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Antisemitism at UK universities 79% higher than before October 7th attacks

Gavriella Epstein-Lightman
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Antisemitism at UK universities 79% higher than before October 7th attacks

CW: Antisemitism

The University of Oxford was among ten universities to record five or more antisemitic incidents from 2024-2026, a new report on antisemitism at UK universities shows. 

The Community Security Trust (CST), a UK charity which monitors antisemitism in Britain, has published a report tracking recorded antisemitic incidents affecting Jewish students, academics, university staff, and campus organisations between 2024 and 2026. Its executive summary warns that “the 7 October attacks ha[ve] resulted in a baseline level of antisemitism that is significantly higher than before”.

Last year saw 95 reported incidents across UK universities, a 14% increase on previous years. This figure remains below the “unprecedented” 272 incidents recorded during the single academic year of 2023/24 but is 79% higher than the last academic year before the Hamas attacks on 7th October. 

CST’s report shows that the city of Oxford had the joint seventh most incidents of University antisemitism in the UK. Of the five incidents reported in Oxford, the majority occurred online. The report also references an incident in October 2024 where a swastika was drawn on a sign for the David Slager Jewish Students society on George Street. 

A significant proportion of antisemitic incidents concerned Israel, Gaza, Hamas, the October 7 attacks, and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. A reported 62% of incidents “contained such references alongside anti-Jewish language, motivation or targeting” while 55% of incidents “demonstrated explicitly anti-Zionist motivation alongside antisemitism”. References to Hitler, the Nazis, or the Holocaust appeared in 26% of incidents. 

The CST findings follow the Union of Jewish Students’ (UJS) ‘Time for Change’ report, published in March 2026, which found that “antisemitism on campus is normalised”.It urges universities to “make clear the difference between anti Israel speech or activity, and antisemitism – and enforce this difference through disciplinary action when students, staff or societies cross the line”. The charity also suggested that educational institutions “make reporting of incidents accessible and worthwhile” in order to “build trust in university processes”.

In response to the report, a spokesperson for the Oxford Jewish Society told Cherwell that they “value the continued engagement of the University with the Jewish community to resolve issues of antisemitism”. However, they said that “the collegiate structure of the university and the unaffiliated nature of key institutions means that there is a deficit of accountability across the University”.

“Jewish students should not have to become less visibly Jewish, less openly Zionist or less willing to speak in order to feel comfortable at university”, the society added. “Antisemitism does not cease to be antisemitism because it is expressed in the language of anti-Zionism. Hostility towards Jewish students because of their real or assumed connection with Israel is not legitimate.”

A spokesperson for the University of Oxford told Cherwell: “Oxford is unequivocal: there is no place for antisemitism, harassment, or discrimination within our community.

“The University condemns, in the strongest possible terms, any form of racial hatred, including any actions or language urging violence against groups of people.”

When asked about measures taken to counter antisemitism at Oxford, the University spokesperson highlighted efforts to promote racial and religious inclusion. These include an annual Student Racial and Religious Inclusion Forum, first held in March 2026, which brought students together to share their experiences. The University also said its Equality and Diversity Unit has facilitated antisemitism training from the Union of Jewish Students for student-facing staff.

Diverse voices: ‘Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah’ by Miljenko Jergović 

Abigail Riley
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Diverse voices: ‘Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah’ by Miljenko Jergović 

‘When he created Earth and these lands upon it, when he divided people into believers and infidels, the crescent moon and the cross, the good Allah made us all different except for one thing. We die easily without seeking reasons; the reasons come on their own. And He sits on His celestial throne and is surprised by how little we cherish life while we have it, and how many tears we shed once it’s gone.’

Hiding in the woods, the narrator of Jergović’s eighth story ponders the push and pull of religion in Bosnia. His is one of the trickier voices in Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah. Obsessed with the sins of a lightning-struck Hodža, the disappearance of a young refugee from the town’s memory, he resolves to be the saviour. He answers the call of God, who is “testing us just as an old grandfather tests his coffee with the tip of his tongue to see if it’s hot”. As he falls asleep in the cold, his mind is fragmented with fantasies of sin and punishment. The details of “the Charred Mosque minaret” slip away; he remembers that “the Hodža was bald and smooth-faced”, but he cannot remember why. When he sneaks back into the town, forgetting the stories he has told himself and the crimes he is supposedly avenging, our narrator commits a confused final act of violence. Jergović, through translators Ellen Elias-Bursać and Mirza Purić, delivers: “We both heard the same thing, and by that, on judgement day we will be judged as men – the woosh of the paddle like the woosh of the wind that brings the snow and the winter.”

Whilst the delusion of Alkatmer’s narrator is perhaps more complex than some other voices in this collection, the understatedness of his story and the winding, folkloric tone are definitive of Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah. Every story is characterised by the universal intimacy of the voice of a stranger telling you strange tales around a fire. Sometimes there is magic explicitly at play, like the talking bird of ‘Zulum’. Sometimes, with the freedom of unreliable narrators and prophetic dreams, reality in Jergović’s stories bends only slightly; such is the case in “Tespih” and “Misir”. 

As he describes it, Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah is the author’s attempt to capture “the unusual documentary spirit of Bosnian and Dalmatian lyrical songs.” Every short story begins with a note describing the “lyrical song” (or songs) that inspired it, thus each is framed explicitly by the culture and history in which Jergović writes. The natural, and surely intended, product of this form is the sharp focus, every time, no matter the length or style of the story, on the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The book stands as a record of Jergović’s people, a collection of mythical voices that can speak to God, to Allah, to birds, and dead brothers. 

