Monday 13th April 2026
Blog Page 472

Making Football Fun: Lessons from Carlos Kaiser

Bailey Kavanagh
-
0
Making Football Fun: Lessons from Carlos Kaiser

I’d like to start with the story of Carlos Raposo. Please bear with me if you’ve heard it before. Raposo, or ‘Kaiser’, as he was better known, was one of Brazil’s most famous footballers for over 20 years and perhaps the most spectacular conman in the sport’s history. Despite his standing as a footballing superstar, and his status as a close friend of actual Brazilian footballing legends Bebeto and Renato Gaúcho, he never appeared in a single competitive fixture.

Kaiser basically couldn’t play football, and built a career spanning three decades off of a completely manufactured reputation. In his own words, he “wanted to be a footballer, but did not want to play football”. The con, at its simplest, involved befriending huge numbers of journalists, scouts and players during his extravagant partying, and then asking them to vouch for him whenever he needed a transfer.

Naturally, he needed transfers often – if he’d ever actually kicked a ball, he would have been exposed as a fraud and unceremoniously kicked out of football for good. At every new club, after arriving to much fanfare, he would claim to be injured, out of match fitness, or not yet sharp enough to train with the ball. If the club pushed him too hard, he would hire a dentist to claim that a focal infection would keep him on the sidelines. When his employers invariably got fed up, Kaiser would just have his friends in the media write a new series of fictional stories about him to get him re-hired, and the partying would continue.

The lengths that the so-called “King of Rio” would go to to not play football only escalated as his renown grew. He paid youth team players to injure him and supposedly bribed a doctor that one club hired to cure him of his made up ailments. In 1986, after a move to Europe, his new club Gazélec Ajaccio arranged a training session in front of fans to celebrate his arrival. Instead of playing badly and ruining his image as one of Brazil’s most exciting exports, Kaiser spent the entire session kicking the ball into the stands and kissing the badge.

At Bangu, he was actually put on the bench. This was a disaster waiting to happen. At 2-0 down, Kaiser was sent to warm up. After 10 years, he was going to be made to play, and his life as a playboy footballer would be over. His relationships with the footballing elite of Rio would collapse, he’d lose access to the exclusive clubs he so loved, and the near constant drug-fuelled womanising would end. This could not be allowed. He started a riot. Acting upon the unseen ‘provocations’ of opposition fans, he jumped the fence, started fighting, and was shown a red card before he could come on. His contract was extended for six months and his salary doubled as a thank you for defending the club’s honour.

His entire career is shrouded in mystery. Kaiser would tell you that he spent eight years in France, becoming a club legend at Ajaccio. Wikipedia tentatively claim that he “allegedly” played there for two years. The Ajaccio chairman does not remember him ever showing up. The entire story feels like a period piece, set on the wonderful backdrop of Brazilian football culture of the 70s and 80s. Showmanship, pomp and spectacle stood above sporting talent as the keys to impressing the gatekeepers of Rio’s socialite class. It wasn’t so much about being a good footballer, it was about being a cool footballer, and Kaiser was the coolest of them all.

I can’t be alone in thinking that it’s a shame that the tale of ‘the greatest footballer to never play football’ has to be consigned to the history books – it’s just too much fun for that. And yet, it is so obviously clear that it couldn’t happen today. The internet would have hung Kaiser out to dry of course, but the issue to me seems to be more about how we as fans interact with our sports teams. We’re watching too closely. If anyone had taken the time to actually check, to hunt down his stats, to know everything about his career path, playing style and footballing philosophy, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. Kaiser was able to exist not because he was pre-internet, but because the footballing world didn’t sweat the small stuff as much.

Think about what would happen today if Kaiser signed for your club. First would come the weeks of brilliantly click-baitey news articles. Someone would put a compilation of all his greatest moments to dubstep and post it to Youtube Someone else would make a montage of all his worst moments, and use it as evidence to argue that the club should fire the scouting department. There would be dozens of Twitter threads about whether he should be deployed in a 4-4-2 or a 4-3-3. Before anyone is actually photographed holding the shirt, hundreds of thousands of small conversations happen, about every single element of the deal, each one to be rendered irrelevant the second a ball is kicked.

I was watching the end of this summer’s transfer window closely, probably too closely. I’m an Arsenal supporter, and was anxious to see if long-promised midfield reinforcements were actually going to show up. Late on deadline day, a friend sent me a link tracking a private plane that had left Madrid about an hour earlier. He argued that this Athletico Madrid’s Thomas Partey was on the plane, and that this was the final piece of evidence that we needed before we could rest easy. (The friend was wrong, the plane took a telling right-hand turn over Paris).

I’m not trying to argue that anyone should care less, or even that they should spend less time thinking about football, but I am claiming that we might be thinking about the wrong stuff. It’s great that fans get excited about new signings, tracking planes might just be unhelpful. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with caring about the details, but I do wonder if anyone’s enjoyment of football is in any way enhanced by knowing the name of your club’s goalkeeping coach.

