Catholic society honoured controversial Cardinal with five course banquet
The Oxford University Catholic Society, the Newman society, has come under fire for inviting the controversial Cardinal George Pell to give this year’s St Thomas More Lecture. The lecture was followed by a drinks reception and five course black-tie dinner held in Cardinal Pell’s honour.
Pell was sentenced to six years in prison in 2019 over five counts of sexual abuse, before his convictions were quashed in 2020. The lecture discussed: “the Church’s suffering in our post-Christian society”.
The St Thomas More lecture is an annual event, which was inaugurated by Cardinal Pell himself when he was Archbishop of Sydney in 2009. The cardinal is an alumnus of the University, having graduated with a DPhil in 1971, and is a Patron of the Society.
The cardinal served as Archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, becoming a Cardinal in 2001. He was later appointed to be the first prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy for the Holy See. In this capacity, he was considered one of the more powerful figures in the Vatican. More broadly, he was known for his adherence to Church orthodoxy and his public debates with atheists and non-adherents.
In 2017, Pell was charged five sexual assault offences against children. One of these charges was dropped in 2018. The alleged sexual assaults took place when Pell was a priest and later an Bishop in Melbourne.
A jury found Pell guilty of five counts of sexual abuse in 2018, and he was sentenced to serve six years in prison. His first appeal with the Victoria Supreme Court was unsuccessful, before the Australian High Court unanimously voted to quash his conviction. The High Court said at the time that “Making full allowance for the advantages enjoyed by the jury, there is a significant possibility … that an innocent person has been convicted.”
Despite the acquittal, Pell continues to be a controversial figure in the modern Catholic church. The organiser of a protest against the Cardinal’s presence, who is also a practicing Catholic, says: “It is egregious that Cardinal Pell should be speaking about the suffering of the CHURCH when in 2017 Australia’s royal commission into child sexual abuse found that in 1973, “Cardinal Pell was not only conscious of child sexual abuse by clergy, but he also considered measures of avoiding situations which might provoke gossip about it.” This was only released last year because at the time the Cardinal was appealing his own conviction for child sexual abuse.”
The organiser told The Tablet that hosting Pell was “shockingly insensitive” and added: “Cardinal Pell was not only conscious of child sexual abuse by clergy, but he also considered measures of avoiding situations which might provoke gossip about it.”
In response, the President of the Newman society, Vincent Elvin, told Cherwell that: “The Newman Society and our members deplore the scourge of sexual abuse which has afflicted
Holy Church in recent decades” but that “As for those allegations which have not been subject to trial in the judicial system, the Society is unable to make its own judgement on these, but is instead guided by Holy Church. In particular, the reception of Cardinal Pell by the Holy Father in October 2020 is a sign for us of the good standing of the Cardinal within the Church.
“It is on the basis that Cardinal Pell has been exonerated, and received in good standing by members of the Hierarchy, that the Society is confident in its position to mirror those shepherds of the Church by welcoming the Cardinal and inviting him to give the St Thomas More Lecture.
“In the post-Christian society seen in this country and throughout the West, we find that many of the individuals who make up that sacred Body are indeed suffering for their faith. Cardinal Pell’s experiences are a particularly stark example, but ordinary Christians suffer in less obvious and less visible ways.”
Cardinal Pell has been approached for comment through the Vatican.
Image: Kerry Myers/CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Oxford’s first ‘hacker house’: For the RICH, by the RICH?
RICH – Rebellious, Intellectually Curious Hustlers. These are the people Jack Chong wanted to live with when he started looking for a house to rent during his final year of PPE. So he put out a manifesto for “the first hacker house for young startup founders in the entire United Kingdom”.
After spending a summer in San Francisco, Jack says he wanted to bring the culture from Silicon Valley to Oxford. And what exactly is that culture? According to his manifesto: “An Oxford education undermines intellectual curiosity. The ego is the enemy. Anyone with the prestige of Oxford (or Harvard, or Stanford) will likely care about who is right, not what is right. University education is meant to preach the radical pursuit of truth. It failed its purpose and now is at the risk of being unbundled. We want to be formidable by radically pursuing truth.”
