Sunday 27th July 2025
Blog Page 776

Students march in support of academic staff

Greg Ritchie
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Students march in support of academic staff

The University and College Union (UCU) strike against changes to academic staff’s pensions began on Thursday, causing widespread disruption to lectures and classes.

Strikers were joined by crowds of supporters at picket lines, including hundreds of students at a demonstration outside the Clarendon Building, on Broad Street.

It follows a warning from the UCU that summer examinations may be affected if the dispute continues.

Thursday marked the first of 14 days of scheduled strikes, beginning with two this week.

Pickets were organised by UCU Oxford at the Science Area on Parks Road, the Bodleian, Examination Schools and the Old Road Campus, and were attended by both striking lecturers and supporters.

There was also a strike rally outside the Clarendon Building. A large crowd of students gathered in support of staff and to listen to speeches from UCU members, student activists, and local councillors.

The president of the Oxford UCU branch, Garrick Taylor, stressed that the decision to take industrial action was not one he took lightly, and he feared for the financial situ-
ation of strikers.

He told Cherwell: “There are households where both the occupants are staff members and are on strike, and so those households are going to lose all their income. It’s not exaggerating to say that people are not going to be able to pay their rent, their mortgages, their daily living costs, and things like that.

“We’ve never done anything like this. For me, on a personal level, it was a huge decision to ask people to strike when I know it’s going to cause such financial hardship.

“We’re doing everything we can. Our union branch has put aside at least £10,000 for a hardship fund, and anything we can get on top of that from people donating will be put towards alleviating the financial worries striking staff have.

“We’re never going to have enough money to fully compensate people so they are going to struggle. Oxford is so expensive to live in. Nobody has spare money. We’re not all well-paid leading academics. A lot of us are on post-doc wages, on casual contracts, so it’s really going to hit hard in that respect.”

Oxford SU and many college JCRs encouraged students to support the strike by not going to departmental lectures and classes, though teaching in college will continue as normal.

Oxford SU said “crossing picket lines to use facilities in departments or libraries could be perceived as not being in support of the strikers.” They suggest that if students wish to support the strike, they should “do work from home or go to a cafe or public library.”

This stance does not sit easy with all students. One fourth year told Cherwell: “Tutors and academic staff are absolutely justified in being aggrieved by changes to their pensions.

“But, it’s also important that our student union supports the interests of students. The SU now supports finalists being left with potentially no teaching whatsoever for three weeks, which is deeply worrying.

“Oxford SU is there to represent students, and while we should show our support to tutors in other ways, we should not be supporting the strike.”

Many other students, however, came out in support of the lecturers, telling Cherwell of the importance of student-lecturer solidarity.

Milo Thursfield, a second year PPEist at Wadham, told Cherwell: “Our uni staff have given us a lot, from teaching us to supporting students in their fight against higher tuition fees.

“It’s really important to show solidarity with them and continue to oppose the marketisation of higher education.”

The walk-outs from lecturers are a response to proposed reforms of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), the fund which provides the pensions to academic and academic-related staff at universities such as Oxford.

The proposed changes would replace the current defined benefit scheme for income below £55,000 to a defined contribution system.

Defined benefit schemes offer a minimum guaranteed retirement income, while defined contribution schemes depend on returns from stock market investments.

The umbrella group Universities UK (UUK) insist the changes are needed to reduce the supposed £6.1 billion deficit in the USS’s budget. However, UCU have criticised the methodology used to calculate this figure, which they say has exaggerated the financial problems of the pension fund.

The union also cites independent estimates that the changes would cause a typical lecturer to lose £200,000 in pension contributions by the time of their retirement.

Two days of strikes will take place this week with plans for three strikes in 7th week and four in 8th week.

Assuming negotiations do not reopen between UUK and UCU by then, 9th week five days of walk-outs, with staff striking from Monday to Friday.

UCU have warned that new strikes might then be announced, with UCU General Secretary, Sally Hunt, warning that exams “might not be taking place if they don’t come back to the table.”

Recipe corner: veganism

Ailin Cheng
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Recipe corner: veganism

Propelled by a hoard of bougie Instagram bloggers, veganism has been on the rise. This year, I decided to partake in the hype and take on the ordeal of a plant-based diet throughout Lent. My skeptical preconceptions were soon dashed. Veganism has made me increasingly aware of my food choices – not only in regards to nutrition, but also the implications they have for the environment.