More and more, we convince ourselves that all the stuff around the game is just as interesting and worth caring about as the actual football. We know more than ever about the exact inner-workings of our clubs and their power-dynamics. We speculate about sell-on and buy-back clauses in player contracts. We worry about the effect on the wage structure of a big new signing. We pretend to all be statisticians, business consultants, and fitness experts to show how much we care. It seems to me that following a sport, and caring about as much as we do about the detail is like to sitting way too close to the television. You can see every pixel, sure, but they’re individually meaningless, and the movie would just be prettier if you moved back a bit and enjoyed watching them link up.

I think that this problem extends beyond how we watch football, and into how the game is played. I was excited for the introduction of VAR, but understand now why there is so much disdain for every decision it makes. There is nothing pretty about a marginal offside call. Absolutely no-one is watching football to figure out whether your hair counts as a part of your body that can play a striker on-side. We spend an absurd amount of time talking about the intricacies of the hand-ball rule, and debating where arms begin and shoulders end, whether arm-pits are a part of the body, or just the gap between your arm and your shoulder. The hand-ball rule ideally, would be the simplest rule in football! Its basic purpose is to separate football from rugby. It’s there to stop people picking the ball up, or volleyball-spiking it into the goal. Anyone who plays casual football understands that, and can tell intuitively when a foul is being committed. There is a natural sense of what is and isn’t a hand-ball, that seemed to largely work until now. On the pitch, somehow, football needs to relax.

This season, I’m going to try to care about football just as much as before, but sweat the small stuff less. Hopefully, I’ll forget the name of the Arsenal CEO, and worry less about the club’s finances. I’ll try to watch games, to enjoy the sport, the pageantry and the showmanship before checking twitter to find out who is playing well. I’d like to think that if football as a whole left scouting to the scouts, and accounting to the accountants, and we all just switched off a little, another story as brilliant as Carlos Kaiser’s would come along. If there ever comes to be another fake footballer, I hope that none of us will be paying enough attention to notice him.

Interview: New University Mental Health Taskforce launched

Joe Hyland Deeson and Abigail Howe
-
0
Interview: New University Mental Health Taskforce launched

Oxford University has launched a Mental Health Task Force to consider the “immediate needs” of students during the pandemic after observing an increase in demand for welfare services over the long vacation. The Task Force will work through until the end of January and bring together those from the NHS, the University’s Counselling and Disability Services, as well as representatives from colleges and students. Cherwell spoke to Gillian Hamnett, the Director of Student Welfare and Support Services across the University, and Sir Tim Hitchens, President of Wolfson College, who are leading the Mental Health Task Force.

While the Mental Health Task Force has only been publicised recently, it has been planned since the long vacation. Tim Hitchens stated: “Over the summer it became clear that we had not only a significantly increased number of mental health challenges but also that we would have a record number of students at the university this term… In September, we felt that we ought to have a task force which for a limited period focussed on making sure that the university took policy decisions and focussed on moving resources”. He continued: “What we’re doing is bringing people together and offering recommendations to those organisations that do make the decisions”. 

Gillian Hamnett expanded on this, clarifying the link between this Task Force and the University’s previous actions regarding mental health: “The Mental Health Task Force complements the longer term strategic work of the Student Wellbeing and Mental Health strategy which was launched last year but that takes a much longer view”. 

The Student Wellbeing and Mental Health strategy was launched in October 2019 and plans to build on the £2.7 million spent on welfare services in 2018-19 and “embed wellbeing into all aspects of students’ university life, from learning and life skills to community, inclusion and support.” Hamnett also highlighted the overlap between those with involvement in the Mental Health Task Force and those who are making longer term decisions: “The idea is that the Task Force can benefit from their expertise and feedback to longer term strategy, even though its remit is quite short.”

One of the first steps taken by the Mental Health Task Force has been to provide £150,000 to reinforce the University’s Counselling Service over this term and £50,000 over the Christmas period. Hitchens described the tangible impact of this support: “The average waiting time for the service is about 8.9 days and we got to the period a few weeks ago where it was nearly 4 weeks… with more resources in the counseling service the waiting time for access which has been lengthening is steadying off and will shorten: that will be an immediate response”. 

Hitchens also highlighted the Counselling Service’s website as a preventative resource, which has information ranging from articles about “how to survive alone in a room” to podcasts about the “challenges of COVID”. The University has also subscribed to Togetherall. Hamnett said that the service, originally known as Big White Wall “offers quite a lot of self-reflection and self-help resources, but is there to help you see if you have tipped over into needing a more focussed intervention, but also the advice on the challenges of living how we’re living right now”.

Right now, many students are concerned for their mental health over the winter vacation, especially those who are staying in Oxford.  One of the Mental Health Task Force’s aims is to plan “for the mental health needs of students over the vacations”. Hamnett explained that “for students staying over the vacation we’re hoping to produce some specific information on what you can do to support yourself in a way that perhaps hasn’t always been clear in the past”. An additional sum of money will also ensure that the Counselling Service can provide greater provision over the vacation.