The balance of folklore and monotheistic religion is a fine one, but Jergović seems well practised at spinning plates. One does not detract from the other: the presence of everyday myth lives alongside the honest faith of his characters. Nor does Jergović shy from the conflict between Christianity and Islam. The suffering of religious war is present, as are its justifications, its heroes and its victims. The form of a short story collection is, in this way, ideally suited for Jergović’s project, which does itself seem to extend a little beyond “lyrical songs”. Or rather, as I would believe myself, Jergović’s valuation of the music extends far beyond that first experience of hearing them. The crises of life, death, love, and faith are all within the bounds of “lyrical songs”,

It is fitting, then, that such a diverse chorus of voices is published in English by the independent publishing house Archipelago Books. Founded in 2003 by Jill Schoolman, the small team specialises in translated fiction “from the margins”. It publishes around 15 to 16 books a year, exclusively translations into English. In a 2018 interview for Publishers Weekly, the translator Bill Johnston describes working with Jill and her team. “It’s an unusual, collaborative dialogical approach,” he says, “and I find it very conducive to doing good work”. At the risk of understatement, it seems this same process has been successful for Elias-Bursać and Mirza Purić: Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah is some pretty “good work”.

Unique writing can come from all kinds of directions, but I don’t think it is a coincidence that Jergović’s writing is coming into English through an independent publishing house, one known for its “dialogic collaborative approach,” the same one that has published his work in English three times before. You might say the same for Mathias Énard and Fitzcarraldo, or the 2026 International Booker winner Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and & Other Stories. Independent publishing houses are taking risks that larger organisations cannot, and as readers we stand to benefit enormously from this. 

I’ll finish with this bit of advice. Contrary to popular belief, not everything goes in one ear and out the other. Some stuff gets kept, and it would be nice if it was interesting. It would be nice if it was the kind of voice you hadn’t heard before. So keep an ear out because Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah is coming out on 13th October. 

Art as protest on university campuses

Lara Solie-Tuluie
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Art as protest on university campuses

CW: rape.

This week, Cornell University has made headlines as prosecutors reopened an investigation into the alleged rape of a student at the Ivy League in 2024. The case is characterised by extreme violence and the university’s apathy towards the anonymous Jane Doe. When victims are ignored, and perpetrators’ punishment is to write an essay, what can we learn from those who use art as protest on campus?

In 2015, Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz carried her dorm room mattress across her graduation stage. She had been carrying it for months: every day the university failed to expel the man she accused of anally raping her. Having reported the assault to the university in April of 2013, Columbia found her attacker, Paul Nungesser, “not responsible” for his alleged crimes. She filed a report with the New York City Police Department to no avail.

In response, the visual arts student embarked on a performance art piece entitled Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), as her senior thesis. Starting in September 2014, Sulkowicz carried a 23kg, dark blue, extra-long twin mattress, identical to the one on which she was raped, with her constantly while on campus. Dubbed by Sulkowicz to Columbia Spectator as an “endurance art piece”, she described the mattress as “the perfect size for me to just be able to carry it enough that I can continue with my day, but also heavy enough so that I have to continually struggle with it”.

Her performance was intended to travel by “word of mouth”. Having written the rules of engagement for lugging the heavy mattress around the walls of her studio space, she left the rest of her performance unexplained: a student walking around campus with a blue rectangle of springs and plastic.

On the steps of university buildings, at coffee shops, covered in a sheet matching the shade of Sulkowicz’s graduation gown, the mattress is always there. The mattress’ out-of-placeness is off-putting, interrupting a space of efficiency, learning, and practicality. It is cumbersome, attention-grabbing, and unsettling. It’s a weight not only to those who carry it, but a disruption to the lives of those around it. Its presence speaks to an absence of accountability and justice in the space it inhabits. Notably, under Sulkowicz’s regulations, the mattress was not allowed to be removed from the university campus, even when she was elsewhere. The burden of truth and violence was made big, blue, and bold. It’s difficult to move and impossible to ignore. In a piece written for TIME, Sulkowicz accused Columbia of being “more concerned about their public image than keeping people safe”. When the words of victims have limited consequence and perpetrators fail to be held accountable, art speaks in a tongue that cannot be twisted.

Protest is often remembered through its material objects. We picture the hourglass of Extinction Rebellion, the peace sign of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the crouching panther of the Black Panther Party. The visual memorabilia and graphic art of protest leave a lasting cultural and personal impression. In an interview with Tate, artist Jeremy Deller recalls the impact the protest art of the 2017 Women’s March had on him: “It was kind of the first time you saw… those body parts being drawn or in public being displayed, those sort of reproductive organs.” Really, women’s reproductive systems have been displayed on museum walls with varying accuracy for centuries. Think only of Gustave Courbet’s 1866 L’Origine du monde: it’s all the ‘taboo’ bits and nothing else. Possibly, it is the presence of these taboo bits paraded so pointedly, with overt political sentiment behind them, as well as the real-life person holding the placard, that makes protest art, at least to Deller, so remarkable. It discards any question of whether art should be political and forces it to be so. It gives the aesthetic political purpose; it upsets how we understand, use, and display art. In Sulkowicz’s case, it makes the mundane, purpose-driven object an aesthetic anomaly that first surprises, and then frightens. 

