Sunday 8th June 2025
Blog Page 818

Blavatnik professor accuses Oxford of “excommunication” after Trump protest

Susannah Goldsbrough
-
0
Blavatnik professor accuses Oxford of “excommunication” after Trump protest

An Oxford academic who resigned his professorship from the Blavatnik School of Government over one of its donor’s support of Donald Trump claims he has since been “excommunicated” by the school.

Prof Bo Rothstein resigned from his post at the Blavatnik School in August after discovering that its founding donor, Ukraine-born millionaire Leonard Blavatnik, had given $1 million to Donald Trump’s inaugural committee.

In a letter to Oxford vice chancellor Louise Richardson, Rothstein claims he has been banned from the school and from carrying out his teaching responsibilities, accusing the University of acting “in conflict with the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression”. His claims have been denied by the Blavatnik school.

In the letter, sent earlier this month and shared with Cherwell yesterday, Rothstein writes: “My duties as a teacher and supervisor have been cancelled. I have also been asked to vacate the responsibility I have had for the School’s weekly research seminar. And I have been asked not to appear in person at the School, and to vacate my office.”

He added: “This policy of excommunication stands in conflict with the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression.

“According to these principles, I have the right to resign and also have the right to state my reasons for resigning to whomever I want without being banned from my workplace.”

“I cannot imagine that the University of Oxford wants to be known as a place where the prize for criticising one of its major donors is excommunication”, he concludes.

In a personal response sent to Rothstein last week, Richardson said she had asked her chief of staff to investigate the matter. “Academic freedom and freedom of speech are two principles which sit at the heart of this university,” she said.

In a statement to The Guardian, Richardson said: “My reply to a private letter from Professor Rothstein should not be interpreted as implying that I have concerns about the actions taken by the Blavatnik school.”

A representative of the Blavtanik School told The Guardian that the School was saddened by Rothstein’s “false allegations.”

The representative said: “Professor Rothstein’s resignation made clear that he wished to disassociate himself from the Blavatnik school of government. So we were surprised to learn that Professor Rothstein wanted to remain in Oxford and in the pay of the school until December. When he proposed to the dean of the school that he base himself in Nuffield College, she agreed.”

Assassination attempts amid the violence that tore Kingston apart

Jacob Cheli
-
0
Assassination attempts amid the violence that tore Kingston apart

Jamaican author Marlon James’ 2015 Man Booker Prize winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is an epic in the truest sense of the word. The first book by a Jamaican author to win the prize, it spans three decades of Jamaican history and legend. It tells the story of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley and the gang-related violence tearing Kingston apart, even as the CIA moved in for fear of the Island falling to communist powers, in the wake of an influx of guns and an increase and escalation of violence that is both political and gratuitous.

This book took me two years, on and off, to finish. It is a complex, twisted spiral and haemorrhage of places, characters, accents and deaths and simply trying to keep track of who hates who, who fucks who and who eventually kills who is exhausting.

Each chapter is written from a certain character’s perspective, and James has an uncanny ability to throw you deep into the heart of whichever character’s turn it is to tell the story. His command of language is simply unparalleled in comparison to anything I have read before or since; he manages purely through language and dialect, not just in speech but in prose as well, to tell you everything about the characters that present themselves.

With countless levels of Jamaican patois, you can determine a character’s intelligence, education, social position and aggression, before the story seamlessly turns to an American CIA agent, equally wellrepresented, or a British ghost, or a gay hitman from New York, taking breaks from screwing up his contract with his lover in a tenement block.

Kei Miller wrote in a review for The Guardian that “this is a novel that explores…the aesthetics of violence”, and this seems true of a book compared many times to the work of Quentin Tarantino. It is an unashamedly violent book.