Another of the Mental Health Task Force’s aims is advising “on the mental health impact and use of University policies including the Fitness to Study programme during the pandemic”. This does include disciplinary policies for those who are found to have breached any rules prompted by COVID-19. 

However, Hamnett stressed that this aim was not a move towards a universal University policy: “The Task Force can’t set colleges’ discipline policies but it can advise on specific issues where we think there might be mental health implications and say here are some things that we can take into account. We can’t get a particular college to change their policy or their approach. We need to be realistic about what we can influence and what we can’t.”

Speaking about the Fitness to Study framework, which determines “whether a student is fit to study or to return to study after a period of leave for medical, psychological, or emotional problems” and has been controversial for student suspensions, Hitchens said: “I know [it] has attracted a certain stigma that it is somehow something to do with discipline rather than health and wellbeing” but that he wished for the Fitness to Study process to “be more widely understood as not part of the disciplinary process but as a way in which we can support those students which, for a variety of reasons which could include mental health challenges, are not fit to study and support them through to the stage where they are”.

Both Hamnett and Hitchens highlighted the importance of welfare within colleges, with Hitchens noting the “enormous amount of expertise developed by the Peer Supporters and welfare officers in colleges who are often trained and supported by people from the Counselling Service”. However, they are also seeking to provide support for these students. Hitchens continued: “I would hope  that if you are someone in a college with responsibility for the mental health of your students, if you felt a little unsupported there should be an added layer of professional support to some of those people”.

All Souls College change Codrington Library name, but keep statue of slaveholder

Amelia Wood
-
0
All Souls College change Codrington Library name, but keep statue of slaveholder

All Souls College’s Governing Body has announced that they will no longer call their college library ‘the Codrington Library’, acknowledging that plantations worked by enslaved people were the source of revenue for Codrington’s donation. A new name for the library has not been specified.

However, the governing body stopped short of deciding to remove the statue of Codrington which stands in the centre of the library.

The college said instead that they would seek to “investigate further forms of memorialisation and contextualisation within the library, which will draw attention to the presence of enslaved people on the Codrington plantations, and will express the College’s abhorrence of slavery.”

In a statement published online, All Souls acknowledged that “Codrington’s wealth derived largely from his family’s activities in the West Indies, where they owned plantations worked by enslaved people of African descent.” 

The college noted their efforts over the past three years to address the Codrington legacy. The college said they had donated £100,000 to Codrington College, Barbados, and they permanently set aside £6 million of the College’s endowment to fully fund three graduate studentships at Oxford for students from the Caribbean. 

On the statute, they have installed “a large memorial plaque at the entrance to the library, ‘In memory of those who worked in slavery on the Codrington plantations in the West Indies’.”

Christopher Codrington (1668-1710) was a Barbadian-born English slaveholder, soldier, and colonial governor in the West Indies. Educated at Christ Church Oxford, he was later elected to All Souls college as a probationer fellow in 1690. In 1698, he succeeded his father as commander-in-chief and captain-general of the Leeward Islands, an island group in the northeast Caribbean Sea. He also inherited his father’s estates, plantations, and enslaved people on the islands. 

A complaint was made against his rule by the inhabitants of Antigua which was later dismissed by the House of Commons. In 1703, after he failed to capture Guadeloupe as part of a war with France and Spain, he left the governorship and spent the rest of his life on his plantations in Barbados. His body is buried in the All Souls Chapel. 

In his will he left £10,000 and £6,000 worth of books to All Souls College, which they used to establish the library. His will also left two plantations in Barbados to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, with instructions to continue slaveholding. 

Common Ground Oxford, a student-led movement founded to examine Oxford University’s colonial past, published the following statement, calling for further action: “We welcome All Souls College’s recent statement on Codrington’s legacy at the College, and we are writing today with hopes for further discussion and change… 

“However, the decision to retain Henry Cheere’s statue of slave-owner Christopher Codrington in All Souls’ Library came as a great disappointment to us. This decision exhibits All Souls’ inability to stand in solidarity with Black and POC communities, who have campaigned to make Oxford reckon with its past for decades. The choice to preserve the statue cannot be reconciled with the College’s stated commitments to ‘investigate further forms of memorialisation and contextualisation’ with regards to Codrington’s legacy…

“Codrington’s legacy is his wealth, accumulated from systematic sexual exploitation, trafficking and mass murder…This has caused generational trauma not just for their descendants, but for all people of African & Caribbean descent to this day…

“Physically, this statue cannot be made neutral: it is positioned such that onlookers stand at his stone feet, its pose is one of heroism and prestige. No plaque could sanitise the harm of continuing to elevate this slave-owner. No plaque could do justice to the thousands of enslaved people whose forced labour generated the wealth on which All Souls Library stands.”

Read Common Ground Oxford’s full statement here. Read All Souls College’s statement here.