The thought of veganism on a student budget may seem soul-crushing, but in saving money from buying animal-products, stocking up on other vegan fantasies is very manageable. An easy, satisfying meal can be made by stir-frying some vegetables – I use the Tesco’s stir-fry pack along with spinach and garlic – and mixing this with rice and chickpeas. The high-fibre content of the vegetables makes the meal no less filling, yet the low carbohydrate and saturated-fat content spares you from a post-indulgence food-coma. Equally important is the exclusion of unsustainably sourced animal products, making this meal guilt-free in more ways than one.

Vegetable produce can be extremely versatile. Try this for a meal plan: start the day with half a banana, sliced to fill up a peanut-butter and jam sandwich. For lunch, mash half an avocado and combine this with coconut yoghurt and lemon juice. Stir-fry some spinach and garlic, and mix this with the avocado-concoction. Serve this on top of pasta with a sprinkling of nutritional yeast as a vegan version of carbonara. As a snack, chop up the remaining banana over some coconut yoghurt topped with granola. For dinner, stir-fry some more spinach with garlic. Add some pan-fried Quorn fajita strips (a chicken substitute), and serve this on top of rice. Mix together peanut butter, soy sauce and sesame oil, and pour this over everything; you’ve made a vegan ‘chicken’ satay. Slice up the remaining avocado to garnish on top.

Veganism isn’t as daunting as it sounds. It comes with health and environmental benefits, and is easy to integrate into your uni routine.

The C-Bomb review – ‘the perfect antidote for those mid-term blues’

Delphine Chalmers
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The C-Bomb review – ‘the perfect antidote for those mid-term blues’

Katie Sayer’s The C-Bomb, playing at the BT studio, showcases new writing at its very best. Fresh, playful and above all funny, it captures the follies and foibles of our modern age.

The subject matter is undeniably unusual. Chloe (played with verve by Alma Prelec) has a problem. And that problem is suspected chlamydia. Impulsive and flamboyant, she decides to throw a party for her past flings, hoping to take each one of them aside, warn them of the risks and urge them to get tested. But life, of course, is rarely as neat as fiction and the episode of Midsomer Murders, which the characters long to watch, amusingly remains firmly in the background as Chloe’s own personal drama takes centre stage.

We are sucked in from the very moment we find our seats. Serenaded by the familiar strains of ‘Boogie Wonderland’ and wonderfully corny selections from ABBA (all hand-picked by sound designer, William Hayman), we are immediately immersed in Chloe’s world of club nights, kettle chips and cheap vino. Before the play has even begun, we know we are going to heed Chloe’s wise advice of always “watching things for young people”. Sayer’s script sparkles with witty in-jokes and well-handled nods to everyday Oxford life. From sly references to Toto’s ‘Africa’ and subject drinks, to jokes about Immanuel Kant and a humorous account of a romantic encounter at the tragically dull Economics Foundation, there is something here for everyone.

And the actors largely bring their roles to life, often finding a richness and humanity in characters who could all too easily be played as little more than the physical embodiment of recognisable stereotypes. Showcasing her directorial flair, Agnes Pethers transforms the stage into a tableau of modern life. As each past boyfriend enters through the bead curtain to join the assembling group in the sitting room, the composition becomes increasingly complete. If Dave (Jake Rich) is an earnest and priggish high achiever and Jonny is a quinoa-munching vegan millennial, then Russell (Flinn Andreas) is a wild party-lover; if Albert (Albert McIntosh) is the socially conservative right-wing son of an aristocrat, then Jack is a straight-talking sporty everyman. Each modern character archetype is represented. And yet the protagonists nevertheless feel fleshed out and whole due to the commitment of the actors, who strike a balance between emotional authenticity and playing for laughs. The only exception is Harold, the pensioner (Aryan Coram), who feels unjustly overlooked. Appearing only briefly to deliver the odd line, he is not quite given the space to come to grips with the role, which is a missed opportunity in a play otherwise filled with deeply memorable characters.

But The C-Bomb’s greatest strength lies in its brilliant self-awareness. Chloe, after all, orchestrates her own drama. Taking each past boyfriend aside, she repeatedly rehearses and refines her confession, masterfully creating her own tension and suspense. And this meta-theatre is not just entertaining, it is also pleasingly thought-provoking. When Jonny dubs the play, “a fascinating tale of friendship, betrayal, secrecy and microbes”, and Kat (played with flair by Phoebe Griffith) tells us that the story “can be summarised in ten seconds”, we are left with the impression that the beauty of theatre lies in its very artificiality. Drama takes well-established truths and reenergises them, as Sayer demonstrates with moving simplicity when she concludes the play with the clear message that we should all just “be nice to each other”. What better lesson could theatre teach us in our fraught modern times?

