The University of Oxford has paired up with UNESCO to launch a free global course titled “AI, Justice, and Rule of Law”. The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) will teach those in legal settings to navigate the ethical, legal, and human rights challenges of AI.
“AI, Justice and Rule of Law” aims to help legal professionals examine the use of AI in courts. In particular, the course provides guidance on practical knowledge and issues surrounding AI in courts and legal systems and has included an AI and Rule of Law Checklist. The course strengthens its students’ understanding of fairness, accountability, and transparency. The programme developed through interdisciplinary cooperation between UNESCO and Oxford has brought together expertise in the form of academics as well as international competency frameworks. The Blavatnik School of Government, Saïd Business School, and the Faculty of Law used the Guidelines for the Use of AI in Courts and Tribunals, to support more informed decision-making in legal and public institutions.
Ignacio Cofone, Professor of Law and Regulation of AI in the Faculty of Law, told Cherwell: “We designed this course so that legal and public-sector professionals can … not just understand how AI systems work technically, but work through the harder questions about when AI affects rights, who is accountable, and what safeguards should be in place.”
With the rapid development of AI, the course has been specifically designed to be updated over time. The University holds the course’s master files meaning that content can be reviewed and refreshed as AI and its surrounding legal debates evolve. The new course comes in the wake of Oxford becoming the first UK university to offer ChatGPT Edu to all its students.
As Philippa Webb, Professor of Public International Law at the Blavatnik School of Government told Cherwell, “We share the most promising practices and pitfalls to avoid through this course.” The course is currently available in English, with French and Spanish versions to launch in June. Further discussions to expand the course into additional languages are taking place by the University.
When a Princeton student got into the University of Oxford’s visiting student programme at Worcester College, one of their first concerns wasn’t about housing or tutorials – but money. “At first, I wasn’t sure how much exactly Princeton would cover”, the student told Cherwell. “You have to make a budget proposal to them, itemising expenses like tuition, room, and board for your study abroad program”.
“Thankfully”, the student told Cherwell, they could afford it. “They actually gave me more than I needed”.
Unlike course fees paid by matriculated students – centralised by the University at £9,790 for home students and between £37,380 and £62,820 for overseas students – visiting student fees are determined independently by colleges. According to Freedom of Information requests by Cherwell, at least 24 colleges offer places for visiting students, five more than the 18 listed on the University’s website, which notes that the information is “indicative only” and “subject to change”.
As of 1st December 2025, 585 students were listed as “visiting, recognised or other” under the Visiting Non-Matriculated Programme, about 2% of Oxford’s total enrollment. Students with this status can attend lectures and use university libraries, and have full privileges at the colleges they attend, including joining the JCR.
Programmes offered
Many of Oxford’s visiting students come from direct partnerships or memoranda of understanding with other universities. Worcester, for example, has direct partnerships with Harvard, Princeton, Swarthmore, and Wellesley.
Most partnerships are with private American institutions, including Ivy League universities such as Yale and Dartmouth, and liberal arts colleges such as Sarah Lawrence College and Williams College – schools where the total cost of attendance can exceed $98,000. A few American public universities also have partnerships with colleges, alongside universities outside the United States, such as Tsinghua University and the University of Hong Kong. Some universities, like Sciences Po, also have partnerships with the University itself or affiliated departments, which assign colleges later.
For students whose home institutions lack direct partnerships with Oxford, the only opportunity to enrol as a visiting student is through a study abroad provider. For North American students, three main providers operate in Oxford: Arcadia Abroad, Institute for Study Abroad (IFSA), and Oxford Study Abroad Programme (OSAP).
Both Arcadia and IFSA offer placements at Herford, Lady Margaret Hall, Mansfield, St Anne’s, St Catherine’s, St Edmund Hall, and Worcester, while IFSA also offers additional placements at Regent’s Park and St Hilda’s. OSAP has partnerships with Magdalen and New, alongside “associate member” options at New, Oriel, and Trinity.
The Oxford Prospects Programme, meanwhile, offers year-long visiting student programmes for students from Chinese universities at Blackfriars, Mansfield, Pembroke, Regent’s Park, St. Anne’s, St. Peter’s, and Worcester.
Visiting students – both those from direct partnerships and study abroad providers – stay in Oxford for varying amounts of time, either for one or two terms or the full year. Hertford, Lady Margaret Hall, and St Anne’s also offer extended fall programmes that begin in September to align with some universities’ semester systems.
Among all 23 colleges with visiting students, the number varies. In 2025, St Catherine’s had the most visiting students listed with 55, or about 5% of the college’s total enrolment, having hosted 366 total visiting students since 2021. Corpus Christi, on the other hand, offers the fewest places: just one student per year from the University of Missouri.
Cost of attendance
In general, visiting student fees – for students coming from direct partnerships – are broadly comparable to overseas fees, which range from £37,380 to £62,820 in tuition costs. However, the cost of attendance varies by college, subject, and home institution.
For instance, some colleges, like St Edmund Hall, adjust fees on subjects, charging students between £50,391 and £63,381 per year, including food and accommodation. Other colleges have a flat fee regardless of course, such as Mansfield, which charges students £46,000 per year.
There is no central register of what colleges charge. The University’s website notes that “fees are set and published by each individual college”, and many direct partnerships involve their own financial agreements. Several colleges withheld fee arrangements from Cherwell under Section 43(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, citing commercial sensitivity, meaning the cost of some programmes is not available through legal disclosure.
Still, a student’s financial situation might affect actual costs. St Edmund Hall, for instance, offers a scholarship fund for American students and one for students from UNC-Chapel Hill. Students may also receive additional funding from their home institution.
For example, the Princeton student at Worcester told Cherwell that Princeton – where they are on full financial aid – covered all tuition and accommodation costs, as well as an additional stipend for living costs. “I was surprised by the leeway they gave me”, the student told Cherwell, though the student added they are “not sure if they do this for all students on full financial aid”.
For visiting students enrolling through a third-party provider, the costs are higher still.
At both Arcadia and IFSA, the fees paid differ both by college and the program. For instance, the total programme fee at Arcadia ranges from $73,995 at Mansfield to $87,995 at Worcester. IFSA, meanwhile, ranges in price from $69,095 at Regent’s Park to $81,085 at Worcester, with premedical students at St Anne’s paying $90,505.
