Or perhaps ‘dirty’.  Or ‘undressed’.  Amongst these inevitable terms you find the actual theme and with it the realisation that you have absolutely nothing to wear. I mean literally having nothing suitable to wear, like Cinderella.

Once you have your theme, inventiveness is the key. Christmas bops, for example, bring out hoards of ‘Slutty Santas’, which, though I never complain too bitterly, were all overshadowed by a girl who came dressed as a present.  Resplendent in a large cardboard box, neatly wrapped and with a bow attached she may have struggled to get through the door and spent most of the night apologising for the way in which her outfit kept walking into people without her knowledge but at least she tried.  Take heed of her example: do not be tempted just to head for Primark or the Party Shop. Approach your bop costume as you would an exam paper: take a few moments to fully read the question and gather your thoughts before you dive in.  Try thinking outside the box…like going Back to School as a bike shed (illustrated).

Your costume, whatever it may be, should be designed and constructed with certain things in mind.  Firstly and most importantly you should not be over constricted.  Whilst dancing is not my forte and I have in fact spent most of my life thus far trying to avoid doing it in public – I am always tempted by the one-hand-clutching-an-ankle-and-the-other-behind-the-head-such-that-the-knee-and-elbow-meet-in-time-with-the-music move: always a crowd pleaser but for all the wrong reasons – but I once made the mistake of producing a costume with such limited arm movement that I could not get my drink to my lips without assistance. 

If you are inclined towards dance then you should curtail your drinking slightly to compensate. Funny to watch you may be, but your embarrassing antics will only be a source of frustration to your friends as they are forced to select photos to add to facebook, subsequently tagging and captioning them all. Also, be aware that whilst air guitar may be fun and, in some situations even cool, there is a time and a place, and in the middle of an ever-expanding circle of startled onlookers, YMCA pumping out of the speakers, is neither. 

When it all comes down to it though, most people at the bop will be just as drunk, badly-dressed, badly co-ordinated and, frankly, uncool-looking as you anyway and those who aren’t haven’t tried hard enough to pass judgement, so just get in there and have fun.

Let’s flashback a few years. Remember waiting anxiously for those A-level results to see if you’d ever get to punt on the Isis and have drinks at the K.A.?

Pretend, for a minute, that you hadn’t made the cut. How would you have felt about attending, as a substitute, a fictional university I call Oxford.net, right from the comfort of your own computer, where your loving parents could still feed you Sunday roast dinners? That option might not be far off, if developments on my side of the pond are any indication.

For years, we’ve been seeing educators take advantage of the Internet through articles and books published online. That was Internet 1.0, all about aggregating as much information as possible to make it easy for the reader looking for say…an essay answer on the French Revolution to find everything he needs.

Now we’re into Internet 2.0, all about connecting information in unpredictable ways. The best Web 2.0 ideas aren’t information collected for one audience, and Web 2.0 readers aren’t in search of information on specific topics in quite the same way.

Today, the best ideas are written and disseminated to a first audience online, on a blog like this one, and if they’re successful, they end up in everyone’s inboxes. The process is viral—you send this post to your friend, he posts it on his blog, someone reads it there and Googles my name and finds a You Tube video of me at the beach and maybe links back to my posting on You Tube, which might lead someone searching “beach” on You Tube, to this post about education.

The goal of Internet 2.0 is to spread information around, not collect it in one place. Which means the goal of Education 2.0 is to spread education to everyone, and not confine it to university campuses.

As I just described in my column , something like this is happening in the United States: U.C. Berkeley has just launched a YouTube channel , where I can learn from Berkeley professors, even though I’m not an enrolled student. MIT and Princeton are in feud over real estate for the campuses they’ve established in Second Life, a virtual world where users set up a persona, or avatar, who can then buy property, attend movies and interact with other avatars representing real people all around the world.

Professors from each of these schools interviewed in the press argue that the new technologies are more than cool gadgets for them: they are new ways of thinking about teaching, and they are changing the way students learn. you don't have to pay for Princeton to go to Princeton in Second Life. You don't have to get into Berkeley to simulate biology labs by video conference.