Great Thunberg’s Spitting Image Sketch and the Problem with Political Satire

Thomas McKeown
-
0
Great Thunberg’s Spitting Image Sketch and the Problem with Political Satire

Between 1984 and 1996, the BAFTA and Emmy-winning satire show Spitting Image spoke truth to power on British television. If you were one of the 15 million people who tuned into ITV on Sunday primetime, you’d find caricature puppet versions of smarmy politicians, shameless celebrities and vapid sports stars being hysterically impersonated and ridiculed. The show revolved around and revelled in its political incorrectness, and now 24 years later – at what many are calling a more necessary time than ever – it’s back.

Just three episodes of the first season have been released so far, but by all accounts it’s just as irreverent and fearless as it was all those years ago. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at their YouTube channel. “Spitting Image: Vicious, Grotesque, Brilliant”, boasts the title of one promotional trailer viewed almost half a million times in three days. And that’s not to mention the reception of the audience: “Finally a blow of fresh air. Your politically incorrect humour is very much needed nowadays,” sighs one commenter with a Union Jack as their display picture. You can see where they’re coming from: if ever there was a year where some satire would serve as a well-received distraction, 2020’s the one – and don’t you worry, for Trump, Brexit, Boris and COVID are all firmly in Spitting Image’s crosshairs.

But among the satirical subjects targeted in the reboot of the show, one name particularly stands out to me: Greta Thunberg. A 17-year-old with Asperger’s whose sole misdemeanour was to dare to take the ruling class of Europe to task regarding their lack of sufficient policy to prevent an environmental crisis. The decision to make Thunberg a recurring character seems short-sighted at best, and outright hateful at worst. If they had to include a mock puppet of her, they could’ve at least made it funny. In the pilot episode, the severe-looking caricature of Greta appears just once, presenting the weather forecast and declaring that the weather will be “HOT”. Haha! Get it? She’s the weirdo climate change girl! The second episode features a longer sketch wherein Greta goes to a West Ham match with a stereotypical cockney bloke and ends up becoming so incensed over the football that she insists on protesting and coming back every week to fix the injustices she sees on the pitch. Here it is, if you’re interested:

https://twitter.com/mchammer66/status/1315008443250552837

Sure, I don’t think it’s particularly funny, but of course, humour is subjective. People might laugh at certain parts, and that’s completely fine – we don’t all have the same taste. What, to me, is the more concerning aspect of all of this is the ‘If It’s Getting The Snowflakes Offended Then It Must Be Good’ brigade coming out in their droves to champion scenes like these, and the reboot of Spitting Image on the whole, as a necessary and effective satire show in 2020. The problem is twofold: firstly, that the show offers critique of people like Greta who don’t really deserve ridicule; and secondly, that all of the critique is completely toothless. Compared to the cutting-edge and culture-shaping Spitting Image of the 80s and 90s, this reboot seems to have taken out its dentures and started sipping the political and environmental crises through a straw.

Even if you happen to think scenes depicting Greta going to the football or Boris having sex with coronavirus itself (yes, seriously) make for great television, the satire still doesn’t break through and offer any effective and long-lasting criticism of the increasingly worrying developments around the world. Satirical novelist Jonathan Coe has reflected on the purpose of humour, saying: “laughter is a kind of last resort – if you’re up against a problem that’s completely (unsolvable), a situation for which there is no human solution and never will be, then OK – let’s laugh about it”. And in genres of comedy which don’t have any other stated purpose, like slapstick or sitcoms, that’s brilliant. When Laurel and Hardy can’t push a piano up the stairs, we’re laughing at them struggling because they’re reflecting a failure of the human condition, showing their exaggerated inability to fight against the forces of physics. But when the subject is political problems, and the genre is satire shows which at least purportedly attempt to make us think about those problems, the effect seems to get lost somewhat. Unlike in slapstick, you can’t only go for the joke or only present the absurdity of what’s on screen if you want to actually make people see Trump, Boris or indeed Greta Thunberg as people worthy of critique. Plenty of folks love the ‘black comedy’ and political incorrectness of the reboot of Spitting Image, but what am I meant to actually be thinking when I’m watching the Prime Minister seducing a strain of a deadly virus in bed? When the weirdly widely faced Greta puppet laments that “the referee has stolen my childhood with his erratic decision making,” what’s actually being said about her effectiveness as a leader in the fight against climate change? Britbox director Reemah Sakaan has responded to criticism of Thunberg’s inclusion, saying that: It’s a very straightforward joke and is nothing to do with her as an individual,” but that’s exactly the problem: if the jokes are straightforward and there isn’t any criticism of individuals being offered, then it seems fairly clear to me that the modern reboot of Spitting Image is no satire at all.