A witty, brilliantly self-conscious examination of the way we live now, “The C-Bomb” is a thrilling piece of new writing. Slickly produced by Eve Stollery, packed with laughs, it provides the perfect antidote for those mid-term blues.

Use of University Counselling Service increases

Matthew Roller
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Use of University Counselling Service increases

The number of students using the University’s Counselling Service has increased, new data has revealed. 

According to a freedom of information request (FOI) seen by Cherwell, 1,372 students used the services in the academic year 2016/17.

This represents a 4.5 per cent increase from 2015/16, which in turn was an 8.2 per cent increase from the previous academic year.

An Oxford University spokesperson told Cherwell: “A variety of factors affects the number of students accessing counselling services each year.

“These include increased awareness of mental health problems, a reduction in stigma for such conditions as depression and anxiety, and greater awareness of the types of the mental health support available to students.

“There has also been a large increase of earlier diagnosis and concern about mental health at a secondary school level and many students arrive at university with pre-existing mental health problems or have already had counselling at school.”

The data also showed marked increases in the number of students presenting issues relating to anxiety, self and identity, and transitions.

569 students presented problems relating to anxiety in 2016/17, a 10.5 per cent increase on the 515 who did so the previous academic year. The number also represents a 39.8 per cent increase from the 2014/15 figure.

The University spokesperson said: “Perfectionism is a key driver behind many mental health problems, including anxiety. This is not an issue unique to Oxford, but one that the counselling service is sensitive to.

Over the last ten years the service has shown constant figures year on year demonstrating its effectiveness in terms of reducing symptoms of anxiety and other conditions.”

256 students came forward with issues categorised as ‘self and identity’, a 5.3 per cent increase on last year, and a 16.9 per cent increase from 2014/15.

Similarly, 89 students presented problems relating to transitions, a 27 per cent increase on the 2015/16 total.

The University’s spokesperson said: “The benefit of the Oxbridge collegiate system is the level of welfare support in each of the colleges and halls as well as the more professional clinical central welfare services.”

They added: “Oxford has a very large and highly valued peer support programme, [and is] seen as an example of good practice across the UK HE sector.”

Despite the increase in the number of students using the services, the total running cost for them has decreased by £27,500 since 2014/15. £1,000,100 was spent on the services in 2016/17, compared to £1,027,600 in 2016/17.

The University spokesperson said: “There has been no cut back in staffing or the level of counselling provided to students.

“There have been some savings in running costs, while staff training and professional development costs have been taken out of the departmental budget and transferred to a central fund. 

A recent FOI request across the whole higher education sector showed that the University of Oxford spent more on mental health provision and on the central counselling service than any other university in the UK.”

A St. Anne’s student told Cherwell: “The Counselling Service was incredible for me. It helped me more than anything else to get out of my own head, which it is very difficult to do at Oxford, and I now have the email of the counsellor I saw before in case I ever want to go back.”

Oxford to open new sexual harassment centre

Libby Cherry
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Oxford to open new sexual harassment centre

Oxford University will open a new centre to support those who have been the victims of sexual harassment.

The policy will see help centralised, alongside more college and department based support.

Further details about the centre will be shared with the student body nearer the opening time.

A spokesperson for the University said: “We are focussing on further improving the extensive support we offer to survivors of sexual harassment and assault.

“Student representatives have been actively involved in the group developing the proposals.

“We have put students themselves at the heart of the process, allowing them to make first disclosures at a level where they are most comfortable, whether within their college, to trained student supporters or to central University staff.”

Currently, the University has more than 380 voluntary harassment advisors who are trained to help students “in understanding their options, including how to make a formal complaint, and guiding them to the range of support services Oxford offers.”

The centre will work alongside the University Counselling Service to help ease the psychological impacts of harassment.

Oxford SU’s VP for women, Katy Haigh, told Cherwell: “We welcome the University’s decision to provide a central advice centre for those reporting harassment or assault.

“A paper advocating for this centre has been circulating various University committees over the last few months; this paper was greatly informed by a working group which included many of our own student members such as ‘It Happens Here’ campaigners and the VP Women 2016-17.

“I am happy to see that the University is now ready to begin work bringing this centre to fruition and has expressed its commitment to improving the incident reporting process, and the SU looks forward to working with them to do this.”

“The work to make Oxford University a safe place for its students is far from complete, but the development of this centre is a big step in the right direction.

“We are actively engaged in tackling sexual harassment and violence in all its forms: as well as our consent workshops and first respondent training, we have a dedicated student-led campaign, ‘It Happens Here’, who advocate for survivors of sexual violence in the University, and educate students and Oxford’s local communities about consent, and we consistently lobby the university to improve its resources on tackling sexual violence on campus.”