And while you could be forgiven for mistaking parts of Jack’s programme for an excerpt from The Social Network, he and his flatmates are not just all talk. One of them, James O’Leary, has raised over £200,000 for his Non-Fungible Token (NFT) football manager game Footium. Speaking to Cherwell, James said: “Living with motivated people is a great catalyst for improving one’s own motivation, and I’ve found it to be useful so far. I truly believe that the RICH house is a great initiative for aggregating people of similar interests, [and] I think that the RICH house allows people who are passionate to connect with a network of people without having to fall at the barrier of formal credentialism.” Jack, who refers to himself as “Chief Meme Officer”, has built companies and products from education technology to drug testing AI software. He currently runs OX1 Incubator which awards more than £15,000 in equity-free grants annually to idea-stage startups.
The idea of “hacker houses” isn’t new. In San Francisco, home to tomorrow’s billion-dollar startups and tech founders in Patagonia vests, they’ve been an integral part of Bay Area entrepreneurism since the early 2000s. Inspired by a mix of curiosity and soaring housing prices, young builders are banding together in co-living spaces, working on collaborative startup projects and securing funding rounds well in excess of a million dollars, while hosting speaker events and think tank sessions on the weekends. Jack told me that living with other builders has allowed for great synergy: James inspired him to join a coding bootcamp and thanks to his other housemates’ extensive experience in cryptocurrency and quantitative finance, their kitchen table chats never get boring.
Do hacker houses make start-up culture more accessible? Or are they prone to creating exclusive spaces for the few that have the right connections and understand the latest tech buzzwords? Granted, both Jack and James went to elite private schools and the RICH house’s gender diversity score could probably be improved (like many of its counterparts in the United States, it has so far been exclusively inhabited by men). But speaking to Jack, I learned that everyone can be a Rebellious Intellectually Curious Hustler (RICH) with the right motivation, the right readings, and the right goals. He believes that “gatekeepers suck value out of a network” and assures you that even if you’re only a fresher, if you’re already working on cool projects, you will be as respected as anyone else in the house.
It’s easy to understand Jack’s frustration with the state of entrepreneurial culture at Oxford. At a university where one needs to obtain special permission just to take on a part-time job while students across the big pond are building the next Facebook or Uber, it’s not hard to agree with his manifesto claim: “Oxford is all about thinking and talking with no doing.” Sharing a living space with like-minded people could not only boost productivity, it also provides company in the lonely periods that every startup founder must go through. And if you’re a young builder yourself, maybe this is the sign you’ve been waiting for.
Great men on vacation: The reporting of Boris’ holiday
The objections to Boris Johnson’s recent holiday to a private villa on the Costa del Sol fall into two broad categories. The first are reasonable yet misguided; the second are completely unhelpful for the politically minded and contribute to a larger problem with political reporting.
On the first objection, the Daily Mail headline read ‘Boris Johnson quietly reveals Zac Goldsmith, the millionaire minister he made a peer, gave him and his family a summer holiday at £25,000-a-night Marbella estate for FREE‘ and, on the other side of the aisle, the Guardian’s headline was similar ‘Goldsmith family funded Boris Johnson’s Marbella holiday‘. They do have a point. The Johnson cabinet is, to use Kier Starmer’s words “wallowing in sleaze” and, more distressingly, they hope to solve this by going deeper into scandal, shoving through bills that curtail the power of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Kathryn Stone. Luckily, the Johnson administration backed down under public pressure, but Stone knows now that if she wants to dig deeper into Boris’ renovations, his Tory donor financed holiday to the Caribbean in 2019, or even Matt Hancock’s handling of government contracts, then her time is running out.
I doubt however that one of the many items on her hit list will be Johnson’s holiday to Costa del Sol. Boris gave out the peerage and role of environment secretary to Zac Goldsmith in late 2019 and Goldsmith was already a friend of his wife before this. Boris could not successfully plan the Christmas lockdown a week in advance, and I find it hard to believe he planned his holiday three years in advance and expended substantial political capital on it. This seems to me clearly like a case of nepotism informing a cabinet position and peerage placement. It is not a bribe-by-villa.