Sulkowicz’s performance art protest draws on the visual interruption caused by something being in the wrong place, detaching the signifier from the sign. The spatial anachronism of mattress-in-library, or mattress-in-cafeteria, creates an unsettling instance of a stubborn, physically cumbersome dedication to truth-telling. The mattress is impossible to ignore; so is the silent system of gender-based violence that permeates university culture. Sulkowicz makes the location of violence mobile, unavoidable, and universal. While the weight of assault can be carried by anyone anywhere, the mattress is a reminder that the perpetrators of such violence are just as present. 

The tool of oppression deployed by universities like Cornell and Columbia is language in the form of excuses and essays. Language is fortified to protect the guilty and complicit from the consequences of their actions. Art, at this moment, confuses the schemes of language. It evades clear distinction, forces itself to be acknowledged, and upsets the campus’ playhouse of power and punishment. 

Good grief! Why do we feel for the death of fictional people?

Jas Mauj
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Good grief! Why do we feel for the death of fictional people?

I always cry at the depiction of death in plays. Considering that, during my first year at Oxford – the first time I engaged seriously with theatre – the listings almost seemed pointed for someone as weepy about grief as I am. From the beautiful, slow reflections of Tidal Theatre’s Launa to the raucous yet still moving titles like Blackstar Productions’ Teen Spirit and Greyjoy, I had some sort of physiological reaction to all of them. Whether it’s a mild sniffle or full-blown tears, I always end up feeling a bit ridiculous about the whole ordeal when it’s over. I mean, it’s not real, is it? Why do I waste my grief on things that haven’t happened, that will never happen?

That question – why I feel sadness for fictional grief – is at the heart of the ‘paradox of fiction’, a philosophical dilemma that asks how we feel anything at all for things we know don’t exist. It could be that, caught in the moment, I am so immersed in the play that I treat it as real. But that fails to explain how one of the most gut-wrenching portrayals of grief in theatrical history – Mother Courage’s silent scream upon seeing the corpse of her son in Mother Courage and Her Children – takes place in the context of a Brechtian production that deliberately distances the audience. The perceived ‘realness’ may not matter to our emotional reaction, but it raises the question of how fiction on the stage crosses boundaries to generate effects in the real world of the theatre stalls. 

Theatre has many unique devices up its sleeve that make it, in my opinion, superior to every other art form in the domain of audience manipulation. Namely, theatre is rife with ritualistic elements: the surreal stiffness of monologues and of stage blocking, the very practice of dressing up to sit silently in a dark room. Of course, one could argue that these are also features of certain films, but film lacks theatre’s trump card: the sense of immediacy between actor and audience. As the influential Polish director Jerzy Grotowski put it: “Theatre cannot exist without the actor-spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, ‘live communion’.” 

In a sense, the actor, inhabiting the ghostly space between unreality as a character and immediacy as a body for the audience member, can use it to be possessed by the emotions it would be impermissible for many of us to feel in real life. When watching theatrical portrayals of grief, we mourn through the actors as much as we mourn with them. We need not necessarily mourn the same thing they do on stage. But even if all the play gives us is catharsis, a reflection the narrative gives us of the ‘real’, I think what is important is that it offers a socially valid space, separate from everyday life, for doing so.

Grieving rituals exist around the world, with ‘professional mourning’ mentioned everywhere from ancient Egyptian records to the Bible. In the deserts of Rajasthan, India, Rudalis – lower-caste women hired as professional mourners in a declining tradition – still carry out the function of wailing and singing at funerals where it would be improper for the upper-caste relatives of the deceased to showcase such emotion. Professional theatre is unique in that it often offers release to the actor as well, whereas the tears of many marginalised mourners throughout history saw no such catharsis.

All of this may help explain why theatre can drive us to tears, but why do we seek out such experiences? Are audiences, voyeurs as they are, the strange ones for going to watch someone whose pain they share for two hours and an intermission, before forgetting it? Or is it the writer, the actors, and the director who work on ensuring their art creates a sense of bereavement in the audience? I believe that Joan Didion holds the answer in her firm indictment of the audience: why we are in the stalls and what we are postponing through it. The starting lines of Didion’s play adaptation of a famously harrowing account of grief following her husband’s and daughter’s deaths, her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, declare: “And it will happen to you.”

Exeter College to fund data centre in Oxford

Stanley Arlidge
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Exeter College to fund data centre in Oxford

Cherwell District Council will decide next month whether to grant permission for a controversial £900 million data centre development funded by Exeter College. 


The development, named EXOq, is located next to Oxford Parkway station in Kidlington and aims to be a “home for global research innovation and education”, with a particular focus on AI and quantum computing. The plans include a large data centre to provide computing infrastructure, alongside an innovation hub aiming to bring together researchers, government institutes, and investors. 

The plans also include a conference centre, 180-room hotel, and a further education college that focuses on “equipping the young people today with the skills to be the workforce of tomorrow, working in and supporting newly emerging technologies linked to EXOq”. Construction would begin in 2028 with an expected completion in 2040. 

Exeter College finance and estates bursar, Nicholas Badman, told Cherwell: “EXOq is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Oxford and the region. Exeter College is uniquely placed to deliver the sovereign High-Performance Compute infrastructure the country, and the Oxford ecosystem, needs to compete in quantum computing and AI.” 

The University of Oxford’s Vice Chancellor, Irene Tracey, said that “fundamentally, EXOq fits very well with the university’s needs and it has my full backing”. 