The University intends to make the reporting and disciplinary side the focus of further work later in the year.

Cambridge University has recently made changes to this aspect of their sexual harassment policy.

Last year, Cambridge brought in a new anonymous reporting system that allows students to record instances of sexual harassment without going to the policy, or revealing the identity of themselves or their harasser.

The aim of the policy is to allow Cambridge to analyse the number of sexual harassment cases, which otherwise would go unnoticed if they had not been reported to the police.

Teddy Hall tampered with tenancy agreements

Fred Dimbleby
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Teddy Hall tampered with tenancy agreements

St Edmund Hall altered tenancy contracts after they were signed by students in order to raise accommodation prices, Cherwell can reveal.

Students have spoken about their anger at the college after they were not informed about the changes to their contracts.

The college has apologised, saying they were “sorry for the mistake.”

Students had signed the original contracts online, but they were not signed immediately by the College.

The agreements, seen by Cherwell, show that the contracts were altered by hand.

In one, the room number was added in pen after being left out of the original contract.

Teddy Hall students later found out about the changes when the contracts were delivered to pigeon holes. They have also complained that they had to push the college to disclose the completed contracts.

The contracts show that rent prices were raised by almost £100.

In Michaelmas term, prices were raised from £2,268 to £2,352 and for each of the next two terms they were raised from £1984.50 to £2,058. An almost four per cent increase.

The price of extra days spent in college accomodation was also raised.

A Teddy Hall student told Cherwell: “I strongly believe that the college should have given an explanation on why altered our contracts without consent because this would have offered us some level or reassurance.

“They should also come up with some preventative measures and rules so whatever I suffered would not be repeated for future students.”

Another post-grad student at the college, Isaac Mayne, said: “You’d have thought that when this happens the Hall would make every effort to make it up to the affected student, and from what the student told the MCR they’ve actually done more to ignore the issue than solving it.”

A spokesperson for Teddy Hall said: “There was an administrative error with one particular type of tenancy agreement at the start of this academic year – which meant a small number of graduate students would have received an agreement that had not been updated to reflect an annual increase in the cost (i.e. it had been accidentally left at the 2016-17 figures). This is the reason for the handwritten alterations.

“We are sorry for the mistake, but it was a genuine error with our billing system.

“As soon as our graduate students receive an offer, they are sent an information sheet which lays out the current accommodation charges but states clearly that a yearly increase will be applied, in August each year (and includes the approximate percentage increase).

“Over summer 2017, one of our accommodation buildings needed an extensive central heating refurbishment, which meant that it could not be occupied, and this work was completed a little later than originally anticipated.

“It was therefore necessary to move some graduate students to alternative rooms at the last minute in order to accommodate them, depending on their date of arrival (which varies from around 1 September to 10 October). In these cases, a room of the same style/price would be substituted £100 where necessary.

“Your enquiry relates to matters that took place several months ago at the start of this academic year. Where students queried anything relating to this, we responded at the time to explain the situation.”

A postgraduate student at Teddy Hall has also told Cherwell about problems with his accommodation.

He said there have been two leaks this year in his room, which is in offsite accommodation near Lady Margaret Hall College.

The most recent leak damaged his laptop and meant he lost his warranty on his laptop because of water damage.

He emailed the college and asked for a replacement of the laptop. They refused.

The IT department checked his computer and said they didn’t find any damage. However, because water had come into contact with the computer the student lost the warranty.

The student, who posted on Facebook about the problems, told Cherwell: “I thought these things were easy to solve, somebody should compensate for the damage. The college could at least say something nice.”

“College, in their replies to me, show that they just don’t have the trust in students. When I told them what happened they kept just pushing it back.

“Every time I say something or make a point, I have to later on show them photo evidence this is not supposed to be like this. It’s wasting a lot of time.”

“If I knew this was how they were going to handle the situation, I might as well just have sucked it up and not do anything and buy a new computer.”

A college spokesperson said: “We are in discussion with the student in question to resolve the situation.

“There was a leak in the room, caused by human error (another student left the shower running), which has subsequently been fixed.

“Students are advised to take out their own insurance for personal effects.”

Neither Oxford University nor Oxford SU replied to a request for comment.

“There is always more that can be done”

Abby Ridsdill-Smith
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“There is always more that can be done”

Oxford’s mental health problem is unavoidable. Whether it’s peer support posters or Oxfesses, fifth week blues or welfare teas, reminders are everywhere. Even your bod card acts as part of this ceaseless carousel; turn it over and you’ll fi nd the number for Nightline, the no judgement, no advice phone line.