A lot of people like to say that the new wave of political correctness has marked the death of inappropriate humour. I think quite the opposite. Satire in the 21st century has the potential to be both amazingly funny and a priceless tool in holding celebrities accountable and speaking truth to power, but the true intention of the comedy needs to be crystal clear, equal parts court jester and town crier. In the past fifteen years, the overwhelming majority of popular satire has been weak enough to warrant a pat on the head and even an endorsement from the ruling class, rendering it utterly redundant. Of course, it can still be funny. 2008 US Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is almost as famous for being perfectly and hilariously impersonated by Tina Fay on Saturday Night Live as she is for her political career. But when Fay chose to discuss the mechanics and humour of her own impression rather than the intention of the satire on popular US talk shows, and when Saturday Night Live chose to air an episode with a collaboration(!) between Tina Fey and the real politician she was impersonating just weeks before the 2008 Presidential election, the utter pointlessness of the show’s attempt at satire became evident. Viewers weren’t switching off their screens more aware of Sarah Palin’s tendency to avoid questions, nor her views on same-sex marriage or Second Amendment rights. If anything, SNL’s depiction of Palin only served to make her more likeable.

Spitting Image’s return has the potential to bring back effective political satire at a time when it’s most needed and after, but their choice of characters and ad hominem-oriented sketches have missed the mark. If they can stop being so busy concerning themselves with trying so hard to be funny and deliberately and clumsily overstepping the boundaries, they might just end up creating satire with a real purpose.

Illustration by Amir Pichhadze.

Review: Sufjan Stevens’ ‘The Ascension’

Jennifer Goodier
-
0
Review: Sufjan Stevens’ ‘The Ascension’

With access only to a drum machine and a computer, the rest of his instruments being in storage after moving, Sufjan Stevens’ September album The Ascension is perhaps his most ‘simple’ and electropop-esque yet. Talking to The Guardian on its release, he discusses how his mind was not in the same folk sphere of his previous break-through successes such as Illinois and Carrie & Lowell: “I’d packed up my guitars in the storage and I think mentally I’d packed away that aesthetic, too.” The album also manifests a far cry from the introspective lyrics often associated with Stevens, instead representing his desire to respond to the volatile political climate and hostile world of the internet.

Opening with the fiery track ‘Make Me An offer I Cannot Refuse’, an exasperated demand for a sign from God in response to the current state of the world, Stevens sets the scene for a more pushy and angsty take on the chaos of humanity than some of his previous work. In quite a severe contrast, the less punchy yet more commercially successful ‘Run Away With Me’ takes a quick musical and lyrical respite from the heavy subject matter of the album to replicate the light fantasy of modern pop culture. Nevertheless, the last thirty-odd seconds of the song remind me of those solemn, ethereal outros which can be found in numerous Carrie & Lowell tracks. So even while attempting to invoke a contemporary pop spirit, something of Stevens’ mellow reflectivity lingers.

‘Video Game’, the second single of the album, continues this more commercial song-writing, with its repeated mantra “I don’t wanna play your video game” providing a catchy albeit still melancholy chorus. Indeed, the song centres around self-identity and fighting against the modern goal of accolades, likes and follows, something somewhat ironic given the commercial sound and production of this very song. Moving on to ‘Lamentations’, a song I kept skipping until I stuck around long enough to hear one of Stevens’ beautifully ethereal, choral outros, we can sense an echoing of a wider theme of the album with the repeated line “I am the future, define the future”: a suggestion of the need to assess the “sense of urgency” surrounding the longevity of capitalism and its issues. Sufjan Stevens opens up to these urgent fears in ‘Tell Me You Love Me’, opening the track with the lines “I’ve lost my faith in everything”.

“I wanna die happy” are the only lyrics of the eerie and existential track ‘Die Happy’, which I strangely enjoy as a brief reminder in the midst of the album of the small goals of humanity in momentous times. Following on from this, ‘Ativan’, a song exploring the use of prescribed drugs for anxiety and insomnia and the struggle to see a greater purpose in life, once again demonstrates Stevens’ exquisite knack for reflective endings, with a pulsating beat uncomfortably mimicking the panic of existential fear and sleepless nights as the song fades out.

‘Ursa Major’ and ‘Landslide’ are, perhaps unusually, my favourite tracks on the album. From the reconclitary and soulful lines of ‘Ursa Major’, calling the lord to “call off all your invasion” for the sake of the beauty all around, to the calm musical notes of ‘Landslide’, invoking the idea of love as a sudden wave of uncontrollable feelings, these two tracks are pure and pastoral amidst the cold, chaotic world of human brutality depicted elsewhere in this album.

‘Gilgamesh’ and ‘Death Star’ are both powerful tracks in their own right, dealing with an ancient quest for immortality and humanity’s failure to deal with climate change respectively, but musically and aesthetically fail to leave an impression on me. The beautiful transition into the floaty electro-beats of ‘Goodbye To All That’, however, marks the beginning of a final few spectacular songs.

‘Sugar’ – a song all about embracing goodness and purity and making it your own – the album’s title track ‘The Ascension’, and the epic twelve minute song ‘America’, finish this one hour-plus epic album in style. ‘The Ascension’ in particular makes this album for me, with its evoking of the wider theme of the album, expressed by Stevens himself, of having previously had a naïve outlook on the world. The repeated “What now?” in the outro sets an uneasy foundation for ‘America’, a “protest song against the sickness of American culture”. 