The breakdown of fees into tuition, food, and accommodation also varies among colleges. For example, Arcadia students at Mansfield pay $53,705 in tuition and $20,290 in food and accommodation, while the same visiting students at Worcester pay $77,155 in tuition and $10,840 in food and accommodation. Among all colleges with Arcadia and IFSA programmes, tuition fees range from $49,850 to $78,645, while food and accommodation fees range from $7,790 to $20,375.
For both Arcadia and IFSA visiting students, the price remains higher than direct partnerships or applications to Oxford. For example, Mansfield costs $73,995 for Arcadia students and $70,225 for IFSA students. Converted to roughly £54,200 and £51,500, the price is more than what regular visiting students at Mansfield pay, set at £46,000 per year.
OSAP’s fees are higher again. Registered visiting students pay $89,400 per year, with an additional $6,000 surcharge for certain STEM subjects. Even associate members – who have fewer privileges – pay $23,700 per term, leading to a yearly cost of $71,100.
For visiting students coming through third-party services, one reason for the higher cost is the additional support and opportunities the organisations provide. For example, a spokesperson for IFSA told Cherwell that “all IFSA students receive a bespoke 3-day orientation from IFSA in Oxford” alongside other benefits, like health and safety support, private insurance, an IFSA staff member in Oxford, and the transfer of academic credit.
One visiting student who enrolled in Oxford through IFSA told Cherwell that financial arrangements have been “fairly straightforward” with IFSA acting as “a middleman”. “I can imagine how, if I were dealing with this directly through Worcester, I would be incredibly frustrated.” The student added, “since they have made it so difficult to get anything done”.
Total revenue
Across colleges that disclosed figures in response to Cherwell’s Freedom of Information requests, visiting student fees have generated substantial and growing income.
St Catherine’s collected more income from visiting student tuition fees than any other disclosing college, earning £5,050,436 from 2021 to 2025. During the same period, Mansfield took in £4,292,528, while Pembroke collected £2,483,222.
Income collected from visiting student fees has also grown at several colleges over the last few years. For instance, St Peter’s earned £233,101 from visiting student fees during the 2021-22 academic year, compared to £573,760 in 2024-25. Meanwhile, St Hilda’s income rose from £200,292 in 2023-24 to £500,730 in 2024-25 – a roughly 150% increase.
Across the twelve colleges that disclosed figures, the total income from visiting student tuition fees from 2021 to 2025 amounted to £26,474,583. As a number of colleges withheld total figures, this figure likely underestimates the actual amount earned by Oxford colleges.
Still, one visiting student from a European university told Cherwell they found the fees they were paying their college “disproportionately high”. “I find it lamentable”, they added, “how visiting students have … contracts which are clearly motivated by colleges’ interest to earn more money”.
What’s stuffier than a perfume shop and more packed than a Lego Store on opening day? It’s the Burton Taylor Studio, and no less so than during the sold out run of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (5th-9th May). In this debut show by Postbox Productions, we are transported to a rundown boarding house where marital dispute, mental torture, and birthday games come together to create a disturbing yet humorous play.
Pinter’s play poses quite the challenge, and directors Marnie Frankel and Lois Avery are scrupulous in every detail (I should know, one of them sat next to me and filled what seemed like half a book with notes on the opening night). The audience is constantly teased with contradictory information. Is it a birthday party? Who is Stanley (Rufus Shutter)? And how Cockney can Goldberg (Will Hamp) go? And, though quite conservative in terms of design, the acting truly brings out the gifts of this play.
The opening brings a convincingly dishevelled Meg (Cait Kremenstein), whose voice and mannerisms are a consistent highlight of the night, fussing over breakfast for her rather resigned husband Petey (Charlie Heath) and Stanley, the sole boarder. Kremenstein, Heath, and Shutter have a lovely dynamic on stage, with subtle changes of tone and character. Humour litters the play, from the hilarious reveal of the trapdoor-cupboard at the start to Meg’s flirty attitude towards Stanley, and the cast allow the energy of these moments to lift up the darker undertones of the play.
Yet things change for Stanley when Goldberg and McCann (Seb Foster) turn up to stay and join Meg in organising his birthday party – but is it actually his birthday? Hamp and Foster offer a wonderful good cop, bad cop duo that is hilarious to watch on stage and blends the serious with the absurd (“All the same, give me a blow!”). Their torrent of lines as they intimidate Stanley serves a good number of gags and their timing is (for the most part) slick. Watching their complete change in manner, demeanour, and accent when dealing with Meg compared to Stanley gives a much-needed release of tension during the play’s darker moments. The pounding of the drum as they circle Stanley like vultures and the quiet intimidation of Petey had me on edge. Trapped inside the tight arms of the BT, you couldn’t escape the tension (or the noise!), but the directors ensure a good balance throughout.
The most well-produced moment of the show was the birthday party itself, where the cast play a thrilling game of Blind Man’s Buff. Lulu (Amelie Rosner), a neighbour of the boarding house, is allowed to shine in this section with her loveably clueless character mirroring the confused state of the audience. The quietness of this scene, as in turn each of the characters is forced to stumble around the stage, was punctured by Lulu’s scream at the end as Stanley attempts to rape her on the table. A harrowing and deeply disturbing moment, the cast handle it exceptionally well.
Nearing the end of the show, and practically sweltering in my jumper (did I mention the heat!?), we watch as Petey gives up a short-lived fight as Stanley is carried away. Quite why and how is for the audience to guess, as is the nature of every character in the play. The reserved character of Petey, the stoney-faced Stanley, the relentlessly positive Meg: all the characters in The Birthday Party are fascinating to watch and analyse, stuck in their sad story. Pinter’s play makes no attempt to glamourise this life, nor provide anyone to sympathise with, rather, one must simply enjoy the absurdity of the play.
One final conversation between Meg and Petey, who now live in a house with no borders, offers a bleak prospect at the end of the play, now devoid of humour. Heath’s impassive Petey contrasts with Kremenstein’s sentimental and unloved Meg at this moment, and it is with Meg’s wistful “I know I was” that we end the show, wishing that we knew anything as certainly as Meg.
Though it messed with my sense of reality, it was a very well assembled production, and the cast offered a promising selection of new Oxford talent. All in all, I am sure this is not the last we have heard of Postbox Productions.