Exeter’s plans come alongside a government drive to grow the UK’s compute infrastructure. The government’s 2025 UK Compute Roadmap forecasts that the UK will need three times as much data centre capacity by 2030 to keep pace with AI developments. 

The plans also tie in with the government’s ambitions for the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor, which it has dubbed “Europe’s Silicon Valley”. An economic impact assessment produced in support of the application suggests that the gross value added could reach £1.4 billion and create 7,000 jobs total, of which at least 4,600 would be in the local area. 

Local residents have criticised the planned development. Kidlington Councillor and Leader of the Green Party on Cherwell District Council, Ian Middleton, has publicly objected to the proposal, while more than 35 local residents submitted statements opposing the plans during public consultation. One resident urged the council to “be courageous and stop letting the colleges dominate the whole area” while another labelled the development “huge, unwanted, and unnecessary”.

Local campaign groups, such as the Oxfordshire branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, have raised environmental concerns including the development’s impact on the green belt separating Oxford from Kidlington and a nearby ancient woodland. One objecting group, Wolvercote Neighbourhood Forum, explicitly references noise problems caused by data centres in the US in a letter opposing the site. 

In response to queries about the project’s environmental impact, Badman told Cherwell: “The College understands local concerns and is committed to making EXOq an exemplar of sustainable data centre design.” Badman noted that the plans include on-site solar power and would reuse waste heat from the data centre through a low-carbon heat network serving both EXOq and the surrounding area. He added that the College is exploring off-site renewable energy and working with electricity generators and is “committed to ensuring EXOq’s demands will not conflict with local energy needs”.

The most significant local challenge to the project surrounds the provision of golf courses. In 2025, the 118-year-old North Oxford Golf Course, owned by Merton College, Exeter College, and the University of Oxford, closed to make way for a housing project. Greenway, a group set up by former members of the club, told Cherwell that “the college gave assurances that Frieze Farm [the land upon which EXOq would be built] could be used if necessary as a replacement for the golf course”. Such a use is suggested in the Cherwell District Council Local Plan 2031. 

Regarding the potential golf course, EXOq states that “evidence submitted to the Local Plan highlighted that the popularity of golf is declining nationally, and there is insufficient demand locally to justify the EXOq site as a replacement course”. In a statement to Cherwell, Greenway have labelled these statements inaccurate. 

A decision is expected at the start of next month after the council’s independent golf need report is complete. The report will be the third golf need survey attached to the application, after Exeter and Greenway submitted their own competing surveys. 

Dosa Darlings, we need to get a move on…

Ellie Pemberton
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Dosa Darlings, we need to get a move on…

Along Cowley Road, a taste of South India sits within a rather inviting building, complete with burnt red accents and the occasional fairy light: Dosa Darlings. After many of my friends had moved to the area into their second-year houses, it only seemed right to try out a restaurant located somewhere beyond a five minute radius of Turl Street. For one night, I left the joys of Najar’s and the Covered Market in search of a new place to add to the ‘treat’ rotation. 

Walking inside, the atmosphere was immediately welcoming, complete with dim lighting, though not too dark given the sparkle of lights decorating the restaurant, and the candle perched in the middle of our table. It was looking to be a lovely evening, which was only further confirmed by the rather beautiful-looking jug of water (still, not sparkling) on the table. This was nothing like the typical uninspiring water containers I had become accustomed to receiving during my summer in the US. 

We ordered a selection of food for the table – I have learnt that ordering as a couple is far superior to having individual meals – since there was so much on the menu that looked appetising. There were the famous dosas and other classic curry dishes, as well as vegetarian options, and ‘little plates’. After some difficult deliberation, we started with two vegetable samosas (£6.50 total), accompanied by a tamarind chutney, as well as a plate of beef chukka (£9.50). Whilst I did not try the latter, I was assured on good authority that it was quite delicious – and I can confirm that the samosas were delightful. They were fresh, piping hot from the kitchen, and generously sized too, leaving us with some leftovers (though not for lack of enjoyment).

The first dishes were speedy, but we then waited another 50 minutes until our main courses came out. Ordinarily, this would have been fine, but here everything was ordered to come together. The wait took a little away from the experience, mainly because, after looking around, it was quite clear that most tables were emptying – even those who had arrived after us. We did finally receive the selection of poppadoms (£4) we had ordered some time earlier to nibble on. This was genuinely quite exciting; there were several types which were all different, not just in shape but also in flavour, texture, and, best of all, colour. So, I suppose, had we not been waiting for so long, we would not have had time to enjoy the novelty of this selection.

This period of delay gave us our most memorable experience of the evening by far. My boyfriend returned from the bathroom, sat down, and exclaimed: “You won’t believe what they’re playing in there.” He was correct; I did not believe him until I went to test the claim myself. Playing very loudly in an otherwise quite chic bathroom was the booming voice of Stephen Fry narrating to me the journey of the ‘Golden Trio’ in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – not quite what I was expecting, given the relatively inoffensive and quiet music playing in the background of the rest of the building. Either way, I did enjoy my short time hearing about Harry’s journey within the Ministry of Magic before returning. Eventually, the main event was here: a prawn moilee curry (£16) and a walnut cinnamon and honey dosa (£9.50). 