Indeed, what makes the final track and the whole album all the more powerful is the context of Stevens’ abandoned Fifty States Project. Stevens’ demand, “Don’t do to me what you did to America”, constitutes a far cry from the man who set out to write an album per American state to celebrate their individual beauty. Instead, The Ascension provides a disillusioned and heart-broken call to action from someone whose eyes have been opened to the long and tumultuous history leading up to America’s current situation. This is perfectly achieved with the mixture of electronic sounds and ‘pop’ lyrics – and they do not diminish the power of Sufjan’s song-writing and delivery at all.

Professorship in vaccinology secured by £3 million Saïd donation

Mark Robins
-
0
Professorship in vaccinology secured by £3 million Saïd donation

Oxford’s vaccine development team has received a £3.33 million gift from Wafic Saïd. The money will be used to fund the professorship in vaccinology, creating a permanent endowment for the position. The post, currently held by Professor Sarah Gillbert, will be known as the Saïd Professor of Vaccinology.

Oxford says the gift will ensure Professor Gilbert can “continue her ground-breaking research in the field, while also helping to ensure that Oxford remains at the forefront of vaccine development for generations to come.”

Gilbert has been working on Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine since 11 January and previously led development of the universal flu vaccine which underwent clinical trials in 2011. Due to her work on the COVID vaccine, Bazaar magazine named her one of 2020’s Women of the Year.

The donation was made by the Saïd family, a wealthy Saudi Arabian family and chief benefactor of the Saïd Business School. The University has also given £1.66 million to fund the position.

Saïd told The Daily Mail: “Professor Gilbert is a great scientist. It is the single most important thing to bring us back to normality – to have this vaccine.”

Saïd is a Saudi Arabian financier and philanthropist who is worth £1.5 billion, according to the Times. He is one of Oxford’s biggest donators and donated over £15 million towards a new teaching facility in 2019.

He added: “I am delighted to support [Gilbert} and the University of Oxford as they work urgently towards developing a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus. This is the single most important thing in the world today as the only way we can return to normality is to have an effective vaccine.

“I hope that the Saïd Professorship of Vaccinology will strengthen in perpetuity the University’s efforts to be a world leader in vaccine research.”

Professor Gavin Screaton, head of the Medical Sciences Division, said: “We are deeply grateful to Wafic Saïd and his family for their incredibly generous gift.

“By securing the future of this important post, the University will be able to continue to deliver and indeed accelerate its world-leading vaccine development research – work that will have an impact on lives globally both during this crisis and as other such challenges arise in the future.”

In July, Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal donated £3.5 million to fund another professorship in vaccinology. This donation supported the position held by Professor Adrian Hill, Director of the Oxford Jenner Institute.

The U.S. election: three students’ perspective

Various contributors
-
0
The U.S. election: three students’ perspective

Anvee Bhutani – Time for (very) cautious optimism 

Living in the UK while America goes through one of the most defining elections of our time has been one of the most out-of-body experiences. My daily routine for nearly the past month has consisted of waking up and looking through the polls and opinion articles as well as asking my friends back home to tell me what the general sentiment is looking like back home. Being from California, everyone I know has had strong opposition towards Donald Trump since the primaries in 2016; indeed, we did not even believe him to be electable so the news then came as a shock which radically increased partisanship and animosity towards the rest of the country. Now, four years later, the election has similarly been a disappointing one, as if I am watching America fail as a state in slow motion. From the disastrous COVID-19 plan to the problematic response to BLM to the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, this year has slowly unfolded to become a living dystopian nightmare. And as always, the candidate choices seem like picking the lesser of two evils, the exact same phrase that was used in 2016. With Biden and Harris now elected, though I am happier than I would’ve been with the alternate outcome, I am worried that there is a lack of a national agenda and that identity politics is in part why their platform became so massively popular. I am therefore cautiously optimistic about the future, keeping in mind that because the bar has been set so low, there is not much to expect from either of these two in response to issues such as climate change or military interventionism abroad. Nonetheless, I do feel at ease knowing that Trump will not be getting a second term and that there will be at least a semblance of change coming to the White House within the next couple of months.

Rita Kimijima-Dennemeyer – Let’s not get complacent

Seeing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania turn blue brought me joy even amidst my multiple crises (both essay and otherwise) this week. Nonetheless, the overwhelming feeling in my heart is not one of celebration, but rather, one of tiredness.

To those who feel genuine happiness about the results of the election, I can only say that I am jealous. Happiness is hard to come by these days, and I say enjoy it while it lasts.  But these past four years have done little to nothing to resolve the issues that we faced in 2016, and if anything, the effects of the pandemic and subsequent civil unrest have made them worse. Wealth disparity in the U.S. has been exacerbated in the past year, with COVID-related unemployment on one hand and the increasing ridiculousness of Jeff Bezos’ income on the other. Disproportionate COVID deaths among people of color, and particularly Black and Indigenous people, have yet again revealed persistent racial inequalities. Furthermore, the Black Lives Matter protests have brought the desperate need for police reform and racial justice to popular light. Compared to being part of what will no doubt be a historic election, it is far less glamorous to have difficult conversations with our family members and acquaintances about sociopolitical issues that have been around for so long that they seem a necessary evil, or quietly donating $10 to a charity on a Sunday afternoon. But it is these small actions that make a difference between elections, and which can contribute to changing people’s minds about how to vote when the time comes again. We have all (hopefully) cast our ballots, and now all we can do regarding this election is wait. But our political involvement should be far from over.