Coming to the second objection, I thought it was put clearest by Jason Moore from the Majorca Daily Bulletin, no doubt snubbed by Johnson’s choice of holiday location, who concluded that “if you feel the need for a holiday in the sun then perhaps you shouldn’t be PM”. Though not as crudely stated, this sentiment is also seen in the numerous headlines: ‘Boris Johnson goes on holiday to Marbella – but is the timing right?‘, ‘No 10 defends Boris Johnson’s holiday in Spain amid energy crisis‘, and ‘Boris Johnson ‘jets off for holiday in Marbella’ leaving behind UK in crisis‘. All these headlines question Johnson’s timing and contrast his holiday to the UK’s oil crisis, my favourite of which is The Mirror’s sassy headline ‘Boris Johnson leaves luxury holiday estate in Spain to finally return to crisis-hit UK.’ Of course, some defend his right to vacation, including a Daily Mail commentator who says that he must rest for the “mighty battles” ahead, which include such menaces as “overly expensive green schemes” and “illegal migration, especially across the channel”.
In my opinion, both sides make the same mistake here. They obsess over the leading man, either worrying that the holiday leaves us stranded or that it is necessary for him to rest before single-handedly facing the battles ahead. All of it leads to propping up the cult of personality that separates Boris from his party infrastructure. This is greatly appreciated by No. 10, who have obsessively insisted that Boris is always their commander in chief. If he is on holiday he is in “regular WhatsApp contact“, if he is lying in a hospital bed he “continues to lead“, and if he is in critical condition he will “be back at the helm in short order“.
All together it becomes quite a ghoulish use of the great-man theory and a thoroughly ill-conceived way of understanding government. The inadequacies in immigration policy, lorry driver pay, green energy funding, and fuel reserves that led to the crisis in question have little to do with Boris’ guiding hand and a lot to do with the last 20 years of governance. Moreover, if we are to look for immediate action, is Boris Johnson the only true voice of the people? Could we not press the Secretary for Energy, Greg Hands, or the numerous professional advisors surrounding him, or the many MPs elected by their district? Even when Boris returns these are the people who will affect, and often take, the decisions of the Government, and obsessively focusing on Boris lets him be the one-man army he wishes he was. No one should be too important to take a week off work, least of all Boris Johnson.
Image Credit: Arno Mikkor / CC BY 2.0
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Over a third of UK Government COP26 advisors associated with Oxbridge
The UK Government was advised by the “Friends of COP” during the last global climate summit. Over a third of the “Friends of COP” were associated with either Oxford or Cambridge, and over a quarter four attended Russell Group Universities for their studies.
The world’s summit on climate change, COP26, took place from 31st October to 12th November. It was hosted by the UK government and set in Glasgow. The UK Government has 30 advisors for the upcoming discussions, who “bring expertise from countries across six continents, including France, Barbados, Chad, Australia, India and Peru”.
Yet the group also showed a high number of individuals associated with the UK’s most prestigious universities. Over a third of the advisors were associated with Oxbridge, and over a quarter attended Russell Group universities for their studies.
The “Friends of COP” included at least six individuals associated with Oxford University: two Oxford Professors, Nathalie Seddon, Professor of Biodiversity and Peter G. Bruce, Professor of Materials; three Oxford alumni; and an advisor to Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute.
Six of the “Friends” were associated with Cambridge University: one Cambridge professor; four Cambridge alumni; and one honorary degree holder.
Nicholas Stern, author of the landmark ‘Stern report’ detailing the economic costs of climate change, attended both Oxford and Cambridge as a student. He has held professorships at Russell Group Universities Cambridge and Warwick, and is currently working at LSE.
The UK also appointed people to be part of its “Team”. Members of the Team included key figures like President of COP Alok Sharma, the “COP26 Unit” composed of strategists and organisational managers, and “COP26 ambassadors” composed of specialists in particular areas, e.g. gender or the Middle East and Africa. Of this team, at least a fifth attended either Oxford or Cambridge as students.
The dominance of Oxbridge alumni and associates in climate research is part of a larger imbalance in the field of climate science and politics. According to Carbon Brief, academics from the Global South are very underrepresented in the field of climate science, with only five African scientists included in the Reuters Hot List of the 1 000 most influential climate scientists.
The Climate Action Network (CAN), a group of more than 1 500 civil society organisations, warned that many delegates from the Global South may be unable to attend the COP26 due to the COVID related entry restrictions, such as vaccine requirements or the costs of quarantine hotels. They argued that the talks should be postponed to avoid the COP26 becoming a “rich nations stitch-up”. The UK Government offered to help with costs.
The information about place of study was obtained from the Public domain, primarily via LinkedIn.