The curry wasn’t particularly memorable and was quite light on prawn, but the flavour was enjoyable and paired with what was left of the poppadoms. For those who have not enjoyed a dosa before, they are quite spectacular in their own way. Dosas are cone-shaped savoury crepes, and mine was so big it didn’t quite fit on the plate. It was, however, utterly delicious, and drowned in honey. I think our combination of flavours may have negated the savoury component slightly, but nonetheless it made the wait worth it. It had a Goldilocks quality, in the sense that it was filling, but not overly so in the way some breads and dipping snacks tend to be. 

Just before the restaurant had completely emptied, we decided to ask for the bill, and it was here that our waiter made up for the earlier inconvenience. He brought over two desserts for both of us to try. I wasn’t quite sure what it was at the time, but after a few Google searches, I believe it was ras malai, since it had a spongy disc in the middle soaked in a bath of milk flavoured with a range of spices. The spongy part was not quite to my taste, but the milk component had a unique (but enjoyable) taste to it which, I suppose, is all I can ask for in a complimentary dish. 

Despite the longer-than-anticipated wait time, the evening was memorable and, at the very least, was a great environment to spend a couple of hours in. I would recommend trying a dosa to anyone; they have so many options that finding a flavour to suit you shouldn’t be an issue. It’s not the place to go for a cheap evening out, but it is by no means overpriced. So if you’re looking for a place to go for a special occasion, or a reason to venture past Magdalen Bridge, then Dosa Darlings is just right. 

We should hate more

Anish Vedantham
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We should hate more

Oxford students hate C*mbridge. Or at least, we’re supposed to. We call them Tabs, occasionally ‘shoe’ them, and inherit a rivalry as soon as we matriculate. There’s only one problem: most of the time, nobody seems particularly bothered.

The Varsity matches between Oxford and C*mbridge began with men’s cricket in 1827, followed by the first men’s Boat Race in 1829. Today, Varsity takes place across 50 sports and involves thousands of students. 

And yet, 200 years later, the rivalry rarely escapes the sporting world. Sure, we shout “shoe the Tabs” during the Boat Race and teams feel similar disdain when facing ‘the other place’ on the water, pitch, court, or track. But, aside from particular Varsity matches, the so-called hate seems a bit…lacklustre. 

Oxford beat C*mbridge 110 times last year and has recorded more wins than the Tabs in Varsity competitions for the past six years. Did you know? More importantly, did you care? We have two centuries of competition and two institutions obsessed with tradition. It should be impossible to manufacture a better rivalry. 

And yet much of it happens unnoticed.

Contrast this with American university rivalries. Harvard and Yale are perhaps the closest equivalents. Their American football match is simply “The Game”, and the rivalry stays with students throughout their lives.

And of course, that rivalry is tame compared to the heavy hitters. 

Duke students tent (camp outside the stadium) for weeks to win tickets to the game against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And it’s not just for the ultra sports fans; some years “more than 2/5 of the student body [have] attempt[ed] to earn a spot” tenting at the most difficult level. The Michigan – Ohio State rivalry presents another classic rivalry, where, during “hate week”, the Ohio State community crosses out every single “M” on campus with red tape.

Of course, these rivalries are a peculiarly American phenomenon and would feel forced here. But Britons do not lack tribal thinking.

Think about football derbies. North London. Merseyside. Manchester. Fans invest emotional significance in beating one particular club that massively exceeds the objective significance of the result. There are uglier manifestations, but there is also wonderfully pointless taunting.

Rivalry operates through agreed irrationality. In 2024, some Tottenham fans even hoped they would lose to Manchester City to prevent Arsenal from winning the league. We don’t need to import the American capacity for hatred. Britons have perfectly good hatred at home.

This is especially crucial at Oxford. For much of everyday life, Oxford isn’t one community. It’s dozens of colleges. We eat separately, live separately, and often socialise separately. It begs the question: what exactly is an Oxford student?

The collegiate structure is wonderful at producing college identity. It is considerably less good at producing Oxford identity. What exactly defines us? The University administration? The Rad Cam? A seal containing a Latin motto?

It can be difficult to work out what a PPEist at Somerville, a Philosophy and French student at Hertford, and a Classicist at Merton have in common. Fortunately, C*mbridge provides an answer: none of them are Tabs. 

Oxford does not necessarily need more spirit. It needs something around which spirit can crystallise. That’s where C*mbridge comes in. 

An ‘us’ becomes much easier to define once there is a ‘them’, and C*mbridge makes an unusually convenient ‘them’. It’s a collegiate university built around small-group teaching, formals, gowns, eight-week terms, and an impenetrable vocabulary – only with supervisions instead of tutorials, Easter instead of Trinity, and enough minor alterations to maintain the pretence of originality. A good rival, after all, must be similar enough that beating them matters and different enough that you can pretend it proves something. C*mbridge fills this role perfectly.

More importantly, there is a liberation in caring so much about something that matters so little. Oxford life offers no shortage of consequential competition: exams, internships, jobs. Hating C*mbridge offers the opposite. There is no rational reason why any of us should care. That’s exactly why we should.

Of course, the rivalry plainly isn’t dead. Rugby matches feature heckling, chants, and a crowd united around shoeing the Tabs. The Boat Race turns London into a sea of dark blue and light blue shirts. The rivalry, however, should not require a fixture. 

We should hate C*mbridge more comprehensively. Stop calling it C*mbridge: it is ‘the other place’. Call its students Tabs without really knowing why. Their shade is not light blue; it is an unfortunate failure to commit to a proper colour. Treat every league table on which Oxford finishes higher as vindication and the rest as methodologically suspect. When a friend announces that they are visiting, offer your condolences. In short, be petty. 