One of the finest traditions of Oxford drama is the summer garden play. Freeing the frenetic energy of the dramatic societies from the limited rehearsal spaces and platforms of Michaelmas and Hillary, Trinity sees the many green spaces of Oxford overcome by hectic preparations for garden plays, as directors experiment with the challenges of performing in an unusual space. With such a proliferation of performances, it also presents the chance for enterprising directors and productions to venture beyond their regular fare and explore less well-known, but potentially no less entertaining, stories.
This year’s Hertford-Mansfield Garden Play was a production of Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, co-written with John Fletcher which was the Bard’s last work before his death in 1616, though it did not appear in print until 1634. It wasreasonably well-known in its time, but has since faded into relative obscurity, only performed rarely and less well-known than its source work, The Knight’s Tale in Geoffery Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. For the sake of the reader, I’ll briefly explain the plot: Theseus, of minotaur slaying fame, is begged by three widowed Queens to intercede against the king of neighbouring Thebes. Theseus concedes, and goes to war, in the process capturing the King of Thebes’ nephews, Arcite and Palamon. All their brave talk of fraternal unity in the face of prison vanishes when they see Hippolyta’s sister, Emilia, and both immediately compete for her affection.
Eventually, all is resolved in a rather tragicomic fashion, but it is rather unlike most Shakespeare in that even in those plays that do tread the line between tragedy and comedy, few slip between the two as frequently as Two Noble Kinsmen. Its opening scene appears to set the play up as a tragedy, whilst its middle section better resembles a comedy; in a Lynchian fashion, after the play’s tragic ending, Morris dancers (who appear earlier in the play) return and do a merry jig. The comedy fits the Mansfield gardens, where the play was performed next to the hulking shadow of the Vere Hamsworth, well. Likewise, the challenging lighting situation, with the gentle afternoon sun of the opening fading into dark sky by the end, lent itself to the tragic development of the play, with the stark white lights used producing stark, dramatic shadows against the bare stone.
This production itself is the work of director Annabelle Higgins and producer Richard Morris, with two choral pieces composed specially for the play courtesy of Owen Robinson. The music does make the play, from its earlier Midsummer Night’s Dream-like feel of fancy to the low, ethereal and deeply unsettling humming from behind the audience as the play reaches its devastating conclusion. Select performances also deserve special mention, amidst the general success of the cast and crew; the eponymous kinsmen, Arcite and Palamon, are played with great flair and distinction. Palamon captures, as Emilia describes, a love-struck morbidity and obsession, whilst Archite’s focus on victory is clearly communicated through clipped tones and a contemplative countenance. Emilia is also exceptionally wellplayed, with several monologues that carefully balance expressing emotion whilst not forgoing the audience’s need to hear what’s being performed.
A few minor flubs occurred, actors missing a few lines and a malfunctioning light set just behind my shoulder. However, with the brevity of time afforded to garden play actors, this shouldn’t be held against them – it is a well performed play given its limited budget, space and time. Performing a lesser-known Shakespeare work was a bold directorial choice, and one that paid off. Equally impressive is the sizable, late run time, with actors performing from 7:30pm until almost 10pm for three days in a row, including a matinee performance on Saturday 9th May.
There is something quietly disarming about the way Meghan Campbell traces her path to becoming one of Britain’s foremost human rights lawyers. You might expect a story steeped in early idealism, perhaps a childhood injustice, a formative mentor, or a precocious sense of vocation. Instead, she laughs and says it was television.
“I watched a lot of Law and Order one summer and thought the lawyers looked really cool”, Campbell tells me. “I’m like, well, that sounds fun. I think I could do that. So really, it was Law and Order, not To Kill a Mockingbird.” She had written the latter on her university application forms, admitting that “it sounded like the right answer”, but the truth is rather more honest, and rather more human.
Campbell is a Reader in International Human Rights Law at the University of Birmingham, where her research centres on women’s economic inequality: the structural, legal, and political forces that keep women poor. Her two monographs, Women, Poverty, Equality (2018) and the recently published Hanging in the Balance (2025), have established her as a leading voice in the field. She has advised the International Labour Organisation, the World Health Organisation, the Council of Europe, and the UK Cabinet Office. She is the Deputy Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub and hosts their RightsUp podcast. She is, by any measure, formidably accomplished.
Campbell grew up in Canada, raised by parents who wanted her to be a pharmacist, thinking it would be a better route to economic security. She had other ideas: “I didn’t love math and science as much as I loved the idea of getting to play around with words and construct an argument and figure out how to be persuasive. That was very, very appealing to me.” After graduating from the University of Manitoba, the only law school in the province, Campbell completed her articling year with the Manitoba government and was called to the bar. She then worked as a criminal barrister, putting in 15 or 16 trials. She went to the Court of Appeal. She wore the robes. She stood in a beautiful old building and argued a sentencing appeal for a sexual assault case, and she loved every second of it.
“It’s very thrilling to cross-examine somebody, to put a witness on the stand”, Campbell tells me. “After you’ve done it, you feel like you could just jog up and down Everest, such a high.” As a Junior Crown attorney, she was carrying five or six hundred files at a time – DUIs, house party assaults, drug offences – learning how to read a case, how to negotiate, how to build an argument from almost nothing. The technical rigour of DUI cases alone, she says, was excellent training: strict rules around self-incriminating evidence, precise timelines, no margin for error. “It’s a very good area to practise because you have to make sure you’re getting your ducks in a row.”
The criminal bar gave her something else, too: a set of questions she couldn’t stop turning over. She could see, from inside the system, how structurally incapable it was of addressing the things that actually troubled her. Criminal law sees each case as an individual event: did this person commit this offence? It cannot look up and ask the harder question. Why is it always trans women being murdered? Why, in Canada, is it always indigenous women?
“The criminal law isn’t meant to solve those larger societal patterns about why certain types of women are more vulnerable to violence”, she says: “And there’s still quite strong critique that the criminal law system revictimises victims of violence because its processes are not victim-centred. When you put a criminal trial in, it’s the Crown that puts the case in. The victim, they’re not in charge of how their story gets told.”