Image credit: Jean-Luc Benazet on Unsplash
OUBbC: Oxford unpick keys and win the hallway dance as they waltz to victory
Oxford 92-68 Loughborough 4s
In a sports hall thronging with tens of people, the Equinox dance crew put on a halftime show. I know even less about dance than I do about basketball, so will not offer commentary on the routine. Yet, as they moved about in their various motions, I did think, “hm… I could do that… but that seems a bit cheap”. What I was thinking about was drawing some choreographic analogy with the game we were in the middle of.
But look, however crass this may be, I did see parallels. To be specific, I saw three. The most obvious and simple symmetry came from the middle part of the show. The performers stood in a semi circle and individuals came forward and did what looked like freestyle, to varying success. This was the climax of the routine and it was up to the individuals to make it worthwhile.
The game this performance bisected certainly depended on individuals to make it worthwhile. For Oxford, it came down to a holy trinity: Josh Soifer, Orin Varley and Alex Koukouravas. Between them, they scored 76 of Oxford’s 92 points.
Josh, as I have covered previously, is a player with a particular skillset. He’s a power forward and has all the strength and tenacity to merit the name. He’s Mr Inevitable. Every quarter begins with a quick Soifer two-pointer. Every missed three is met with a Soifer rebound. He also inevitably gets into foul trouble, and, inevitably, the resultant forced absences are much noticed. For those periods he is missed, Oxford lose that sense of security, that sense that a flying ball will be met by a flying 6’5” Canadian.
The thing about Josh is that he can’t shoot from far, or, at least, he doesn’t. His currency is rebounds and drives. Early in the first quarter, just as the teams were feeling out the rhythm of the game, he pulled off a drive to remember. Drives in basketball are both brutish and beautiful. And this where the second parallel with dance comes in.
The opposition ‘key’, the rectangular box below and in front of the hoop, is stuffed with opposition players, moving about at speed. A player that decides to drive to the basket has chosen a difficult three-second obstacle course. They must spin and feint and, yeah, dance their way through, unpicking that inscrutable morass. And once they’ve carved out the path, they jump and a defender jumps and in the air, they play chess. The shooter looks to pop it over the defender’s head but the defender starts moving his hand to block and the shooter instead, in an instant, moves his hand to one side and then the other and hits it round his opponent, and the chess match is over and the fate of the ball is up to the gods.
Up to the gods, yes. That is why the most hopeful of these shots are called ‘prayers’. But Josh’s shot was not a prayer—it was solid, and rehearsed. As it dropped in, I heard the loudest cheer I have heard at any of these games. I wish I had a photo of Josh’s face at that point. It contorted in such a passionate way that it’s hard to describe. The feeling-out-the-rhythm thing was over. The tone had been set.
So, that’s Josh. The value of Orin and Alex is a bit different. Yes, they can drive. But they can also shoot. And ‘can’ in both of those sentences is used in a high threshold sense. Orin probably had a better overall game. He’s the captain, but his leadership style is not rowdy or tough. The shout he leads of ‘1, 2, 3, Oxford!’ before each quarter sounds more comradely than rabble-rousing. This is a style I think I’m instinctively disposed to defend as it’s also the only one I’m personally capable of. But it does feel like the Oxford dressing room is a comfortable and welcoming place, and I think Orin has his part to play in that.
It also helps that he’s pretty good at basketball. He seems to always pick up points in a fairly steady way. But, as Akin Akinlabi—an up-and-coming player slowly and surely gaining himself more game time—says after the match, if we made a highlight reel for this game, it would all be Alex. Alex is the starting point guard. My basic understanding is that a ‘point guard’ is the pivot from which everything stems. They control the tempo of the game, and direct people to the right positions for various plays. And for a point guard, Alex sure does a lot of pointing. Yet at the same time, he’s popping up on the left, or the right, shooting a perfect three, or he’s driving round one, round two, round three. Some of the drives and shots on the bounce he managed on Wednesday were so creative. He was in the dancing mood.
You might have noticed that I don’t talk about defence very much. That’s because I don’t really understand it. Drives are a dance, but it does take two to tango. And here is parallel number three.
The weird acrobatics of these sequences is down to the weirdness of the defensive rules. Basically, neither player is really allowed to make contact with each other. I mean you can, but not properly, not forcefully. So, the result is that the defender is actively trying to prolong a version of the awkward-dance-when-trying-to-walk-past-someone-in-a-corridor. The attacker moves one way and the defender anticipates and copies. The attacker moves the other way, so does the defender. That’s why it’s so important for a defender to ‘beat him to the spot’, i.e. get in the way quick enough.