Perhaps, then, we should be grateful for C*mbridge. Every good protagonist needs an antagonist. They give our insults somewhere to land, and dozens of colleges something to agree upon. They can even make Oxford feel like one university.

That is a valuable public service. Obviously, we should never tell them. Instead, regard light blue with suspicion. Be partisan. Whenever you compare us to them, come to the completely dispassionate conclusion that Oxford is better. And if you happen to meet a Tab, be perfectly pleasant. They made a rough decision when they were 18. We’ve all been there.

C*mbridge has spent eight centuries giving Oxford somebody to hate. It would be rude not to take them up on their offer.

The rise of the pop girlie: Marketing mediocrity or feminism in action?  

Aoife Williams
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The rise of the pop girlie: Marketing mediocrity or feminism in action?  

“GIRLS INVENTED PUNK ROCK, NOT ENGLAND”: so reads the iconic green T-shirt of Sonic Youth legend Kim Gordon. The slogan stands in defiance of an unfortunate truth in the music industry: femininity and credibility often exist in contention with one another. Patti Smith, discussing her impact as a woman in the male-dominated 1970s punk scene, has expressed her resentment of the term ‘female artist’: “To me, I was an artist. We don’t use the expression ‘male artist’”. I share Smith’s reservations about the term ‘pop girlie’. The now well-established term, born from the boom in popularity of young female pop artists, feels to me somewhat belittling of women’s artistry. But my own gripes with the term aside, it’s worth exploring what it means for women in music, and for pop culture more broadly.   

It’s not unusual for glamorous women and their young, largely female audiences to dominate the charts: Madonna, for instance, is listed as the fourth best-selling artist of all time. The pop girlie explosion, though, has captured the zeitgeist with an era-defining ferocity previously reserved for men. The music we historically afford this label of ‘era-defining’ to is overwhelmingly male: The Beatles as the faces of peace, love, and LSD; the Sex Pistols as the ugly (and co-opted) face of punk; Nirvana as the begrudging kings of grunge; and so on. The year 2024, however, was to the pop girlies what 1976 was to punk. With the Eras Tour in full swing, the year was marked by several huge releases by female artists, notably Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, Gracie Abrams’ The Secret of Us and, of course, Charli XCX’s cultural behemoth, Brat. Admittedly, Brat aside, these releases are not to my personal taste, but my self-indulgent distrust of the mainstream doesn’t blind me to the significance of women becoming front and centre in an industry so historically hostile to us. 

The trend kept its momentum in 2025, diversifying as Olivia Dean’s R&B-infused The Art of Loving became a global phenomenon, and Slayyyter’s Crank introduced a hedonistic edge. Songs are becoming shorter and snappier, with the influence of alt-pop icon PinkPantheress evident in the increasing rarity of albums exceeding 30 minutes. Brevity, though, can entail a lack of depth. Internet music critic and self-important bald man Anthony Fantano said of Addison Rae’s debut Addison, for example, that beyond “its pleasant, gently danceable beats, and moody ennui… this record really contains no thrills or appeal or depth or excitement or substance”. Fantano speaks to a shallowness that is the product of a need for songs to be clippable and suitable as potentially viral soundbites for TikTok – a trade-off of artistry for marketability. Young female artists like Rae face ridicule for supposedly ruining music for everyone, whilst the profit-driven record executives who are actually to blame largely escape backlash. 

Dismissing music made by young, attractive women as unserious and shallow, though, isn’t a new phenomenon; it is a long-established tradition. Courtney Love once remarked that “proletariat male rock critics” had “a real problem… with denim boomer issues” when it came to accepting the credibility of glamorous women. The cultural ecosystem of which she spoke has since all but disappeared: music magazines which could once make or break careers are now reduced to niche online publications, unimportant to all but a particular group of vinyl-collecting, band-tee-adorning nostalgists. Her point stands, though: people who care about music can’t seem to help but revel in tearing apart the artistry of successful women.  

This is not to dismiss criticisms about the quality of music coming from the current pop girlie boom. To be honest, I find some of it to be absolute drivel (see Taylor Swift’s laughable latest single, ‘Cleveland!’). But I wouldn’t dare equate my own boredom with a lack of artistry. The three-minute pop song, for all its clichéd lyricism and its intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus unoriginality, is a sacred thing. The nature of pop music is that it is formulated to be popular. Not everything needs to be ‘boundary-breaking’, ‘ethereal’, or whichever other buzzwords Rolling Stone likes to throw around. Simplicity isn’t a crime; it’s the backbone of the music industry. 

I do wonder, though, whether a label such as pop girlie can be reductive. The tendency of audiences to place the artists we adore into neatly labelled boxes can be detrimental, as Charli XCX expresses in ‘Camera’, the fourth track on her newest album, Music, Fashion, Film: “Am I being fuckin’ stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen when I’m turning thirty-four?” 

Reaching new levels of fame with Brat seemingly came at a cost for the singer, who, after spending her career developing a complex, varied sound, suddenly found herself the caricatured face of a cultural movement beyond her control. Artists are fragile beings: if we try to reduce them to a two-dimensional label, they will retaliate with a mediocre swerve to grunge-pop.  