Part of the landscape of Oxford life, these friendly adverts and soothing top tips are evidence of a serious issue: the exceptionally high prevalence mental health issues here at Oxford University. You need only look at the statistics to realise the terrifying scale of the issue. Oxford SU’s recent welfare survey reported that 44 per cent of Oxford students felt stressed most or all of the time, and that 58 per cent felt that they had suffered from a mental health issue in the last year. The University itself revealed a rise in students contacting counselling, with numbers increasing from 1521 in 2011, to 1940 in 2013. The number of people reporting cases of depression more than doubled between 2003 and 2013, while the students reporting anorexia nervosa nearly trebled, and those suffering from panic attacks had almost quadrupled.

The situation here is unique. A highly pressurised environment, combined with driven, competitive students creates a melting pot which exacerbates and even causes mental health problems. When I spoke to Courtney, a student suffering from anxiety here in Oxford, she told me that she had never been in an environment where she was “under so much prolonged stress… The fi rst time I thought about it was Michaelmas of my fi rst year. I spent the rest of that year in an ostrich-head-sand kind of situation, until my prelims came about… I had to actually face the fact that I have anxiety because I was having panic attacks”. Another student, Ellie, agreed. She said: “I think that the atmosphere at Oxford leads to a kind of insecurity about your identity because people here have come from a situation… where they are pretty clever. Suddenly you’re thrown into an environment where even if you were the absolute best at your school, you could easily be the worst in your class here. It’s not just academically; there are a lot of different dimensions. It can really diminish people’s self-esteem to see that you’re just a small fi sh in a big pond”.

Clearly, there’s more to it than this. Alan Percy, head of counselling, pointed out a series of other reasons for the increasing mental health problem at Oxford: “Some of these reasons are positive, such as increased awareness of mental health problems, a reduction in stigma for such things as depression and anxiety and greater awareness of the types of support in terms of mental health available to students… However, there are a number of factors, often cultural or sociological that have negatively impacted on young adults. For example, there [are] strong indications that social media increases bullying, disrupts sleeping patterns and can create unhealthy comparison and perfectionism in all kinds of ways, such as body image, personal and academic achievements. Secondary education has changed and is far more results focussed and evidence shows that this can lead to an unhealthy persecutory perfectionist way of thinking, which can stop self-compassion and hinders the development for more flexible thinking to negotiate the challenges of life. It also makes the transition from secondary education to higher education much harder. Perfectionism is a key driver behind many mental health problems such as being unable to work or be motivated, depression, anxiety, self-harm and eating disorders.”

How can a university go about tackling a problem which is as big and variant as this one? An ever-evolving issue, the challenges of mental health change with every generation of students, while the demands and expectations of counselling increase with growing awareness and education. Percy himself acknowledged that, when it comes to the counselling service, “there is always more that can be done”.

At its most basic, Oxford advises a two-pronged approach: at a university level, students can access counselling, gaining advice and guidance from a professional; within college, students should speak to “tutors, personal tutors, chaplains, deans, graduate advisors, junior deans, JCR or MCR welfare offi cers as well as college doctors and nurses”, according to the Mental Health Policy. We are also able to access peer support programmes, individual to each college.

Clearly, counselling is central to the experience of many students with mental health problems. It is surprising, therefore, that it is the subject of so much of Courtney and Ellie’s derision: “I believe the problem is they try to fix people on a very short scale,” Courtney tells me. “I went in and had one counselling session and was advised that most people are out in three sessions. For serious mental health problems, three hours of chatting with someone isn’t going to fix it. At that time, I felt really pressured that I had to be fixed in three sessions and there was something wrong with me if there wasn’t. [The therapist] was saying to me it’s ‘cause we’re really overbooked and what with me having anxiety I’m not a direct suicide threat… my needs were kind of downplayed”. Ellie agreed: “I think the biggest problem is the way in which things are seen as specific short-term cases, and that after a certain number of sessions there is some kind of assumption that you will be better or that the role of the counselling service is over.”

Indeed, the counselling service prides itself on being able to run 51 per cent of students through its system in three sessions or less. The beautifully arranged 2016 counselling video draws our attention to this, as a highlight, so to speak: the video pauses on a long list of statistics which breaks students down into the number of sessions they took before they left the counselling service. Percy seemed to echo this sentiment, explaining, ‘The average number of sessions for one-to-one counselling at Oxford is just between three and four sessions, which is roughly the average number of session for university counselling services in the UK HE [Higher Education] sector and also for university counselling services across the USA. This is because university counselling services are set up to offer relatively quick support for a wide variety of emotional and mental health problems to help students in terms of their academic a n d personal development… we try to address the wide spectrum of mental health problems from the majority of students coming to the service with mild to moderate problems and those who have more long term and serious problems.”