Campbell was 23 years old. She told her boss she was going abroad for a year to Edinburgh, for a master’s, and would come back. They held her job. Instead, halfway through her master’s, she decided to apply for a doctorate at Oxford. She went for it, she says, because “you only live once, take the big swing, see what happens”. Many months later, they said, you are accepted: “I was like, what now? I could not and I still cannot fathom why.” She was baffled by the college system (“they all look the same to me”), and ended up at Pembroke entirely by chance. The next several years of her life were dedicated to trying to answer the question that had been gnawing at her since that junior posting in Winnipeg: why are women so disproportionately poor? And what, if anything, could international law do about it?
Her doctoral research, which became her first book, focused on the UN Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). It is, she explains, the leading international legal instrument on women’s rights, ratified by 189 countries. And it says almost nothing about poverty. “There’s no kind of obligation on states to tackle the gender dimensions of women’s economic deprivation”, she explains: “And so, obviously, that’s a massive source of rights violations. If you are a woman who is poor, it’s almost inherent that your rights are going to be violated.”
The examples she reaches for tend to be both simple and quietly devastating. In the UK, before 1946, when a couple received social welfare benefits, the payment went directly into the man’s bank account. If the relationship was abusive or simply unequal, the woman might never see that money. “The way the law is structured, the delivery of benefits perpetuates women’s economic dependence on men. Those are the state’s structures that are keeping women poor.”
Take the care economy. Most unpaid care of children, of the elderly, of whoever needs looking after at home, is still performed by women. That work takes time and energy. It limits the hours available for paid employment, the ability to develop skills, and the capacity to take economic opportunities as they arise. And almost every benefit system in the world, she argues, is built around a model that simply does not see this. “What it recognises as work tends to ignore the things that women do as actual work every day. That’s incredibly demanding of their time and energy.” She explains that women are told that they have to find work in the formal market, but when they explain they are burnt out from all the unpaid care work at home, caring for children, parents, in-laws, they are told “that is not work”.
CEDAW, she concludes, does important work. It is progressive, wide-ranging, it even addresses climate change, noting that when disaster decimates public services, it is women who absorb the unpaid care work the state can no longer provide. But Campbell believes that it could be bolder. She says it needs to tell governments: “Your benefit levels are just too low. This is not enough money.”
Through our conversation, the current political climate lurks constantly in the back of our minds. Trump’s second term. Farage in ascendance. ‘Gender-critical’ campaigns spreading across Western Europe and North America. Campbell does not minimise any of this. But she also does not panic, which is either a sign of deep faith in the long game or of habitual sangfroid, or possibly both.
The systems, she acknowledges, are struggling. International institutions were built on the assumption that all states were operating in good faith, committed to a shared cosmopolitan ethos. “If you have actors who are now hostile to those systems”, she says, “it becomes very challenging, because the remedial tools these organisations have are often quite soft.” The UN can express concern. The Council of Europe can make recommendations. Neither can compel.
Yet, if right-wing groups are working actively to defund and delegitimise these bodies, she points out, it must mean they perceive some threat in them. “If they were completely irrelevant, you would just ignore them. Law is not a perfect answer. It’s not the total solution. Looking to the law to solve all the problems of inequality will make people frustrated. But it’s a very powerful tool.”
The work being done by the manosphere, the ecosystem of online figures and movements trading in hyper-traditional gender norms, is, she agrees, its own kind of threat. She has been researching comprehensive sexuality education, which is one of the arenas where this reaction is most visible: campaigns to roll back curricula that teach gender diversity, that tell girls their sexual pleasure matters, that dismantle the idea that men and women are fixed and opposite types.
“These norms that men in the manosphere are articulating might not seem connected to your day-to-day life”, she says, “but they create an enabling environment that legitimises retrogressive and conservative policies. These larger cultural norms are filtering into all different parts of our lives, and they will start to be reflected back in laws and policies”. She is not, she is careful to add, suggesting that engagement is the answer. Quite the opposite. “Not everyone is going to be rewriting constitutions. But you have the power to not engage, to stand up to these things when you see them happen in everyday life. And that’s all part of a larger project.”
Campbell quotes something Carol Sanger, a scholar of American abortion law, said on the podcast RightsUp, which Campbell hosts for the Oxford Human Rights Hub. The point of anti-abortion laws, Sanger told her – the waiting periods, the parental consent requirements, and the mandated heartbeat screenings – “is to make you feel ashamed that you got pregnant”. Campbell pauses: “That line just made me really rethink: if we had shame-free abortion laws, it would give so much autonomy and decision-making to women.” Then, more quietly: “But for most people, they don’t live under that kind of law.”
This is what the Oxford Human Rights Hub exists to do. It takes the gap between what the law says and what it actually does to people’s lives and holds it up to the light. Blogs, podcasts, journal articles, documentary films: all freely available, all rigorous. “Universities are not well funded, and access to journal subscriptions is so expensive. We can create free resources for people who can’t afford access to them. But at the highest quality. Asking the hardest questions.” The Hub’s podcast was built on a specific frustration: that headlines about landmark cases tell you what happened and nothing about what it means. “People love podcasts, and they have time for podcasts,” she says. “Academia has sometimes snobbery around which mediums are the right mediums, where real scholarship lives. I don’t want to get bound up in those debates. Real scholarship is not just one format.”
But asking the hardest questions means sitting with hard answers. Working in human rights, particularly on women’s poverty, is taxing. After a hard day, Campbell does the things anyone does: spends time with friends, gardening, wine bars, working out. She gets angry. She talks it through. She tries to figure out how to make things better. “You recognise it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Women have been fighting for their equality for a really long time. You’re part of that chain, like a baton race. It’s not your job to solve it completely. But it’s your job to keep trying to push the baton forward.” She says it without grandiosity. The way you might, if you had spent 20 years actually doing the running.
You return to your college at night, after anything between a day of work and an evening of cavorting. The view admits the welcoming glow of the porter’s lodge and the reassuring presence of a porter behind the reception desk. Past the gates, you enter the secluded safety of the inner-college dark, smelling now of grass and early summer cold. The perfect picture of an Oxford homecoming.
Late one evening, I paid a visit to John, Somerville College’s night porter of 19 years. As he let me through the gate, he was curious about the article. “We don’t get much attention, us night porters”, he explained. The warmth of the lodge fanned my face. His colleague was out patrolling the premises. Between the two of them, they are responsible for everyone on site from eleven at night to seven in the morning. The students, engrossed by their term-time miseries, appreciate their presence only occasionally: when they stumble into the lodge bleary, intoxicated, tearful, or lacking keys. For many, the night lodge exists as a background certainty, noticed chiefly in moments of crisis, vulnerability, or inconvenience.