It does not shy away from confronting anything, and the hyperreal descriptions of violence, sex, drugs and murder are painfully vivid. It’s a book you have to put down every now and then just to get a break from James’ twisted and detailed reimagining of a series of events so shrouded in secrecy that they became myth, or to refamiliarise yourself with one of the 75 characters presented in a list at the beginning. The ambition and scope of this book is astonishing, pick it up if you have lots of time and few sensitivities.

How to maintain dominance in the library

Priya Vempali
-
0
How to maintain dominance in the library

Any outsider might think that Oxford students would be professionals in the library: wandering through the dusty shelves, in their element, diligently getting their heads down to produce yet another thought-provoking tutorial essay. But I’m sorry to tell you – this is entirely untrue. Getting through life in the Oxford libraries is an art, and I’m here to show you just how it’s done.

Firstly, if you want to reach maximum impressiveness, you’re best heading down to the Radcam or the Bod: no self-respecting BNOC spends their time wandering around the Sackler. Following an embarrassingly difficult trek up the stairs (the result of your abysmal capacity for cardio), you can pretend to yawn to cover up the fact that you’re panting from climbing literally two flights of stairs. This also has an added perk: it makes you look like you’re recovering from a massive sesh last night, instead of snuggling you pillow watching Bake Off.

Once you manage to find a seat (preferably not near that thirty year old postgrad who’s muttering to himself whilst reading), you can start your study session by getting up any lecture notes you have. Even if you’re not reading them, it makes you look a whole lot more studious whilst you swipe left on tinder under your desk.

Try not to get too put off by the rapid-fire typing of everyone around you – they’re likely writing Oxloves about that girl they chirpsed at last week’s bop. You, on the other hand, are a professional. Opening up a new document, you stare at the blank screen in front of you for approximately 10 minutes, before seeking refuge in the familiar embrace of Wikipedia, ashamed to admit that you’re too lazy to open up a book. Alas, it happens to the best of us – better luck with next week’s essay.

The collegiate system is in need of change

Daniel Kodsi
-
0
The collegiate system is in need of change

“How can we be so good, when we organise ourselves in this sclerotic way?” vice-chancellor Richardson asked in her Oration earlier this month. “How much better would we be if we made decisions faster, if we were to build more trust between us so that we could make decisions more expeditiously?” At a couple of other points in her excellent, misleadingly reported, speech, she makes feints in the direction of university centralisation. There can be no mystery about why the problem of centralisation is such an important one for our University. But the minimal proposals Richardson indicates we should consider seem to me perfectly sensible and totally innocuous.

It is a point that is often ignored at the student level: Oxford operates at a severe financial deficit relative to other (American) universities in its weight class. It has a fifth of Harvard’s endowment, a quarter of Yale’s, a third of Princeton and Stanford’s. When it comes to hiring the best faculty, all else equal, Oxford can be out-bought; when it comes to exciting new research initiatives, Oxford must be warier in its commitments. Much of this is no doubt attributable to a difference in alumni culture. But two observations. First, it is surely right that the quality of fundraising operations is variable across colleges. Secondly, this only increases the pressure on the University to make good use of its resources: not, as Richardson laments, employ the equivalent of 30 full-time employees on processing expense claims.

It is also undoubtedly the case that the collegiate structure is the source of much that is extraordinary about the University. Furthermore, there is a real question about how far Oxford can go in the direction of unity without becoming, at a deep level, a different institution. A remark by Jerry Cohen has considerable force in this connection: “in addition to the consideration of what good we might do… there is also the consideration of what we are, of our identity, and we may legitimately have regard to our desire to preserve that identity.” Cohen observes that a university might have a “central, organising self-conception”; that even if a change might be better for undergraduates, graduates and faculty, there can still be reason not to go along with it. But to make changes is not to change everything; and the journey towards centralisation does not strike me as one, that, once embarked upon, is impossible to stop until it has reached some far-away endpoint.