Defence is this strange, jittery samba. You’re constantly trying to anticipate your opponent’s movements, and you can’t be too far (or they’ll shoot), and you can’t be too close (or they’ll drive past). What’s funny is when an attacker successfully dribbles round you, you kind of just have to let them go—which means that when a drive unpicks a defence, the mass of players that looked so intimidating is transformed into a group of men sheepishly giving way to you.
I think for proper basketball people, this will all sound fairly inane. ‘Weird dance? What are you on about?’ I mean I’m meant to be learning, developing my understanding. They say that over time, I should start being able to know whether a shot is going from the moment it leaves a player’s hands. Reader, I’ve tried… but that’s still definitely not the case. They say I’ll probably build a connection with this team, and start caring about whether they win or lose. Reader, I have to admit I’m still more interested in the story than Oxford’s winning.
What I did notice, though, in this match, is that my focus on offence over defence is partly a sign of development. The Oxford attacks just seem to have more colour. Loughborough would come forward, and maybe they’d string some passes together, maybe they’d shoot a nice shot. But it all felt fairly routine—like they were getting points just to keep the game rolling on. When Oxford attack, I see characters and possibilities. I see Alex pointing, Orin shooting, and Josh flying in for the rebound.
Of course, there are two levels on which to process the story in these games. There is this one, where it’s slowed down, where basketball is this waltz of flying and footwork. And then there’s the bigger picture, the context. This was a cup game. Oxford have progressed to the next round. And although this is the Loughborough 4s, they really are a decent team, which tells you something about what Oxford are up against if they want to get back to winning Championship games against Loughborough 1s—like they used to a couple of decades ago. This was a tough game and probably Oxford’s best performance of the season. It takes them to a 6-0 record this season, which, as I said last week, is the best form in over a decade.
I don’t know on what level I will focus on the next match. It’s an away game at Brookes, whom Oxford narrowly beat a couple of weeks ago, but are expected to now be more in the flow of their season. Supposedly they have quite a few spectators at their games. Supposedly this will be the hardest game of the season so far. But I also suspect I will find myself gravitating back towards that other level of interpretation, where the physical is supreme, where Alex’s points are directing a dance routine, and where everything pauses as Josh crashes towards the hoop.
Image Credits: Oxford University Basketball Club
98% of surveyed Oxford University students vaccinated
Oxford University have reported that 98% of students who took part in a University survey have been vaccinated. 95% of students surveyed have had both doses, and 3% of students have only been partially vaccinated.
The response rate for the survey was 49.3%. The University also stated that “there were virtually no differences in vaccination rates between different colleges and departments”.
The survey was sent to all students of the University in the 3rd and 4th weeks of Michaelmas term.
The details of each student’s vaccination status was not passed to colleges or departments. Prior to the beginning of term, St Edmund Hall and Lincoln College asked students to voluntarily take part in college-wide vaccination surveys in order to help them respond to “potential outbreaks”.
Restrictions on isolation still exist. If you test positive for the virus, you must self-isolate for 10 full days. However, government restrictions on self-isolation for close contacts loosened in mid-August. If you are in the same household as someone who has tested positive, you must be fully vaccinated, under the age of 18 years and 6 months old, or not able to take the vaccine for medical reasons to avoid self-isolation.
A leftist critique of Oxford teacher strikes
In recent years, lecturer strikes have become something of a staple at Oxford, averaging about one strike per year for the duration of my studies and research so far. These strikes are typically over reasonable concerns about pay or pensions, although this is, of course, in the wider social contexts of academia being a relatively well-off occupation to begin with.
Whenever these strikes occur, there are three typical responses from the student body. Conservatives denounce the strikes as wasteful and harmful, leftists tend to uncritically support the strikes because striking is an important strategy of the labour movement, and the vast bulk of less politically engaged students tend to express a mixture of disinterested apathy, and frustration at being the ones primarily inconvenienced when they are not responsible for the issues that lecturers are striking about. This frustration is apt to discourage students from taking the strikes seriously, and even to push would-be allies away from supporting the strikes each time a new strike is called.