A tutorial system like Oxford’s would probably work even better online than an American university’s, where the emphasis is on putting students in classes together.
Reading and writing for tutorial essays is a solo task, and in tutorials, all you really need is your tutor. If digital libraries like Project Gutenberg are putting all your sources online, and your tutor has an avatar too (like the professors at MIT do), how many more young people would suddenly have access to an Oxford education?

This is education, of the highest caliber, universally accessible, yet without undermining the experience for the on-campus select and I think it’s just around the corner.

But is the experience good enough to replace university for a student who can’t afford it? Would you trade in Oxford for an online download? Would you send your children to Oxford.net? And if not, what do you make of the virtual experiments of American universities?

A bit better this. The originally-named satirical blog Satire Blog thinks the top dogs should rename Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport "Willy Brandt Airport", "Helmut Kohl Airport", or "Al-Qaida Airport. We'll chase you into the sky", according the decision makers' political stances. I'd say Frankfurt-Hahn Airport, which Ryanair fly to, should be renamed "Hahn Airport: Nowhere near Frankfurt", as that's where it is (3-4 hours by train in fact). And London Luton should just be "Luton", or perhaps "Inverness Luton".Back to political themes, anyone for "Heathrow Cameron Airport"? It changes its name depending on passengers' own preferences.Please post suggestions below. PS I have discovered that Germany has a whole blog dedicated to Wales . For some reason.
Cherwell 24 is not responsible for the content of external sites

People here go to funfairs, some people go twice a week. They look forward to it.
The whole af-fair (apologies) began when I exitted the classroom and walked into a semi-circle of giggly girls. Many of these females dye their hair blond and straighten it, so I have difficulty remembering who is who, and meeting three classes of thirty in three days doesn’t help. I walked directly into their trap, attracted by the welcoming smiles. A blond one asks me if I want to go to the “funny fair.” I agree.We walk together across town, and a brunette’s enthusiasm peaked when she discovered she was born on the same day as me, in the same year. Three boys joined us and they proceeded to kiss their girlfriends. A custom in Belgium is to frequently talk of your amoureux, it is even better if he is there with you, or if this is not possible, to show the language assistant innumerable photos of him.The fun fair attractions had the usual sinister neon lights and aggressive spray paint. I thought I might as well quit being such a cynical sissy and go whole hog, so I bought my ticket for the ride they’d picked, the most daunting one there (propelled into the air on a sort of levvy and twisted upside down in the process, stock fairground business). Before boarding, I ask the attendant whether I should take my boots off. This is when I began to have qualms.This man had a pot belly, a bushy moustache and bushy grey eyebrows. He was bald and had a very round head. He said, “are they your boots?” and I said “yes, but should I take them off?” He asked me again whether these boots belonged to me, so I asked again whether he thought they might fall off, and got the same reaction as before so I said just that, no, they weren’t mine so he grumbled and walked off. I strapped myself into my seat. The ride itself was terrifying. I kept flying about my seat and slipping because I’m quite puny. More often than not I was upside down, at least at level two of the Eiffel Tower. I was also thinking that I’d lose my giant pink hairclip. The whole time they played 80’s music on repeat and groaned incomprehensible words that bellowed out a megaphone. As I flew about above Liege I understood why the bushy man couldn’t answer me. He must have lost plenty of brain cells from flying about in his machine. Maybe that’s why Belgium doesn’t have a government at the moment. I still have my pink clip though. Lucky. And a blond-haired girl wondered if I wanted to go to the funny fair again today. I politely declined, along with a karaoke invite.

£3000 worth of computers were stolen from an office in South Bar, Banbury, on Monday night.Four Toshiba laptops, each costing around £800, were stolen from the premises. The burglars are thought to have entered via a rear window, which had been forced open.Police believe the raid may have been interrupted, as other computer equipment had been left behind.

Plans have been announced for a new exchange programme with a university in Taiwan. Earlier this month the President of the National Taiwan University , Lee Suc-chen, visited eight British and French universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, with the aim of promoting cooperative research.

The University of Oxford is said to be interested in work with the NTU on the subject of ‘Austronesian culture.’ A spokesman for the Taiwanese university said that it would be a major boost to send students to world famous institutions.

By Katherine Hall