There is a final point that we should address, concerning sentiments of the faculty, with which I, as an undergraduate, must be unacquainted. In a recent survey, Oxford academics expressed greater satisfaction with their University’s administration than those of any other UK university. This should not be lost sight of in the push for international competitiveness, unless the process become self-undermining. The way the situation appears to students is quite plausibly entirely different from the way it strikes those more intimately involved; indeed it cannot be ruled out that students only have access to the most superficial level of a problem that runs much deeper.

Questions alone don’t tell the story of an Oxford interview

Roddy Jackson
-
0
Questions alone don’t tell the story of an Oxford interview

The prospect of an Oxford interview is a mixture of terrifying and impenetrable. Horror stories abound in the media, ranging from the bizarre (“Tell me about this banana”) to the plainly brutal (“How do you know that California exists if you haven’t been there?”). Apparently candidates are asked to cut off their own ties, or throw a chair through a window. You could be forgiven for thinking that the interview is an opportunity to bully nervous teenagers into argumentative holes in some sort of annual cathartic academic fetish party.

But of course, this is far from the case. My own interview touched upon Bob Dylan and cereal packets at various points (to the great delight of my friends who were further convinced of English’s non-status as a subject), but that’s not all we talked about. I suspect that all interviews can be distilled into a series of juicy soundbites like these, ripe for sharing and apt for catastrophising. To divorce these sort of questions from their contexts is unhelpful to applicants. My interview had its moments, but Bob Dylan had just won the Nobel Prize, and cereal packets came up organically. The ‘banana’ is not designed to be a prop in a performance at gunpoint. Similarly, abstracting upon ‘California’ is a cue for exploration rather than for an existential crisis.

But Oxford’s own sample interview materials, recently released, are surprisingly deficient. The questions are decontextualised to give the impression of a fragmented interrogation, rather than a flowing discussion. The exemplar question for Biochemistry – “Ladybirds are red. So are strawberries. Why?” – is stimulating, but it suggests an interview model rewarding eloquent bluster over tongue-tied intelligence. Owen Lewis, Professor of Ecology at Brasenose, explains the thought behind the question: “Red can signal either ‘don’t eat me’ or ‘eat me’ to consumers […] I’m interested in seeing how applicants attempt to resolve this apparent paradox.” This information is likely to be ignored in favour of the clickbaity obscurity of its parent question.

Dr Samina Khan, Director of Admissions and Outreach, empha- sises that “the interview is primar- ily an academic conversation.” This conception of the interview is the most familiar to those who have undergone it: for all its quirks, it is essentially a challenging discussion

Oxford cannot demystify its admissions process by publishing a series of headline-grabbing questions – it is this genre of question that has fermented notoriety around interviews. More weight should be lent to mock interview videos, which offer a better insight into the shape and style of an interview. It is counterproductive to spotlight the weird and wacky parts of a jigsaw when you could instead demonstrate how they fit together as a whole.

How to: leave a tutorial with any positivity

Matthew Palmer
-
1
How to: leave a tutorial with any positivity

So you’ve just finished a tutorial. Perhaps you’ve aced it. Your essay/problem sheet/presentation was brilliant, you had an answer to every question your tutor threw at you, you contributed meaningfully to the discussion and even said something mildly-insightful. Great. Leave the room buzzing with energy, take the rest of the day off and go pour yourself a glass of your favourite poison in celebration.

Perhaps that happened.

Or – more likely – it didn’t. You didn’t prepare enough for the tute, your pathetic excuse for an essay was a half-arsed, inchoate mess that made little sense under even the most casual scrutiny, and it was obvious that you didn’t have anything worthwhile to say in the following debate. Worse, you probably had to be rescued from your tutor’s polite inquisition by your fellow students. The tute crawled along as you prayed to be released from the pit of shame. Let’s be honest, you fucked it.

Well, now what do you do?