Most Oxford colleges and accommodation sites have porters on duty around the clock. Since March 2025, every college with a porter’s lodge manned overnight is in the University’s Safe Lodge scheme, providing support and ensuring safe return for any student seeking help at night, regardless of their original college. So for a majority of college residents, 24/7 lodge availability is a matter of course. Colleges like Somerville, Hertford, and Oriel employ permanent night porters, while at others, porters work variable hours on a rotating day-or-night shift system. St John’s College told Cherwell that the College recently updated shift arrangements to a three-on/three-off rota pattern, following feedback from the lodge team. This is to ensure porters have structured rest periods and sufficient time to adjust and recover from nocturnal work.
Overnight staffing is neither universal nor standardised across colleges. Working hours vary, and pay is not centrally regulated by the University, in a city currently ranked amongst the most expensive in the UK to live in. Some lodges see eight to nine-hour night shifts, which John at Somerville describes as relatively comfortable compared to his previous employment, as compared to the weekly twelve-hour shift rotations at colleges like St John’s and Worcester. A number of colleges offer porters a Grade 3 to 4 salary, some with an additional monthly night workers’ allowance. Regent’s Park College, which employs casual evening porters on select days of the week, lists in 2025 hourly portering rates of £12.60 (lower than the 2025-26 Oxford Living Wage, at £13.16) with holiday pay and meal allowance. The college’s night porters are available from Wednesday to Saturday, with junior Deans on call on the remaining nights of the week. When asked about the particulars of the night security system, the College declined to comment. These disparities reflect a broader feature of Oxford’s collegiate structure: welfare and security systems often depend on the budgets and priorities of individual colleges.
What happens in a night? A shift at the lodge involves more than dealing with late-night mischief and drunken mishaps, and tending to students who have accidentally locked themselves out of their own rooms. The role combines security work, customer service, emergency response, and informal welfare provision. Night porters are first responders to any emergencies that arise, from fire and security alarms, to medical emergencies, calls for assistance, and emotional distress. First-aid training is usually mandatory or provided by the college. Front-of-house business proceeds as during the day, for any student or guest arrivals. Like John and his colleague at Somerville, night porters working in pairs take turns carrying out random security patrols, though for his first 13 years, John was the College’s only night porter. Some night porters are also asked to clear litter while doing site checks. Inside the lodge, they are vigilant of anything out of the ordinary as they monitor the CCTV screens.
Students often most clearly notice the integral role of night porters when they are no longer there. After University College removed its overnight lodge staffing on the grounds of financial limitations in the 2021-22 academic year, JCR condemnation and further discussions with the college’s Governing Body brought it back in 2024. The common perception remains that the overnight lodge is the staple feature when it comes to feeling safe at Oxford.
John drew attention to the fact that colleges’ increasing emphasis on mental health in recent years is reflected in night porter duties as well. This means that porters are instructed to stay attentive to signs of distress among students and follow set procedures if anything raises concern. “If a student is having a mental health issue, there’s 100% support there. If we spot a student not looking too happy or a bit tearful, maybe didn’t want to speak to us, we could refer it on to the welfare team”.
Especially during exam time, many students pass through the lodge visibly struggling with stress. Porters ensure the lodge is a grounding, approachable space for the student body, and that, when needed, the appropriate resources are provided, and wellness information is relayed confidentially. Night porters are among a number of out-of-hours workers at Oxford who provide welfare support to people at their most vulnerable. In practice, they frequently act as students’ first point of human contact during moments of panic, loneliness, intoxication, or distress. Colleges without permanent overnight staffing at the lodge often choose to raise awareness of the local Samaritans and Safe Haven service, and the Oxford Nightline, run by student volunteers.
Recounting notable incidents in the past, John found that they had been rare enough during his 19 years at Somerville to list with ease. The college encountered a burglar only once, who broke in by scaling one of the walls, and managed to go as far as the principal’s lodgings before the night porters caught him. In another episode, an abusive boyfriend had to be forcefully removed from college grounds. He had been acting aggressively towards his girlfriend and her friends, and grew violent while being escorted out. John got punched, and had to punch him back. Other than these, the occasional intoxicated student needs to be talked down. Some return to the lodge the next day, embarrassed and apologetic.
But overall: “19 years, I don’t think that’s too bad”! Generally, troublemakers among a new cohort of students can be identified within the first three weeks. The porters concentrate on easing them into the way the college works, and after about five to six weeks, “It’s all happy families again. College life goes on”. John said the priority is simple: to keep the place secure and everybody safe. “You deal with it, thinking on your feet, and it gets you and the College through the night”.
More than burglaries and abusive boyfriends, the COVID-19 pandemic stuck in John’s memory as the most difficult event in all his time working as Somerville’s night porter.
“COVID was just a nightmare… It really was hard work.” It’s a well-documented experience for many non-academic staff at Oxford. In 2020, roughly half of Keble’s non-academic staff were furloughed, and the College went into consultation on a redundancy programme as a result of major pandemic-induced revenue losses. Across Oxford institutions, frontline staff found themselves responsible not only for enforcing emergency rules but also absorbing the frustration and hostility those rules produced. In early 2022, Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) introduced body cameras for its staff after a 125% rise in violent incidents during the pandemic, launching the ‘There’s No Excuse’ initiative in a call for the respect and protection of hospital workers.
The unhappy pandemic-year undergraduates faced by the porters had the excuse of being denied their promised university life. “The COVID intake of freshers was horrendous”, John recalled. The students were resentful of being confined to their ‘bubbles’. The policy was put in place as part of the College’s social distancing measures, and enforced by porters who often bore the brunt of that resentment. Students sometimes grew even more unruly when porters reminded them it was against the regulations to mix outside their bubbles. “They were very rebellious students…They didn’t seem to think it was a risk”. But John, after years of shepherding Oxford’s blithely demanding youth, is sympathetic.
“It was sad because those students never really got the experience of the Oxford University situation, as their predecessors or the ones that followed on afterwards, because everything was so restricted. I felt sorry for them, and I could understand the way they were reacting. But it just went on for a whole year. They tried to rule the roost… but of course you couldn’t let them do that, there were things in place for a reason”. And once the pandemic had passed, “It was like they were different students completely!”