Of course, there are many people who would find three or four sessions adequate, even excessive. However, with the heightened rates of mental health problems at Oxford, we can’t consider national averages a good judge of adequacy. Moreover, for those suffering from severe mental health issues, this focus on efficacy can be detrimental to student’s health. Courtney explained: “I think that the current support system really isn’t helpful; personally, I am now going to outside sources.”

From day to day, we often see mental health support embodied as welfare and peer support. Each college has a welfare scheme, which might endeavour to support others through drop-in sessions, welfare teas and fifth week events. Peer support provides a new support system, and one which avoids the stigma often attached to counselling within the Western cultural consciousness. As Ellie argued, “I think that having a varied support network is always a good thing and… peer supporters can play an important role in that there are some things that you may not need to talk to a counsellor about or… that peers may be better informed about”. Percy agrees: “Peer support is one of many ways to promote good student mental wellbeing and also create a ‘whole institution approach’ to supporting students with mental health difficulties.  The most recent report from Universities UK on promoting student mental health saw peer support initiatives as crucial, and charities such as Student Minds similarly emphasise this approach.” However, while peer support is a good idea, it falls short in many ways; Courtney “would never go talk to a peer supporter about my problems, purely because they are somebody I know around college and I really don’t want them to know… it’s going up to someone that you don’t know and spilling all of your closest mental problems; that’s something I don’t even tell my friends about.” Ellie also acknowledges that peer supporters “will never have the same level of training as counsellors”. Even with 30 hours of training under their belts, peer supporters may still be underprepared for some of the greater challenges they encounter in their role.

Oxford spends the most money, per head, on mental health of any university in the UK. It provides for countless students every year. As Percy has said, “it would be impossible to satisfy or meet the expectations of everyone using the service.” But we must strive for better: more counselling appointments, better training for peer supporters and more information for tutors about the pressures faced by students. At a university that can afford to spend over £50,000 on the vice chancellor’s air travel, it’s not a question of money or resources: it’s a question of willing. And the University should be willing to prioritise its students.

Interviewees’ names have been changed.

Iraq is not a twentieth century Crusade

Barney Pite
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Iraq is not a twentieth century Crusade

In September 2001, President George W Bush declared that ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.’ Since then it has become common to refer to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as crusades and to frame the war on terror in religious terms.
Crusading rhetoric permeates political discourse and lends a veneer of historicism to discussions of the ongoing conflicts in the middle East. But are these parallels justified on historical grounds?
Christopher Tyerman, Professor of the History of the Crusades at Oxford, argues that the parallels drawn between the war on terror and the crusades are largely spurious and indicative of intellectual laziness.
His speech consisted of a non-stop barrage of defense of the war on terror with little moderation. Tyerman’s speech came from a one sided perspective with little time given to the other side.
While many would have qualms with such onesidedness, the fact is that such attacks on interventionism are the norm. Allowing Tyerman to make his case may be the only way to hear the case at all.
According to him, the Crusades have little “relevance, comfort, insight or instruction” for historians, commentators or policy-makers studying the web of conflicts that have emerged since 9/11.
For a start, the war on terror was not justified to the public on religious grounds. Nor were American citizens encouraged to sign up to the military in return for indulgences that absolved them of their sins.
Admittedly, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did have a religious inflection. Memos sent to George Bush by Donald Rumsfeld were titled with verses from the Bible, Osama bin Laden referred to the Americans as ‘crusaders’, and addresses to US troops were often framed in biblical terms. But, for Tyerman, they were not holy wars in any substantive sense. Even the physical parallels between the war on terror and the crusades are shaky – the crusaders never even came close to Iraq or Afghanistan.
David Hume described the crusades as as ‘the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.’ The same, too, might be said of the war in Iraq. But there is no reason to regard the war on terror as anything more than superficially similar to the crusades.
The crusading ideal did linger on after the ninth crusade. As late as 1481, Pope Sixtus IV called for a crusade against the Turks and Leibniz urged Louis XIV to launch a crusade in Egypt in 1672. However, the aftershocks of the crusading idea had petered out by the nineteenthcentury and modern-day conflicts are little more than distant echoes.
According to Tyerman, the false parallels drawn between the crusades and modern conflicts are partly a result of taking intellectual short cuts. By framing the war on terror as a modern crusade, one can reduce it to a simple us-and-them narrative, a modern-day clash of civilizations.
However, this sort of simplification risks caricaturing all those fighting the US and US-backed forces as alien extremists driven only by religion, obscuring the political dimensions of the ongoing conflicts in the middle East and the complexity of the situation on the ground.
As such, those who draw parallels with the crusades only make the situation in the middle East harder to understand. Indeed, Tyerman goes so far as to accuse them of perpetrating a “meretricious confidence trick” – strong words, perhaps, but with the ring of truth.