You could go to your room and sulk/cry/rage over a cup of tea and Tesco’s own-brand biscuits, which is probably what you feel like doing. This has the benefit of allowing you to wallow in self-pity for an hour or two, but, in the end, this will probably just leave you in a state of dull misery for the rest of the week, dreading your next encounter with the arch-inquisitor. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Better would be for you to talk to your tute partners. Chances are, even if you thought you were the only one in the room to fail miserably, at least one other student went through the same hell. Even better if it turns out the entire group hated every moment – then you can have a good old-fashioned bitching session about the tormentor, and laugh off the fact that you messed up. And once that is done, make it your mission to ace the next tute. Go listen to some motivational tunes, hit the library early each morning, put in the extra graft, and send off your work way before the deadline. Passively-aggressively dare your tutor not to give you a decent grade this time.

Feeling better? Good. Now pour yourself a glass anyway – you’ll probably need it. And let’s face it – it could be worse. You could do a science degree.

Life Divided: The case against black tie

Anoushka Kavanagh
-
1
Life Divided: The case against black tie

It’s midnight. Your feet feel as though an elephant has trodden on them – or, if you are lucky, are now totally numb – from the heels your toes are sticking out at unnatural angles from. And you’re groggy and chilly as the effects of weak alcohol have worn off. The black tie ball that started out so beautifully is no longer so beautiful.

After a long cloakroom queue behind likeminded sufferers, you welcomingly snatch your sneakers like the lifeline they are and head back to the dance tent. Only your gown is now far too long for you minus the artificial six inches, and you accidentally step on the trail, snagging it. That perfect dress you spent *literally months* searching for on Asos, instead of writing the essays you should have been writing, is now ruined. As a saving grace, you remember you couldn’t possibly wear it again anyway, because, oh god, it would be social suicide to be seen in the same dress at a black tie event twice.

Not only are you drunkenly tearful about this minor wardrobe disaster, but you’re also now cold. Shame you didn’t think about how chilly British May nights are when admiring your own cleavage. You look enviously to the boys prancing around in their waiter-like uniforms, complete with warm jacket. Black tie’s probably not so bad if you only have to throw on a tux.

One of them takes pity on you standing shivering and staggers over inebriated to offer you some warmth. What a gentleman! Until… “You can have my coat if you sleep with me” he slurs. What a prick. You come to the conclusion that he must be a member of that stalwart of misogyny, the Bullingdon. Why else would he look so good in a tux – you’ve heard that’s an entry requirement. Besides, you remember reading it in Cherwell, so he must be, right?

Touch, tenderness, and technology in Cloud of Petals

Eleanor Birdsall-Smith
-
0
Touch, tenderness, and technology in Cloud of Petals

Sarah Meyohas’s Cloud of Petals grants its audience no time to adapt or understand before it launches forward. We are immediately hit with its startling power, as thick thumbs rub the clitoral centre of a plump dusty pink rose. Yet, while at times erotic and deeply seductive, it is not just about sex.

Set over the course of four days, the installation aims to address perceptions of beauty as well as the relationship between nature and technology. In a sentence out of context, this sounds appalling, tired and clichéd, yet remarkably it manages to almost completely avoid all of these usual shortcomings. The brief premise of the film follows sixteen men who were chosen to carefully and diligently pick flowers they deemed to be the most beautiful.

These flowers were then used and explored in a laboratory designed by the renowned Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. Over 100,000 petals of all different types and colours were both physically pressed and uploaded to a cloud system. This leads us to the interesting way Meyohas interprets the relationship between beauty, nature and technology: “This film traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence,” says Meyohas. “From the trove of images taken by
the ‘workers’, an artificial intelligence algorithm is created, allowing for the creation of new, unique petals forever.”

However, while the concept behind the piece is intriguing and brilliant in its own right, it is the finished spectacle that truly amazes. It is filled with fast pace transitions which make your tummy turn and your heart swell. This manages to strike an interesting balance between uncomfortable and exciting, for instance at one point focus is put on the thick bodies of Burmese pythons as they slip scale by scale past the rose petals, until we are suddenly but seamlessly zooming beneath an amass of exposed rubber wires and tubes in the ceiling, which otherwise would have remained ordinary and overlooked.