In this article, I intend to break ranks with my friends on the political left to offer a gentle and, hopefully, nuanced critique of the current form of these teacher strikes. I do not intend to criticise the notion of striking altogether – it is an essential tool of the worker for their own liberation. However, I do believe that a serious look at the current strategy around lecturer strikes in Oxford reveals that the present strategy is deeply flawed, exchanging long-term progress in favour of short-term and easily renounceable gains.
In order to understand why, we must recognise the contradictions that exist within a class analysis of the university organisation.
The current model of teacher strikes is based upon the recognition of class conflict between teachers, lecturers, and researchers, on the one hand, and the university as employer, including the various persons and organisations who profit from or have a stake in the university, on the other.
However, it neglects to recognise that the popular class in this university microcosm consists of more than just teachers, lecturers, and researchers, and, importantly, that this popular class in turn contains many contradictions.
On the one hand, we have the non-academic staff of the university, who, like the academic staff, must offer their bodies and time in wage-labour to the university. They have a proletarian relationship towards the university as their employer, but are separated from the academic staff by hierarchical and prestige-based relationships; as both academic staff and non-academic staff tend to see the academic staff as a class apart from their non-academic counterparts, the possibility of joint action against the university for the betterment of each is severely undermined.
On the other hand, there are the students. Students typically do not engage in relationships of wage-labour with the university, unless they act as lab assistants at some stage, and so it is not immediately apparent that they should be lumped with the popular class in contrast to the university as employer. Indeed, one could argue that students represent a kind of consumer, and therefore fall altogether outside of a dialectal class analysis of the university body. I would contest that such a view misses the material relations that hold between students and the university.
The university-as-employer holds a landlordly relationship to the students, who often depend upon university accommodation and facilities for their day-to-day living. This was a fact widely recognised by students during the previous heights of the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in rent strikes in various parts of the country. In addition, the student still finds the bulk of their day constrained by the demands of the university, and, given our current fee-paying system, students often find themselves financially exploited by the university institution – a result of the basic social fact that a degree is often essential to survival in our modern late capitalist society.
In this regard, we can see that the student does have a fundamentally antagonistic class relationship to the university-as-employer – perhaps not a proletarian relationship, but certainly a precariat and renter-dependent relationship.
Thus, we see that given a thorough analysis of the class relations at play, there is a serious possibility for unity and solidarity between the academic staff, non-academic staff, and students of the university.
It should be clear that should such solidarity be achieved, the concerns of each group would be amplified by alliance with the others. Would the teacher strikes not be more effective if students withheld fee-payments and rent until a settlement was reached? Would student rent-strikes and protests against ever-increasing student fees not be more effective if teachers and non-academic staff went on strike in solidarity? And would we not be able to achieve greater workers’ rights and a living wage for the non-academic staff of the university if students and teachers together were willing to take direct action in support of their cause?
However, it should also be clear that the present strategy for lecturer strikes does not foster any solidarity between the academic staff and these two other sectors of the popular class within the university microcosm.
When teachers strike on their own, nothing is done to help the non-academic staff of the university achieve a living wage. Is this not a slap in the face to those non-academic staff? When the teachers strike in such a way that the students are the ones who suffer most, having to continue to pay university fees whilst receiving insufficient tuition, is that not an insult to those very students?
By choosing to strike whenever they might lose some degree of privilege over the non-academic university staff, and to strike in such a way that the students – with whom they should have class solidarity – suffer more than the university which is the actual target of their strike, teachers drive a wedge between themselves and the other parts of the popular class in the university setting, undermining the possibility of class solidarity and exacerbating the contradictions that already exist.
This is made even worse by appeals to false solidarity. One the one hand, striking lecturers often demand solidarity from the students, shaming students who continue to pursue their studies as strike-breakers. Yet not once have I seen a teacher strike as a response to the burdens placed on students – either fee hikes or demanding rent in the face of a pandemic. Thus, the teachers demand solidarity from the students, while simultaneously utterly refusing to show any solidarity with the students when they are exploited.
We also see another kind of false solidarity with respect to the non-academic staff. When academic staff strike, they will often use rhetorical appeals to standing in solidarity with the more precarious and less privileged non-academic staff – however, an examination of who is participating in and leading the strikes, and who benefits from the demands made, readily demonstrate that this ‘solidarity’ does not, in fact, improve the situations of non-academic staff. It therefore constitutes more of a smoke-screen, trying to use the precarious and exploited position of the non-academic staff as a cover for industrial action primarily focussed on maintaining the privileges of the academic staff. Can anyone point to even a single way in which the material conditions of cleaners, porters, and the likes, have been improved by the repeated strike action of the academics over the past half-decade?