The Shape of Water – an odd romance makes perfect sense

Jonnie Barrow
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The Shape of Water – an odd romance makes perfect sense

The opening narration of The Shape of Water, voiced by Richard Jenkins over ethereal shots of a submerged 1960s inner-city apartment, paints the ensuing story as a fairy tale of a reigning prince, a “princess without voice”, and “the monster who tried to destroy it all”. The line seems to be written solely to raise a wry smile from long-time viewers of Guillermo Del Toro’s films; after films such as The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Crimson Peak, it’s a well-established Del Toro trope that human antagonists tend to be far more monstrous than the bizarre creatures that, in the hands of any other filmmaker, would be the automatic villains of the piece.
But what bizarre creatures could possibly await in a film so beloved that it’s already garnered a leading 13 Oscar nominations?
When Guillermo told his regular collaborator Doug Jones (the insanely talented actor behind Abe Sapien in Hellboy, and basically anything weird in Pan’s Labyrinth) that he’d be playing the romantic lead in his latest film, he must have wondered how on earth would that end up looking?
The answer is: far more sweet and romantic than it may appear on paper. Amidst the Cold War paranoia and the Space Race of the early 1960s, Sally Hawkins plays Eliza, a mute cleaning lady in a government-run laboratory. When the scientists capture a truly extraordinary amphibious creature (Jones) from the Amazon river, Eliza bonds with the creature and soon decides to break him out of the laboratory and return him to his home.
The film doesn’t need to add sinister government forces for you to draw parallels with films like E.T., but Michael Shannon’s brusquely sinister Colonel Strickland is a towering ‘monster’ for our heroes to come up against.
Within this gang of heroes, there’s hardly a false note to be found. Octavia Spencer, playing Eliza’s colleague (and often her voice), is wonderfully endearing as Zelda. Richard Jenkins, as her cat-owning artist neighbour Giles, is truly delightful.
Each of the main players is in some way at a socio-cultural disadvantage – Eliza is mute, Giles is gay, Zelda is an African-American woman. The film clearly enjoys pitting society’s outcasts against the traditional patriarchal and American values embodied by the unabashedly villainous Strickland, alongside drawing unexpected parallels between these characters and Jones’ creature.
The creature himself is an incredible feat of design. He has to look suitably monstrous, and wild enough for you to believe he’s a river creature, but also with enough anthropomorphic features that you understand why Eliza would feel an affinity for and, ultimately, an attraction to him.
Yes, you read that right – it’s no secret by now that The Shape of Water is a truly bizarre-on-paper love story between a woman and a fish. Yes, they fall in love. Yes, they have sex. No, you don’t get to see them do it, you perverts. But that’s not the point – the point is that when the two of them do fall in love, it makes perfect sense within the film’s internal logic, and you end up as swept away with their romance as you would be in any other love story.
You see, Guillermo Del Toro has always been a not-so-secret romantic, and his films absolutely reflect that innate romantic sensibility. Pacific Rim is nothing if not a huge love letter to giant robots and kaiju monsters, Crimson Peak is just about the most romantic gothic ghost tale imaginable, and The Shape of Water takes Del Toro’s love of cinema to new heights.
His traditionally lavish production design and cinematography are finally used to capture and frame an actual blossoming romance.
The film is filled with camera compositions that are so gorgeous you could fall in love with them in complete isolation to the rest of the film itself, while Alexandre Desplat’s whistle-filled score sweeps the film away on a wave of pathos.
Like many of this year’s Oscar nominees, the period setting often belies surprisingly timely political commentary – if an audience member chooses to draw parallels to Trump’s America or the #MeToo movement, it’s certainly possible.
But the story itself is painted in frustratingly binary shades – Shannon is certainly a menacing antagonist, but his motivations are textureless and bland, and that feels like a missed opportunity. When the film is taking such big swings in having the two central lovers be a fish and a woman, more moral complexity in the details would surely have enhanced the main narrative.
The film’s central balancing act of creating a world which is both nostalgic for a romantic past, yet often vicious and hard-hitting, is so perfectly executed that it couldn’t be easier to give yourself over to the film’s unique brand of oddness.
It’s strange, it’s unabashedly romantic, it’s probably the most unique thing you’ll see in cinemas this year, and it could only have come from the mind of the legend himself: Guillermo Del Toro.