This sense of unity and connection continues throughout with a particular emphasis on line and geometry, which somehow manages to stay tied down to the experiment at hand, with almost Orwellian imagery of men working within this bizarre factory full of grids and parameters.  There are also beautifully tender moments, as a child laces glimmering blue blurs into the hair of another, which then, a little jarringly, are revealed to be little blue bottle flies. Yet it is at times undeniably sensual in a way no romance novel, film or porno ever could be.

It will hit you in the depth of your chest, exciting your heart and mind and inciting desire
purely though its keen focusing on the impact of the touch. It embraces its electronic form and presentation through an ongoing house fly motif, which flits between being on video, and physically resting on the screen which displays the video. This enables the shots of the cloud and loading icons to continue the narrative without becoming trying or cringe inducing.

The sombre and foreboding soundtrack to the video adds a weight to the piece, which on its own could seem fleeting frivolous and skittish with its quick paced shot changes, yet in combination becomes serious and almost scary. The actual music has the same effect as trailers for blockbusters, which inexplicably give you goose bumps in the cinema, however this is also combined with interspersed moments of ASMR-style whispers. The result is that the video seems to hit every sense, setting the body on fire. Tuning in to the intricacies of human sensation, the piece above anything else seeks to invite emotional response.

At no point is the narrative (to use the term loosely) or themes of the piece driven home or flagged up for the easy consumption of the viewer, enhancing and stretching the accepted ‘show not tell’ principle.

Cloud of Petals is on show at Red Bull Arts, New York, through 10 December 2017, but an extended cut is available to stream via ‘nowness.com’ as part of their ‘Video Art Visions’ series, which also has many other beguiling pieces from a variety of different sources.

Is high fashion more accessible than ever?

Chloe Dootson-Graube
-
0
Is high fashion more accessible than ever?

As it is said, fashion weeks come and fashion weeks go, but LFW SS18 was marked by a certain revelation; Burberry produced its second ever collection to deliver the product straight from the runway to the consumer, with clothing seen on the models available to the regular buyer instantly, in-store and online. When this scheme was launched it was predicted that it would cause a shake-up within haute couture, as the fashion industry is a delicate equilibrium sustained through its seasonal schedule and demand-supply based enterprise.

As SS18 didn’t end in flaming carnage run through with mobs of the masses, one can only assume that these fears were misplaced. Together with the rise of livestreamed shows and collections becoming viewable online, could this signify a movement to a fashion industry that is less elitist in its approach to both its creators and buyers? The fashion editors decided to take ourselves out of the office to investigate. After a couple of weeks of planning, we arrived at Covent Garden bedecked in fashion week appropriate attire (read: looking very extra). We entitled this venture ‘Budget Fashion Week’, as it turns out the likes of Burberry, Shrimps and their other reasonably large compatriots aren’t willing to dole out tickets to student journalists with a week’s notice.

This is fine, and indeed the question is already partly answered: no, haute couture is not particularly accessible to student journalists, not even such illustrious ones as ourselves. We decided that Christopher Kane probably did not issue an invitation on account of some bitterness towards Cherwell Fashion’s recent Croc exposé. As we have said, this is fine. Haute couture hates student journalism, but it is fine. So we find ourselves at Fashion Scout at Covent Garden’s Freemason’s Hall to watch Leaf XIA and Irynvigre. Fashion Scout, to the uninitiated, is a venue that seeks to showcase lesser known and upcoming designers, and is subsequently one of the most accessible spots in London Fashion Week.

For Leaf XIA, we were ushered to a standing spot in the back, which provided an optimal view of the the audience; for Irynvigre we were landed with whopping second row seats.
In terms of looks, Leaf XIA seemed to encapsulate the term ‘kawaii’ with lurid fabrics and dolly shapes. MIA played in the background. For a moment, I was truly happy. Irynvigre was certainly a brand, as it was termed, ‘for rich bitches’ – floaty and sheer garments glided down the runway on ethereal models.