Sonya Ribner – A victory for empathy and experience

“What comes next?” King George asks the newborn America in the musical Hamilton. While the country no longer has to construct a government from scratch, it must resuscitate the one it has. Joe Biden’s victory is a declaration in favor of science, competence, experience, empathy, and unification. However, the break was anything but clean: a razor-thin margin split blue and red on Election Day.

Overlooking the precipice of a firmly divided country, President-Elect Biden must tackle the pandemic, confront an existential environment threat exacerbated by the current administration and, in his own words, “battle to achieve racial justice and root out systemic racism.” The open question remains whether a Senate increasingly likely to have a Republican majority and the Trump Supreme Court will hamstring any meaningful initiatives attempted by a President Biden. Indeed, the senate majority leader presently supports Trump’s “right” to legally challenge the election’s outcome when no credible evidence has surfaced to contest the election results.

In spite of looming roadblocks, Joe Biden’s win matters. Not only will Kamala Harris be America’s first woman, first Black, and first South Asian vice president, but together they promise a forward-looking America that will reengage with the international community. In addition, President-Elect Biden has made clear he will embrace science and prioritize the welfare of all citizens. The typically conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce voiced its optimism that the Biden administration would break the political gridlock that has plagued the United States in order to pass legislation that bolsters the economy. Human Rights advocates at the United Nations meeting in Geneva also commented that a Biden-Harris administration would introduce positive policy changes, such as police reform and the treatment of migrants. Though some lament that Joe Biden represents a mere changing of the old guard, he ushers in the wave of hope and decency that the world needs in this challenging time.

20% of COVID-19 patients receive a psychiatric diagnosis in 3 months, Oxford study finds

Zoe Lambert
-
0
20% of COVID-19 patients receive a psychiatric diagnosis in 3 months, Oxford study finds

A new study shows that 20% of those who contract coronavirus are diagnosed with a mental health illness within 3 months. This is about twice as likely as for other groups of patients over the same period. 1 in 4 had not had a psychiatric diagnosis before COVID-19.

Paul Harrison, Professor of Psychiatry, University Oxford, Theme Lead – NIHR Oxford Health BRC, who led the study, said: “People have been worried that COVID-19 survivors will be at greater risk of mental health problems, and our findings in a large and detailed study show this to be likely. Services need to be ready to provide care, especially since our results are likely to be underestimates of the actual number of cases. We urgently need research to investigate the causes and identify new treatments.”

Research by the University of Oxford has also reported that those with pre-existing psychiatric disorders are 65% more likely to develop coronavirus.

The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) is conducting further studies to establish the link, but so far have observed a correlation which have been attributed to a variety of factors: medications, residential facilities, behavioural, and lifestyle factors all interact to increase occurrences and severity of coronavirus.

Some medications used to treat mental health conditions have been proven to suppress the immune system and give the patient side effects which exacerbate their vulnerability to coronavirus. Antipsychotic medication such as Clozapine can lower white blood cell counts by over 15%, thereby significantly reducing immunity. This is in addition to other side effects such as diabetes, obesity and respiratory depression, which are known to be coronavirus risk factors.

Across the UK in 2019, there were over 16,000 patients in psychiatric inpatient units. In a similar manner to the pandemic’s care home crisis, shared spaces and overcrowding, as well as a lack of PPE, have intensified the likelihood of contracting the virus and created an environment for coronavirus to spread rapidly. Paired with the increased vulnerability of patients due to medical and lifestyle factors, this greatly increases the risk to patients.

Dr Max Taquet, NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow, who conducted the analyses, remarked: “This finding was unexpected and needs investigation. In the meantime, having a psychiatric disorder should be added to the list of risk factors for COVID-19.”

Balliol “flood” leaves students adrift

Maya Misra
-
0
Balliol “flood” leaves students adrift

This week, a broken tap in Balliol forced a staircase to evacuate, and concerns were subsequently raised regarding the College’s response to student welfare.

The leak, referred to as a “flood” in one TikTok video, began around midnight and continued on for several hours until the proper maintenance staff could arrive. A College porter was at the scene but was, as one student described, “helpful but out of his depth”. Eventually the fire department was called to turn off the water. As a result of the flooding, students slept in spare classrooms, grouped by household.

@amylia1917

#uni

♬ original sound – James Charles

During the leak, as one student told Cherwell, “Students were using bins to bail water out of the window. We got soaked and cold due to the cold water. Thankfully other students were incredibly helpful, offering clothes and hot drinks”.