Some, though, have embraced grouping female artists. Olivia Rodrigo’s recent Daisy Chain Fields festival, which raised $20 million for organisations supporting women and girls, is a testament to this. The festival boasted a stacked line-up, bringing together some of the biggest female pop acts in recent years, including Chappell Roan, Mitski, and, of course, Rodrigo herself. A range of alternative acts also performed, including alt-rock veterans The Breeders and riot grrrls Bikini Kill. The festival’s marketing, shrouded in flowers and pastel tones, did not shy away from girlish motifs. Such a wholehearted embrace of the feminine aesthetics that our misogynistic popular culture has traditionally mocked creates the impression of a group of artists carving out a safe space for themselves in an industry that has long abused, mocked, and ignored them.  

With this sentiment in mind, I can see why the pop girlie phenomenon could be important for women’s place in our culture. Perhaps its flippancy is the whole point: embracing the artistry found in simple pop melodies and fun, girly aesthetics and demanding they be taken seriously. For all it may be a marketing ploy in plain sight, there is something to be said for the proliferation of music made by women and the wider impact it could have on the industry. If today our biggest pop stars are mostly young women, perhaps in ten years’ time indie and alternative scenes that currently struggle with seemingly constant scandals involving male musicians’ predatory behaviour will also become more welcoming spaces for women. Even if I were to be cynical and refuse to see this pop girlie influx as anything but a marketing ploy, this fact remains: anything Noah Kahan, Sombr, or Harry Styles can do, the pop girlies can do backwards and in heels.  

World music after ‘world music’

Agastya Anand
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World music after ‘world music’

On the face of it, the term ‘world music’ is perhaps one of the most unhelpful terms for any genre of music. While there is stylistic, lineage-based, and thematic common ground that connects the music we categorise as ‘rock’, ‘jazz’, ‘hip-hop’, or even ‘pop’ music together, there is not very much that connects ‘world’ music. 

If we go by the most liberal definition of world music, it’s simply any music released in a non-English language, or made outside the West (which is itself a very subjective geographic boundary). I like to narrow the term down to music that’s made outside the West, but heavily marketed to, if not self-consciously produced for, a Western audience. It’s still very much a ‘vibes-based’ descriptor, and I tend to associate it more with a certain language of exoticised marketing, typical of 1980s-2000s world music labels like Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records or David Byrne’s Luaka Bop. 

Byrne – formerly the frontman of the band Talking Heads – has incidentally written before about his distaste for the term world music in a 1992 article, where he called it “a label for anything at all that is not sung in English or anything that doesn’t fit into the Anglo-Western pop universe this year”. Byrne was, in my opinion, correct, and it seems like his advice has at least been somewhat heeded – even the organisers of the WOMAD festival, a yearly celebration of the genre founded by Peter Gabriel, have moved away from this term. But from an epistemological standpoint, the term has some utility – at least in the context of the late 20th century. Fela Kuti, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Youssou N’Dour – all artists who were marketed as making world music at some point or the other – may have very little in common musically, but they shared one common trait for the (Western) listener: their foreignness. In an era when music from outside the Western world was a novelty, this was enough to set them apart into a category of their own. 

Much like the generic term ‘Latin music’, which could apply to everything from Andean huayño rhythms to Nuyorican salsa and modern electro-reggaetón, ‘world music’ is essentially an etic descriptor. Interestingly, ‘Latin’ music seldom is categorised as world music, perhaps because it was more familiar to American audiences, and often catered to Latino audiences in the US as much as it did to curious white Americans. 

But does the term have any utility at all today? It seems like the world is – if not politically, then at least culturally – more globalised than ever. It’s no longer odd for Westerners or (more specifically) first worlders to listen to music from other parts of the globe. These artists – BTS, Burna Boy, Anitta, Bad Bunny, and many more – are not exactly comparable to the ‘world music’ of the past. This is not only because they tend to be as popular in their home countries as abroad (which was rare among world music artists with some exceptions) but also because their music isn’t treated as a novelty, or ‘exotic’; rather, it’s treated as simply another part of the globalised pop-music ecosystem. 

At the same time, demand for ‘obscure’ music from outside the West has not disappeared – as the popularity of labels like Awesome Tapes from Africa, Sublime Frequencies, Sahel Sounds, and Habibi Funk among music aficionados can attest. Artists like Omar Souleyman, Ata Kak, and Mdou Moctar seem to fit the mould of ‘world music’ from the 1980s much more than the more well-known non-English or non-Western artists one might spot on the Billboard charts. They have reached a position of modest success, but mostly through Western audiences and labels, and have remained only somewhat known at home. 

The most tangible legacy of world music is perhaps ‘worldbeat’, a genre that refers in broad strokes to Western pop or rock music infused with various ‘exotic’ stylings from ‘world music’ (think Paul Simon’s Graceland); a genre that is much more ‘real’ and definable than ‘world music’, and also has a much clearer lineage dating back all the way to the ‘exotica’ of the 1950s. This genre isn’t the most popular today, but it’s not dead, as recent (and rather popular) releases by Gorillaz and Ed Sheeran would suggest. 

In the era of globalisation, ‘world music’ is something of an anomaly. On one hand, we are more culturally connected than ever; the internet has created opportunities for people across the world to communicate with each other.