Never in my life, I remarked, had I ever seen anyone nearly as tall as the barefoot models on that runway. Sizing of models and subsequently, collections remains a staple criticism in the accessibility debate, and with good reason, too, as neither of us could physically envisage ourselves in these clothes without looking like some kind of textile based art installation.

However, Fashion Week is just as much about fashion as a culture as it is about the clothing, and despite the various efforts to livestream and show collections remotely, some- thing is lost in translation. You won’t be told about the various orgies that have occurred in the venue and the conspiracy theories of its founder by means of livestream.

Notable front rowers across the event included someone who was wearing an inflatable costume who is apparently semi-famous, members of what could equally be a cult or a Russian boyband wearing matching jackets emblazoned with the logo ‘the Fourth Kingdom,’ somebody who we thought was in JLS but was probably not, and many other gorgeous people. Fashion Scout, we conferred, is truly the promised land.

We even spotted Molly Goddard, dresser to Rihanna, in a very puffy creation of her own design. I think it is therefore fair to say that Fashion Week is therefore a place where the fantastical is realised. That which only exists in the collective unconscious, and by extension, Instagram is projected onto the streets before us.

In this respect, we certainly got the fashion week experience, budget or not. While we certainly weren’t doing bumps of coke off Mr Burberry’s Chest (the true fashion week experience?) the fact that we had the opportunity to take a seat at the showcasing of new British talent is a compelling argument for the idea that high fashion is finally becoming accessible to a new audience.

More Slush than Snow – The Snowman fails to impress

Jonnie Barrow
-
0
More Slush than Snow – The Snowman fails to impress

No film this year constitutes a more ignoble failure than Tomas Alfredson’s (Let The Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) Scandi-snoozefest detective film The Snowman. At least other bad films this year looked bad from the outset: The Emoji Movie had a snowball’s chance in hell of being good, The Dark Tower’s production problems were publicised well in advance, and nobody ever cared about Transformers 5. But The Snowman has such a wealth of talent in front of and behind the camera (the executive-producer is none other than Martin Scorsese) that its failures seem even more pronounced than other terrible movies this year.

Michael Fassbender (in a performance more dreary than I’d ever thought him capable of) plays Harry Hole, a detective who you’d be forgiven for thinking is absolutely rubbish at his job if other characters didn’t inexplicably tell us he’s the “Best Detective Ever”. He teams up with a new recruit (Rebecca Ferguson) to find and stop a serial killer who keeps leaving snowmen at the scenes of his murders. The film never explains why he does this.

Not only are none of the performances even passable, but the story itself makes very little sense. Desperate to understand the train-wreck I’d just witnessed, I rushed home from the cinema to find out how a director who has previously been so clearly obsessed with creating coherence out of convolutions in Tinker Tailor could create such a bafflingly hard-to-follow mess here. It transpires that, by his estimates, 10-15% of the screenplay wasn’t even shot, meaning that essential pieces of the story were forgone in favour of a speedy shooting schedule.

Pieces of flashback sequences starring a laughably awful Val Kilmer are inserted into the story seemingly at random. Elsewhere, whole plot threads are picked up and dropped on a whim, as if the two editors were trying to outdo each other in a game of creating loose end upon loose end to convince the audience to get up and leave. Incomprehensibly edited action scenes and ludicrous plot developments inspire murmurs of incredulity, and mitigate any semblance of payoff the film could’ve had at many key moments.

Everyone on the screen looks bored, and everyone in my screening looked bored too. The film starts badly and, despite glimmers of improvement peeping through the snowy landscape, somehow gets worse the longer it goes on. Blade Runner 2049 is far more worthy of your attention, avoid The Snowman like frostbite.

1...817818819...2,508Page 818 of 2,508

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 James Ashley