As a porter who only works nights, John is candid about the relative invisibility of his role. “You could work here for 13 years, and no one knows you,” he says, recalling how a tutor who had been at the College for many years had come in one morning, greeted him brightly, and asked if John was new.
Still, grappling with dissatisfied young people and distracted teaching staff on a regular basis, John says that he feels well-supported by the college institution, and is happy working here. “You get so many people from different nationalities… and it works. Everything together works”.
“Apart from that COVID situation”, he adds. “That will stick with me until I die”.
St John’s College told Cherwell that it keeps Lodge staffing under regular review, seeing to both staff wellbeing and effective operations. Considering the reactive and ad hoc nature of much of their work, porters are “trained appropriately and aligned to the responsibilities they may encounter in their roles. They are also supported by wider, well-established welfare provisions, including on-site student welfare advisors and an on-call system, ensuring that any situations beyond routine duties are managed safely and appropriately”.
College porters, typically hired directly by the College as permanent staff, report to the Lodge Manager and Domestic Bursar and are embedded into the College’s administrative structure. There has long been a push, however, for all colleges to formally extend the same protection and wage standards to their sub-contracted staff employed in housekeeping, catering, maintenance, and events – arrangements that vary depending on the wealth and policy of individual colleges. The lodge, therefore, sits within a wider conversation about invisible labour at Oxford: the workers responsible for maintaining the University’s daily operations often remain peripheral to its public self-image.
As the sky grows light and early risers trickle out into the streets, the night porter hands over the shift and goes home to family, or into a routine slumber with blackout curtains. Through personal and collective crises, the lodge and the porters are always there. Meanwhile, the collegiate system remains a patchwork of rota structures, pay scales, budget limits, and levels of transparency. “Everything together works”, as John says. That clockwork constancy depends on labour which most students rarely see, but routinely rely upon.
The Oxford Union has invited Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who identifies as Tommy Robinson, to speak at a Week 5 debate on the motion ‘This house believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam’. The invitation has generated backlash from University societies, senior Union officials, and Stand Up to Racism UK.
Yaxley-Lennon’s invitation has provoked censure from national organisation Stand Up to Racism, which posted a joint statement on social media with Oxford Against Discrimination to condemn the invitation “in the strongest possible terms”. They also called on Oxford Union President Arwa Elrayess to confirm that the invitation has been rescinded; “issue a public statement apologising for extending the invitation and promising full transparency with speakers’ events”; and “acknowledge the harm” caused to students by the decision. Stand Up to Racism has organised a protest to take place outside the Oxford Union on the 28th May, the day of the Week 5 Debate.
Several University societies condemned the decision in statements to Cherwell, with Oxford African and Caribbean Society (ACS) telling Cherwell “granting Robinson an academic stage at a time of increased far-right activity confers a degree of respectability to ideologies that have historically marginalised our communities.” It Happens Here (IHH) accused Robinson of using sexual violence cases “to advance anti-Muslim sentiment”, and said his presence at the Union “ signals to survivors that their experiences are being instrumentalised, instead of taken seriously”.
Oxford Student Greens told Cherwell that “there is no space for the kind of inflammatory, hateful rhetoric”. The Oxford Labour Club published a statement on Instagram saying it was “disgusted” by the invitation, writing that while “free speech is important… that does not mean that Tommy Robinson, a far-right extremist convicted of assault and harassment, should be platformed by the Union”. The Student Union (SU) published a statement recognising that “many students may be concerned about recently announced, upcoming high-profile speaker events in Oxford”. The SU expressed “support and solidarity” with any students affected, “particularly those from marginalised groups”.
Condemnation has also come from senior Oxford Union officials. Cherwell understands that Prajwal Pandey, Oxford Union Librarian for Trinity Term, criticised the decision to invite Yaxley-Lennon in a speech before the Week 2 debate at the Union. A petition to call for a vote by Union members on the invitation to Tommy Robinson was circulated online by the Overheard at Oxford Instagram account.
Cherwell has also seen a letter of resignation by Shermar Pryce, formally Chief Advisor to the President, in response to the decision to invite Yaxley-Lennon. Pryce cites his displeasure at what he dubs a “clown show”, and accused the Union of “appealing to malformed conceptions of ‘free speech’”: “To not rethink this invite, after members of all backgrounds and dispositions have expressed their concerns and fears, borders on malicious.” The letter further alleges that the decision was made without the knowledge of the majority of committee members.
Candidates in the re-poll for the position of President-Elect, including the successful candidate Gareth Lim, unanimously condemned the invite when asked for their opinion by Cherwell during the election campaign. However, speaking to Cherwell after his victory, Lim repeated that he would not have invited Yaxley-Lennon to the Society, but said the Union should “stand by [its] decisions” and said incumbent President Arwa Elrayess had “done a pretty good job” at deciding who she wanted to invite. He said Elrayess was considering changes to the debate format to “ensure that people like Tommy Robinson answer the questions” and that it will be “only after we see the debate” that we could judge whether the invitation to Yaxley-Lennon was “the right thing to do”.
The reported invitation comes within the context of longstanding accusations against Yaxley-Lennon of Islamophobia and intimidation. He was a co-founder of the English Defence League in 2009, whose supporters have repeatedly targeted Muslim communities and mosques across the UK. He has also been convicted on multiple occasions, including for contempt of court in 2018 after livestreaming defendants accused of sexual exploitation outside a trial in Leeds, in breach of reporting restrictions. He was jailed for 18 months after admitting to the charge.
Yaxley-Lennon has faced further convictions for assault and harassment, and has been widely criticised for his rhetoric, accused of fuelling anti-Muslim sentiment. His public statements have included describing Muslim refugees to the UK as “fake refugees”, a 2011 threat to “every single Muslim watching….the Islamic community would feel the full force of the English Defence League” if another Islamist terror attack were to take place, and a 2018 admission that he “doesn’t care” if he “incites fear” of the UK’s Muslim community.
He previously warned members of the press: “If you’re a journalist and you think your office or your home is a safe space…it’s not”, and referred to a female BBC journalist as a “slag” after Yaxley-Lennon was questioned by police over an alleged assault of a man at London St Pancras Station in 2025. Yaxley-Lennon was not charged over the incident.