One of the students who assisted the affected staircase said, “They came out all wet and freezing and tired, there was no one there to help them, and it was down us to get them towels and a hot drink so they wouldn’t get ill.”

The next morning, students received an email from College stating: “We have discovered the flood was caused by student vandalism. I am sure you would like to join me in thanking all the staff who came in at a moments [sic] notice to fix a situation caused by such thoughtless behaviour.”

Students contest this, however, saying it was an accident and that College “appeared to want to blame us rather than help us.”

Other descriptions of the College response included “poor” and “threatening”.

Speaking to Cherwell, Balliol said:  “We are still investigating the cause of the water leak. Students affected were given immediate support. Luckily nothing was damaged except some towels, which the College replaced.”

University Q&A: No safety net for 2021 examinations, residency requirement remains in Hilary

Abigail Howe
-
0
University Q&A: No safety net for 2021 examinations, residency requirement remains in Hilary

2021 exams

At a COVID-19 question and answer session on Tuesday 17th November, the University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Martin Williams, confirmed that there are no plans for a safety net policy for examinations taken this academic year, stating that we are “in a significantly different situation to last year” and “students engaged with alternative forms of assessment very well”.

Williams continued by stating that the University is “trying to make sure that what we are offering this year is a fair assessment and a level playing field for all students”. However, Declared to have Deserved Honours and Declared to have Deserved Masters degrees will still continue to be options for those who are “unable to take these assessments”. The previous safety net policy gave “faculties the choice of how results are calculated, with the option to exclude or adjust the weighing of results obtained in remote assessments” with the aim that no student should be “disadvantaged by the conditions in which they revise for and sit their exams in the exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic”.

Williams also discussed the likelihood of alternative modes of assessments, including open-book exams or examinations sat remotely, saying “we think about two-thirds of exams will switch to an alternative format”, but that some for some courses, particularly those which deal with “mathematical problem-solving”, examinations should still be taken in person and invigilated traditionally. 

Residency requirements

Many questions were raised regarding plans for Hilary term. Professor Roger Goodman, the Co-Chair of the Hilary and Trinity Term Co-ordination Group, explained that the University is “still at the mercy of government regulations” regarding an in-person term, but that – barring government regulations – students should expect to return to their colleges in January. Explaining the University’s decision to make residency required rather than optional, Williams stated: “our feeling is that there is a lot more to being an Oxford student than just the face-to-face teaching”, including “access to labs, access to libraries, access to each other, to the opportunity to work in a scholarly environment”. Addressing those who are studying remotely this term after applying for an exemption to the residency requirements, he explained that “students who were granted a residency exemption this term [which he clarified to be before 1 November] will be able to roll that over to next term if they wish” but that he “would encourage students to return to Oxford if they can”.

Tuition fees and finances

Some students did raise the possibility of a tuition fee refund or reduction, citing lack of access to facilities under the current circumstances. Williams stated that he would “push back on the idea that the university is spending less on providing education this year” and that “at this stage, we are not considering any fee reductions”. Miles Young, the Warden of New College and Chair of the Conference of Colleges, continued that there has been a “huge extra cost”, including buying perspex and “ensuring that tutorials are delivered properly”, particularly “at a time when our revenues are absolutely diminished by loss of all sorts of revenue streams”, such as conferences and visiting students. He concluded: “The problem smaller colleges have is, frankly, finding a way to survive”.

Pandemic response

Regarding the University’s overall response to the pandemic, Young was more positive, saying he “feel[s] reasonably comfortable that in Oxford we’ve handled the pandemic well, certainly in comparison to other universities”, helped by the collegiate system and the adoption of households within colleges. He continued that “the household system has been the reason we’ve managed to contain Covid… they have a price, which is the self-isolation of a larger group, but it’s a price I think is well worth paying”. However, he said that he hoped, over the vacation, colleges would consider their household arrangements so “friendship groups can migrate into households”. 

The Pro-Vice-Chancellor praised the “really fantastic, constructive behaviour from [the] student body” and the slight drop in coronavirus cases. Professor Chris Conlon (Professor of Infectious Diseases, and Chair of the University Health Medical Advisory Group) elaborated on this, saying there has been “very little transmission of infection within departments and almost none within teaching spheres”.

Student responses to the webinar were mixed. While some were encouraged by the question and answer session, saying “thank you… all you’ve done so far, it’s really impressive”, another was far more damning, claiming that “communication has been terribly short-sighted, making planning impossible and increasing anxiety”.

Image Credit: Billy Wilson // Flickr. Licence: CC BY-NC 2.0.

1...471472473...2,578Page 472 of 2,578

Support Student Journalism

Cherwell is Oxford’s oldest independent newspaper, established in 1920. We are entirely student-run. By supporting us, you will contribute to keeping our paper in print and online. Every donation makes a difference.

Donate

Explore

Follow us

More

Oxford Student Publications Limited © 2025 - All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy

Website by Jamie Ashley