However, globalisation is asymmetric: because Western (and particularly, Anglo-American) culture is globally hegemonic, globalisation reinforces that dominance and rarely lets artists from the Global South speak for themselves without Western interference. Moreover, even popular artists from outside the Anglo-American world have faced backlash when entering the mainstream – one needs only to look at the negative reactions from the American right-wing mediasphere to the recent Super Bowl performance by Bad Bunny. But even withholding parochialism, the view of the Global North and the West as the ‘default’ is still prevalent even among those not defined by ideological fervour. Perhaps, if we want to get rid of the ‘exoticism’ regarding music from around the world, it might be best not simply to preach about it when it relates to music, but rather to push for cultural exchange to be the norm, and not to be an oddity.

The elusive career paths of humanities students: Does the ‘Oxford bubble’ breed employment anxiety? 

Bella Hughes
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The elusive career paths of humanities students: Does the ‘Oxford bubble’ breed employment anxiety? 

Strong-minded and academically driven undergraduates are certainly not something found lacking at the University of Oxford. The thousands who swarm the streets of this beautiful city of ‘dreaming spires’ bustle about the centre, emitting a hum of excited determination. What exactly these ‘buzzing’ students are determined to achieve can vary. For freshers, it might be making their time here rich with new experiences and people, or maybe it’s the aspiration to achieve a distinction in their Preliminary Examinations. However, for those of us approaching our final year, career-led ambitions have, to a certain degree, overtaken academic concerns at the forefront of our minds. 

Although the word ‘finals’ is enough to generate anxiety in even the most level-headed among us – a feeling my flatmate and I commonly refer to as ‘the pit’ – it is also the worry of what lies beyond these fated examinations that can daily plague both our conscious and subconscious minds. The pressure to know where our careers are headed is often amplified by our parents (or grandmothers, in my case!), some of whom might have a more definitive idea about where our degrees will take us. It is true that some come to Oxford with a clear picture of where they would like to be in ten years’ time; however, amid the masses of budding professionals, there are those of us who feel lost regarding what we truly desire to do with the rest of our lives. If you share similar anxieties, it is not inconceivable to perceive yourself ‘falling behind’ in an imagined race set along a preordained linear trajectory. 

Surrounded by peers who have already secured placements or appear to know exactly the career path they are about to embark on, it is easy to develop a sense that you are running out of time. This is only amplified by the frequent stories of the dire state of the graduate job market, passed through the grapevine of the recently (and not-so-recently) graduated. We undergraduates often hear horror stories about how long it can take after graduating to find a company willing to interview you, let alone hire you, despite potentially having received a first-class degree from one of the finest universities across the globe. Unfortunately, there does not seem to exist an easily deducible ‘correct’ path one ought to take; one that might prove all the time spent studying intensely, coming home early from a night out to cram, and the sleepless nights spent completing essays has been worthwhile. 

I believe a feeling many undergraduates here will resonate with is academic perfectionism that is almost never satiated, at least in the long term. After achieving one goal, the next takes over, and the drive to succeed and prove oneself can become overwhelming, without one really being aware of what it is that matters so greatly about being ‘the best’. It is this compulsion that has troubled me recently. While I am not sure I would go as far as to say that Oxford breeds specific expectations of ‘right’ career progressions for its graduating students, I would be lying if I claimed I didn’t believe a competitive environment such as this can encourage the feeling commonly labelled ‘impostor syndrome’, convincing you that there are such expectations to which one must live up in order to ‘fit in’.

Furthermore, this unsettling feeling can pose an issue for humanities students such as myself. Many humanities degrees do not lead directly into a specific professional field. As someone who studies Theology and Religion, I have often been asked if I intend to pursue a career in the Church but, as an atheist, this path is not one I have been especially tempted by, or would be particularly appropriate for me. The response that follows this answer is usually a variation of: “Well, what else can you do with your degree?” The answer, luckily (or unluckily – depending on how you look at it), for me is “quite a lot actually”. But this also poses a significant problem. Without my degree leading me to a specific career, my choices are rather expansive, which can be quite daunting if you, like myself, chose your subject out of passion, rather than practical use. Thus, the seemingly ‘elusive’ career path of humanities students is one that can provoke an ever-resurfacing anxiety when it becomes the topic of conversation. 

Now, as I enter my final year, I am still none the wiser regarding my career aspirations beyond those which most primary school children could identify: reasonably high-paying, relatively enjoyable, and somewhat related to my degree. These criteria would then, hopefully, make my degree, and the approximately £60,000 worth of debt I will have accumulated in my studies, worthwhile (though most ten-year-olds might not include the latter). Perhaps this seems juvenile and obvious, and it is certainly not at all helpful in narrowing down what I want to do. Nevertheless, in writing this, I am aware that, when one doesn’t know exactly where to begin in the search for job prospects, this is not necessarily the worst place to start! After all, in a pool of fresh graduates eager to find employment, I would wager that being open to anything while I find my feet is no bad thing. 

I have been working on the assumption that the path I need to take to achieve my ‘dream’ career (whatever that might be) is linear and flat – something that any path towards something worth having rarely is. If my slightly vague, short-term and more generic aspirations have gotten me this far, then I am sure that, in time, they will get me to where I eventually decide I want to be. 

I have spent the last year preaching that finally letting go of internal pressure to ‘be the best’ is what actually got me to where I am now, rather than overloading myself with the expectation that I need to meet a certain goal in order to make my degree ‘worthwhile’. It is perhaps time I began to heed my own advice: to let myself enjoy my final year here for the wonderful experience it is, and realise that I have the privilege of time to discover what I would like to pursue a career in, and change my mind again, and again, before I get it right.

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