Defending her decision to invite Yaxley-Lennon in an article in The Telegraph, Elrayess wrote: “For more than 200 years, the Oxford Union has existed to host debates – not to platform views uncritically, but to subject them to the most rigorous scrutiny. You do not invite a speaker to endorse them: you invite them so that their ideas can be examined, and their claims tested.”
Elrayess also appeared on the right-wing television news channel GB News to explain her defence of both the debate and the invitation to Yaxley-Lennon. She addressed concerns about the security risk raised by the event, and called it “a shame that we can’t even debate these topics anymore without the feeling of things crashing down.”
A spokesperson for the Oxford Union previously told Cherwell that the Union gives “members the opportunity to challenge…a broad range of speakers” and “only host[s] speakers who agree to be challenged”.
Oxford’s Turning Point UK society also defended the invitation. Their President described
Yaxley-Lennon as “a culturally relevant figure in British politics” and that “the debate is of incredible importance”. They described the event as “the perfect opportunity for those who vehemently disagree with Tommy Robinson to put his ideas to the test”.
“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.” – Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven
In a world on the brink of a catastrophe, Miranda Caroll draws the story of Dr Eleven.
Dr Eleven, a jaded physicist, lives on a space station the size of our moon after escaping from the ruins of a destroyed Earth. The planet’s artificial sky was damaged when they fled from an alien invasion, leaving its surface in perpetual twilight. Human communities live in the Undersea, a lonely network of submarines and fallout shelters under the space station’s oceans. The creator of this kaleidoscopic world, Miranda, is a shipping executive by day and comic artist by night. Miranda is one of many characters – the toughest, or perhaps the tenderest – to populate Emily St John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic epic, Station Eleven: a story of pandemic survivors trying to navigate the ruthless wilderness of a world without civilisation.
DrEleven’s story is one of conflict and melancholy, of anger and longing. So is Mandel’s Station Eleven. As Mandel’s narrative spans across temporalities both before and after the catastrophe of a world-ending contagion, we observe the traumas inflicted upon a landscape when law and order crumble. We observe the cruelty of a fragmented world and its inhabitants’ attempts to survive and heal. Just as memory is power, art becomes a tool for survival.
The world before the contagion is populated by Arthur Leander, Miranda Caroll, Clarke Thompson, and their contemporaries, who navigate lives of triumph and heartbreak with a lostness that is deeply human. By contrast, the post-pandemic generation confronts a lawless wasteland of violence. Kirsten Raymonde, our narrator, performs Shakespeare for the enduring human settlements with a troupe of musicians calling themselves the Travelling Symphony. In this lost land, each character seeks their own solace. Some turn towards religion and violence, conjuring fables in a distorted fantasy of new gods and prophets. Others, like Kirsten and her companions, inscribe through memories and artmaking.
Electricity and gas become myths to the children of this new world. The aeroplane becomes a symbol of manmade freedom. The Symphony salvages food and clothing from abandoned houses. They build fires as the generators run out of propane. They whisper old words of poetry and pluck tunes on old strings, clinging to some semblance of familiarity in a land no longer recognisable.
Mandel’s voice is elegiac. Sections of the novel become a chorus of mourning. “No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played under floodlights. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through aeroplane windows. No more flight. No more cities.”This polyphony of voices mourns the loss of human infrastructure with a haunting mixture of grief and tranquillity.
Did Earth ever belong to us, or have we only borrowed it for too long? Mandel investigates questions and claims of ownership. The lives we meticulously build rest on a perilous network of manmade structures, ranging from social norms to resource access. But these structures of technology and the socioeconomic systemscan collapse. Our time on Earth is fundamentally transient, vulnerable to entropic forces insentient to human existence.
The only way to honour this impermanent earth is to make art about it. Miranda sketches visions of a fictional world that bleeds into a bruised sunset along the Malaysian coast, just as the Symphony scrapes together performances of Shakespeare and Beethoven in the ruins of a new land. Art anchors us to identity. It is our armour. A survival without identity, without imagination, is meaningless.
Artis power. The thirst for beauty connects us when we are floundering, cast adrift. In a stroke of metafiction, Mandel’s novel shares its name with the title of Miranda’s comic: Station Eleven. At the novel’s climax, Kirsten is captured by Tyler Leander, whose cultivation of a manic religion has earned him the name ‘prophet’ and a cult following. With a gun pointed at Kirsten’s forehead, Tyler quotes from the comic: “We long only to go home. We dream of sunlight, we dream of walking on earth.” Kirsten quotes it back at him and, in doing so, stalls her own death. In a world where their shared language is violence, these words open a bridge across the divide of blood and hatred.
This shared devotion to a comic book tethers the two to their humanity. Kirsten survives because both she and Tyler are joined, however momentarily, by a power greater than themselves.
“We have been lost for so long. We long only for the world we were born into.”
Does anything at all belong to us? This spectacle we call society can be uprooted in the blink of an eye. This claim over our Earth – our cities, our factories, our electric towers – is perilous. We are easily broken. Yet Station Eleven not only acknowledges but celebrates our fragility. The novel demonstrates how speculative fiction is a genre ultimately concerned with the relationship between the environment and the individual, between Earth and humanity. By the end of the novel, our wandering characters survive in a shaky diaspora, imagining a painstaking reemergence of human society as they cradle each other for warmth. There are no answers, but there is the hope of an endless search.
We must do this, I think. We must make stories out of our own fragility. We must write novels about the world ending that manage, also, to be breathlessly hopeful. This is our power. To stare our demise right in the face, to imagine beyond the lives we know.
We are owed nothing except our store of carbon. The Earth does not endow us with the right to claim anything but the people we are, at a moment in time: memories, thoughts, scars, and all. As Mandel’s characters wander a world beyond the edge, confronting the brute of physics, the harsh lashings of a landscape, they discover in themselves a ruthless optimism that mutates to survive. This is how we live on an Earth that is temporarily borrowed. This is how we survive. This is how we ache, and long, and lust for life.
The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) has published a new report advocating for centralised admissions procedures for applications to the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, arguing that the current collegiate system increases the opacity and complexity for applicants and their teachers.