Here, again, the method of the teachers’ strikes undermines whatever solidarity could exist amongst the popular class; by using the non-academic staff as a smoke-screen and then discarding their interests when the academic staff’s self-serving demands are met, this rhetoric undermines any trust the non-academic staff may have in the teachers’ solidarity with them. It simultaneously appears to show such non-academic staff that industrial action that claims to support them does not materially improve their own condition, which in turn may lead such non-academic staff to move away from unionisation and industrial action altogether, further aiding and abetting the exploitation of the non-academic staff by the university.
This is a recipe for long-term failure. It encourages both students and non-academic staff to view teachers as entitled, placing their own self-serving interests ahead of the needs of others, rather than recognising that it is the university who is exploiting each group in its own way. As whatever solidarity may exist here is continuously eroded, the effectiveness of future strikes decreases, and the risk of serious strike-breaking backlash – particularly from the student body – increases proportionally.
What then is to be done?
The same as is always required when there exist contradictions within the popular class. Such contradictions must be negated – that is to say, we must find and build solidarity between these three parts of the popular class within the university microcosm.
As it is the teachers who are at present effectively unionised, and also the teachers who have done most to insult the solidarity of students or non-academic staff, it is the teachers who must take the lead. Those teachers who are unionised must encourage the non-academic staff to unionise themselves, with the promise that if the university or colleges attempt to fire any member of staff for unionising, as much of the academic staff as are unionised will strike until that individual who was fired is re-instated. Only with this threat of industrial action can the fears of those in more precipitous working conditions be alleviated, and thus, the opportunity to engage in worker organisation can move from a distant fantasy to a present reality.
Simultaneously, there must be a move to unionise the students. Once, the student union would have served this purpose, but it no longer has the militancy or reach to call rent strikes or similar actions from the student body. Thus, either the student union must be radicalised again, or else a new union must be founded with an explicit focus on student-led direct action. This is likely to be the most difficult part of building solidarity, as many students suffer from the false consciousness that a capitalist understanding of the university creates, seeing themselves only as consumers and failing to recognise the ways in which they, too, are exploited by the university, or the power that student action has – both historically and in the present day.
Once both non-academic staff and students are unionised as far as possible, it will be necessary for the academic staff to take the lead on building trust necessary for true solidarity. The academic staff must be willing to give up some part of their more privileged position in the class structure of the university microcosm by being willing to strike or take other industrial action in solidarity with the concerns raised by non-academic staff and/or unionised students, whether this be fair wages for non-academic staff, opposition to disproportionate rents, protest against fee increases, or any other such concern.
If the academic staff demonstrate this willingness to suffer in their own finances in order to stand in solidarity with students and non-academic staff, this will help cover over the distrust that the previous method of striking has sown between students and non-academic staff, on the one side, and teachers, on the other. It will necessarily foster a reciprocity in solidarity, and then teachers would be able to propose future industrial action in the reasonable confidence that, rather than presenting antagonistic opposition to their strike, students and non-academic staff would be willing to take action alongside the teachers to pressure the university for more immediate and substantive improvement.
This, then, is the substance of my criticism – the present mode of striking ignores the contradictions that presently exist within the popular classes in the microcosm of the university. Teachers expect solidarity from their students, and claim to stand in solidarity with non-academic staff. But they have offered no solidarity to students in return when the students have attempted to raise protest against the exploitative practices of the university, nor have they demanded serious material improvement for the non-academic staff. They continue to exacerbate and increase these contradictions.
So long as these contradictions exist, any industrial action taken by the academic staff constitutes a grasping for short-term gains at the cost of long-term class solidarity and, by extension, at the cost of more permanent advances.
The only thing that has ever secured long-term improvement for working people is a militant solidarity between the many parts of the popular class. Where solidarity is fostered, property-owners and employers must recognise the demands of the workers; where solidarity is undermined, power is returned to the propertied class.
As things are going, teachers can only look forward to a gradual erosion of support for their striking. While this erosion may be somewhat abated by the quick turn-over of students and the general uptick in public interest in leftist politics in recent years, it cannot be halted, so long as the present strategy persists.