Withnail and I was a buddy comedy unlike any other

Joe Baverstock-Poppy
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Withnail and I was a buddy comedy unlike any other

“We’ve gone on holiday by mistake” is just one of the many highly quotable lines in Withnail and I. It also summarises the nature of my trip to Cowley’s Picture Palace – more a happy accident, however, than a mistake. In sun-soaked Cowley, on a Sunday afternoon, I was willingly roped into seeing this cult classic that I had never heard of before. What I found was a buddy comedy unlike any other.

As a resident of North Oxford, Cowley seems like a distant land, filled with lively bars and eateries, compared to the suffocating suburbia of Summertown. The Picture Palace itself is a novelty giving an exciting glimpse into cinemas of old. Tickets are paid for in a booth outside. Once through the front door you are immediately in the picture room, no reception, no corridor. A tiny concession stand offers roughly a pint of ale at £4. The Sunday crowd was surprisingly old and unpretentious. One criticism would be the acoustics, with lines of dialogue occasionally being lost. Ironically this added to our post-show discussion as we attempted to stitch our knowledge of the plot together.

Withnail and I itself is slow to start, beginning with a series of awkwardly connected vignettes. The film follows the misfortunes of the eccentric Withnail and his anonymous friend credited as ‘I’. However, as the second act begins, the film finds its footing with the pace both comedic and dramatic. Much of Withnail’s humour is drawn out through its embellished characters as opposed to conventional jokes or set-up and payoff action. Its characters are so striking that one can see its influence in all sorts of British comedy. Spaced, Bottom, The Mighty Boosh and Peep Show all have similarly deprived dysfunctional duos.

One way in which Withnail and I has aged poorly, however, is in its treatment of gay people. While Richard Griffith’s role as Monty, an eccentric homosexual, who aggressively comes onto ‘I’, could be viewed as simply a one of a kind humourous character, one can’t help feel that Withnail is playing off of a negative gay stereotype.

The stereotype of forceful gay men has been used to shame gay people and was sinisterly employed by Kevin Spacey to excuse his behaviour towards a young actor. There is some degree of sympathetic portrayal for Monty, especially in his subtly solemn farewell note. However, the depiction of Monty’s treatment of ‘I’, a young actor himself, should be criticised for its danger in cementing a damaging stereotype, which is a little too close to home.

The film is beautifully shot, deftly using camera work to both enhance certain jokes and produce visual gags of its own. Striking landscapes of Cumbria and London are employed not with any particular shoehorning but as a general backdrop for the action on screen, giving it an additional degree of wonder.

“We are 91 days from the end of this decade and there’s gonna be a lot of refugees” is another one of Withnail’s great aphorisms. This film is in part about the end of an era – set in 1969 it depicts the slow and painful death of the hippie. While some move on to greater things, for instance ‘I’ landing a big acting role and cutting his hair, others stay stuck in the past, slipping into oblivion. As Withnail departs in the final scene, a park fence turns into a row of prison bars. Withnail and hippies like him are reduced from free spirits to imprisoned addicts.

Written by Bruce Robinson, Withnail and I is an autographical film to some degree. Robinson’s experience of the ’60s is clearly portrayed by the aforementioned depiction of its death. However, the true heart of this film comes from its depiction of these two friends.

What makes Withnail and I stand out from other buddy comedies is how it depicts the disintegration of a friendship. There is no reconciliation or sentimentality at the end of the film, instead we are left with an unspoken but lasting disagreement. It is an experience all too relevant and common for the Oxford student, whose social life moves at a lightning pace – we meet a new friend, take delight in who they are, and then slowly realise they are not all they are cracked up to be.

That moment of realisation is followed by a cold, unspoken uncoupling. Here, Withnail clearly hasn’t fully accepted or realised that ‘I’ is leaving not just their apartment but leaving Withnail himself. Although Withnail undeniably treated ‘I’ with contempt, attempting to pawn him off to his uncle for a cottage, no one leaves this film totally in the right. ‘I’ heads to the station in the final scenes, speaking to Withnail as if he were a mere acquaintance and refusing to allow him to accompany him further. Withnail and I perfectly depicts the moral ambiguity of a failed friendship, balancing the wrongs of the bad friend and the one who jumped ship.

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