Charlotte Armstrong, author of the report, told Cherwell that the collegiate admissions system “can place a significant burden on teachers and advisers trying to support students, and risks discouraging capable applicants who may see the system as confusing or inaccessible”. In the report, Armstrong pointed to several factors complicating the admissions process, such as variation in outreach funding, fragmented outreach provision, and poor institutional coordination.
Alongside its national outreach initiatives, such as UNIQ, the University delegates regional outreach to colleges. The University’s Common Framework for Admissions outlines shared principles and procedures to “ensure a fair, consistent and academically rigorous admissions process across all subjects and colleges.”
However, HEPI’s report noted the impact of the huge wealth disparity between colleges: In 2024, Christ Church College’s endowment (£758 million) was around 17 times that of St Anne’s College (£44 million). According to the think tank, these differences prevent there being a consistent level of support and connection, with some colleges budgeting up to twelve times more on widening access than others. Armstrong told Cherwell that “this risks creating an uneven landscape where a student’s exposure to Oxbridge – and the guidance and support they receive – can depend on their geography, and which colleges happen to have been allocated to their area.”
In its application guidance, the University describes how “while it may look different from applications to other universities, each part of the process has a clear purpose and guidance to help you understand what to expect.” Applications to Oxford involve an earlier deadline for UCAS personal statements and references, choosing between applying to a specific college or an open application, a potential admissions assessment and/or submission of written work and at least one interview, all before the main January deadline for UCAS has passed. HEPI’s research identified Oxford’s additional application requirements and earlier timelines as another factor limiting students’ and teachers’ ability to navigate the admissions process.
In response to these barriers to transparent and accessible admissions procedures, HEPI has recommended a multi-stage approach, culminating in full centralisation of Oxford applications. The proposed first step would be to develop a more consistent approach to interviewing to establish a more level playing field for students and teachers.
Under a fully centralised application model, applicants could be interviewed by academic staff from several colleges before being allocated to a college through a ranked preference method. This system would, as Armstrong told Cherwell, “reduce the risk of strong candidates missing out because of where they applied and make the system clearer, more transparent and fairer from a student’s perspective”.
Oxford is keen to tell a particular story about itself: that it is open, that it is trying, that it is changing. Without a doubt, this rings true, particularly on a financial level, as exemplified by the generous Crankstart Scholarship and the University’s many hardship funds. And to be clear, they matter. For many students, that money is the difference between being here and not.
But there is a quieter problem embedded in how this support is structured and discussed – one that reveals a set of assumptions about working-class students that the University has yet to fully confront. At its core, the issue is not the existence of financial support, but the expectations that come attached to it.
Schemes like Crankstart tend to operate on the premise that financial disadvantage is primarily a matter of shortfall. Give students money, and the problem is essentially solved. This sounds reasonable until you consider what it assumes – namely, that recipients already possess the knowledge, confidence, and cultural fluency to manage that money “correctly” within Oxford’s uniquely opaque financial landscape.
But money at Oxford is not neutral. It comes embedded in systems like battels, college charges, book grants, rent schedules, vacation storage fees, formal wear expectations, unpaid internships, and the subtle but constant pressure to spend in ways that signal belonging. Knowing how to navigate these is not intuitive. It is learned often informally, sometimes through family experience, and long before arriving here.
Working-class students are far less likely to have had that exposure. Yet the structure of support assumes they will simply “figure it out.” This assumption shows up in small, but consequential, ways. Funds are frequently disbursed in lump sums, with little guidance beyond generic budgeting advice. Hardship applications require students to anticipate and articulate financial needs in a system they may not yet understand. There is an implicit expectation that students will know when to save, when to spend, and when to ask for more – all the while managing the social pressures of a university where spending norms are rarely explicit.
This gap is intensified by how difficult it is to earn money while at Oxford. Term-time work is typically discouraged in favour of prioritising academic commitments, leaving many students with little flexibility to respond to unexpected costs or social pressures. The assumption is that financial support will be enough. When it is not, there are few alternatives. The option to simply “work more” – a common fallback elsewhere – is largely closed off, further narrowing the margin for error.
When things go wrong, the burden quietly shifts back onto the student. Overspent? You should have budgeted better. Didn’t apply in time? You should have known the system. Struggling socially because you can’t afford to participate? That’s unfortunate, but invisible. The underlying message is subtle but powerful: you have been given the opportunity, now it is your responsibility to make it work.
But is it not natural that, upon receiving extra money in your bank account – possibly more than you have ever had before – you would be tempted to spend dramatically? Those Ryanair flights for a European city break? Suddenly affordable. Tesco Finest over their value products? Why not treat yourself?
Initially, it might seem obvious to respond to this gap with more “support” in the form of budgeting workshops, financial literacy sessions, or compulsory guidance on managing money at Oxford. But this risks reproducing the same problem in a different form.
If framed incorrectly, these initiatives can feel deeply patronising. They rest on the assumption that working-class students lack basic financial competence, and that they need to be taught how to budget, rather than supported in navigating a system that is itself unusually complex. In reality, many students from lower-income backgrounds arrive at Oxford already highly skilled in managing limited resources. The issue is not ignorance, but context.
Budgeting at Oxford is not the same as budgeting at home. It involves decoding unfamiliar charges, anticipating irregular expenses, and negotiating social expectations that are rarely spelt out. A workshop on “how to manage your money” does little to address this, and risks talking down to the very students it claims to support.
What’s needed instead is not remedial education, but structural clarity. Clearer information about likely costs, more transparency from colleges, and a recognition that the difficulty lies not in students’ abilities, but in the University’s complexity, at both a social and institutional level. We all have different relationships with money, which therefore makes blanket advice on budgeting pretty pointless. We all know what we should be doing, but how we implement it when suddenly able to afford that round of shots, dinner out, or a last-minute ticket, is far less straightforward.
The issue is not a lack of discipline or understanding, but the collision between individual financial habits and an environment where spending is both highly visible and socially loaded. In that context, generic advice about restraint offers little real guidance.
What students need is not to be told how to budget, but to be given a clearer sense of the landscape they are budgeting within – one where expectations, pressures, and costs are made explicit, rather than left to be inferred.
Until that visibility exists, the burden will remain unevenly distributed. Students will continue to arrive equipped to meet the academic demands of the University, but left to decipher its financial and social logic alone.
Access without understanding is not access at all. And that is a gap no scholarship, however generous, or life-changing, can fully close.