However, if academic staff chose instead to put aside privilege and elitism, to recognise their class position and seek solidarity with students and non-academic staff, we could see genuine progress for all involved. A coalition of solidarity between students, teachers, and non-academic staff – especially one which challenges the inherent elitism of the university hierarchy and is based upon a horizontal organisation – could see the needs and demands of all three groups brought forcefully to the attention of the university, in such a way as the university cannot ignore.
I hope that the teachers and other academic staff of this university will see this article as an olive branch. We can work together. We can share solidarity for the betterment of all. We can unite the disparate popular classes of the university for the common good.
But if we are to do this, the academic staff must first be willing to demonstrate materially that they will give to us the solidarity that they demand from us, and they must be willing to use their own advanced position to engage their non-academic colleagues and students with unionisation efforts. Solidarity is not about the words you say, it is about the deeds you do.
If they will not, then all they are asking is that we should suffer more so that they, the most privileged of us all, may preserve their privilege still. Such is the unequivocal message of the current striking strategy.
Review: The Last 5 Years // Eglesfield Music Society
Eglesfield Musical Society brought to life the musical hit The Last Five Years at The Queen’s College on the 4th-6th of November. Written and composed by Jason Robert Brown, The Last Five Years is the story of Jamie, a rising novelist, and Cathy, an aspiring actress. As well as telling the story of the forming of a relationship and its subsequent breakdown, The Last Five Years is also centred around the theme of artistic struggle. Exploring what it means to be a person striving to be in the creative arts, the decision from EMS to do this show was perfectly timed as the arts sector begins to recover from the effects of the last few years.
As a show with only two characters, the use of four actors in this production was truly innovative. It was able to showcase their talent in the best possible way, highlighting the actors’ strengths while elevating the characters to a level above how they have been traditionally interpreted on stage. The casting was excellent: Harriet Nokes and Grace De Souza took on the role of Cathy, perfectly paired alongside Cormac Diamond and Dec Foster as Jamie. The storytelling of The Last Five Years means that it faces the risk of being confusing for the audience: Jamie tells his story chronologically whilst Cathy tells hers in reverse. This is why having such a strong cast was so important. By casting two actors as the same character, the opportunity was presented for the performers to bring a unique spark to the character whilst maintaining that they were ultimately the same person, even down to the smallest of mannerisms.
The sheer intensity of the show means that it is often vocally challenging, and in some moments, voices were strained. However, the visible presence of the band on stage made such a beautiful expression of music central to the production. The space on stage was therefore small, but at no time felt overly confined. The stage floor was scattered with torn book pages and lighting choices were fairly stripped back but were key for determining the mood of the scene. The use of set and props were certainly creative, the most memorable being how a story was told with a clock, and later used as a driving wheel – perhaps from this we can coin the term “clockography”.
There were whimsical moments that went further to adding to the characters’ likeability. The silliness of some scenes was warmly embraced, meaning that the audience could laugh along at ease. These snippets were carefully balanced in such an emotionally intense show, and it was clear that almost every execution of direction was meaningful. The director, Ollie Khurshid, told Cherwell: “Vocally and emotionally it’s hard. It’s quite hard to get it right, tonally, as well. It was a bit of a risk. And it was a risk to do something new with the casting. Changing any classic show is risky but that’s what makes people sit up in their chairs, it makes them reconsider what they are watching. Hopefully the risks paid off.”
I firmly believe that it was this risk taken that elevated the show to a level that is entirely unique. Captivating the audience’s attention throughout, this production revelled in the most magical aspects of live theatre. And oh, how marvellous it was to return to the passionate world of student theatre!
The meaning behind the show was at the forefront of Khurshid’s direction. Speaking to Cherwell, he emphasised just how this choice in production related to some themes of the pandemic: “It strikes me in particular how isolated the characters are in the show – all but two of the songs are effectively solo numbers. Moments of connection are rare, and what the show offers its audience is this mosaic of fragmented snapshots of Cathy and Jamie. It was this aspect of the show I wanted to play with in particular, splitting each character in two and juxtaposing these pieces of their story in new ways. So, this new staging, I hope, might encourage our audience to consider a little more what exactly they are watching, who’s story is being told, and how we compromise and negotiate our identity with ourselves and others. Perhaps that’s an interesting discussion to be having after this last year.”
This production was a masterpiece in the art of storytelling, setting a strong precedent the bright future of student theatre that will emerge out of the pandemic.
