Sunday 27th July 2025
Blog Page 826

Balls are the clearest indication of Oxford’s elitism problem

Catherine Cibulskis
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Balls are the clearest indication of Oxford’s elitism problem

After purchasing a ticket to the upcoming Rag Ball, some of us will find our pockets lighter by £85. With carousels, fire breathers and psychedelic light shows, at Oxford we spare no expense when it comes to having a good time. In an evening of decadent excess, students can socialise and celebrate in beautiful surroundings. But who exactly enjoys these college events?

Many feel that these charity balls, along with college and society balls, are an integral, fascinating element of the Oxford experience. Though the night may promise free food and drink, which many will binge on to redeem their losses, the golden ticket is still a tall order for those living on a tight budget. And this begs the question of whether Oxford caters to all students, regardless of background.

Most college balls cost between £100-£150, which for many students constitutes a substantial part of their budget. As Oxford bars students from work during term time, students must rely on their maintenance loan to fund their Cinderella-esque journey. Whilst most universities do host balls, Oxford’s extravaganzas carry their own culture. And to some, it’s a culture of exclusion.

Former Education Minister David Lammy has recently accused the University of overarching and acute lack of diversity. The University has also recently been identified as being dominated by students from more affluent parts of the country, such as the South-East, with only 15% of students coming from Northern regions, 11% from the Midlands and 3% from Wales. Statistics like this bring the arguably elitist aspects of the Oxford experience into question.

Arguably, the attendance at commemoration balls is indicative of a wider problem within the University, that of access. While events like these are an important feature to retain, it is difficult to navigate doing so without excluding certain members of the student body.

However, by diminishing the cost, the experience itself may be diminished. Do the most lavish and memorable nights come hand in hand with the expense? Subsidising tickets for those who struggle to pay is also fraught with difficulties reminiscent of the stigma attached to free school dinners.

Making steps to ensure that Oxford’s college balls are available to everyone, regardless of their wealth or background is an important step in Oxford’s progression towards a modern, diverse and equal environment, whilst preserving the charac- teristics that give the University its own distinct, traditional atmosphere. Despite the criticism that these occa- sions attract, they are still a treasured milestone for many.

The more salient fact is that Oxford as a whole has to consider how wealth and class affect the overall experience of students as individuals, whether this limits their prospects when it comes to application, acceptance and life within college itself.

The new Westgate Centre is a failure for social housing

Simon Neumaier
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The new Westgate Centre is a failure for social housing

When the plans for the redevelopment of the Westgate shopping centre were discussed in 2008, they were met by multiple heated town hall debates attended by large crowds of residents, concerned by a multitude of worsening issues in the city.

Those who opposed the plan discussed alternative uses of the additional space, the most pressing of which was affordable housing.

Fast forward nine years, and the problems facing the city and its housing market are even more severe. Rents have increased continuously, and the number of rough sleepers in the city has more than tripled.

In hindsight, it seems that the space which is now dedicated to a high-end shopping centre should instead have been used to mark a much-needed step in the right political direction. The uncomfortable truth is that affordable accomodation, or even council housing, may have eased the pressure on local tenants, but it certainly wouldn’t have boosted Oxford’s commercial or aesthetic image in the way that an enlarged Westgate shopping centre does.

It’s true that the developers did include new flats in the redevelopment plans – 59 flats were built as part of the new site.

The only problem with this newly created space is that a one or two-bedroom flat would set you back between £350-£500k, extortionate figures which even break council provisions mandating that a balance be struck between affordable housing and expensive construction projects.

According to the Oxford Mail, the new high-end flats featuring private balconies and rooftop gardens have their most promising clientele in the parents of university students, those looking to house their children and provide themselves with a long-term real estate investment.

The terrible cynicism of this is that this space could have been used to remedy the effects of student housing and its ever-growing demand for facilities on local residents.

Instead, it is now being used to further a culture of monetised student living, meanwhile ignoring the needs of ordinary citizens.

Housing conflicts on Iffley Road were a painful reminder of the role that the University and colleges play in Oxford’s housing crisis, occupying an increasingly large portion of the scarce space near the city centre. The acquisition of new spaces exclusively dedicated to students are putting an additional strain on the rent market in the city.

While more students live as close to the city centre as possible, more permanent residents get pushed to the outskirts, feeling increasingly overlooked. Oxford is known as a student city, but moves such as Westgate further the narrative that permanent residents are not a priority.

Heralding the Westgate as a miracle for jobs and opportunities is misplaced. Among other reasons, it ignores its social consequences and overlooks the fact that the ones hit the hardest by a lack of affordable space in Oxford are not those who will be able to indulge themselves in this new consumerist utopia.

Only a minority of students will be able to afford these kinds of flats, but all share a responsibility for colleges’ housing policies and our impact on the local community as a group of temporary residents and consumers.

The new Westgate centre projects a problematic message: profits can be made from the city’s students, and they are willing to ignore local communities in order to continue a pattern of frivolous consumption and luxury living.

If we do not acknowledge our responsibility for our local environment, if we don’t challenge both our institutions and ourselves in how we use the limited space this city can provide, we are complicit in the social cleansing of Oxford, driving many further towards the outskirts.

Oxford’s new social and commercial hub comes at a cost. We should all acknowledge that a large part of the local community is paying a price for our casual spending.

New access scheme founded for BME applicants

Eve Webster
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New access scheme founded for BME applicants

A Pembroke student has founded a new initiative to widen access to Afro-Caribbean students.

Hope Oloye, a third year Biomedic at Pembroke, said “Oxford needs to take an active approach” in tackling racial inequality at university level. She is one of many students taking active steps to do so.

Oloye has created a mentorship programme and prize scheme – the Afro-Caribbean Tyler Prize – to improve access for black students. The programme involves an essay competition in which each entrant is given one-to-one support from a current or former Afro-Caribbean Oxford student. This aims to assist the improvement of academic writing and essay skills in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences.

Oloye began working on the new scheme before Lammy accused Oxford of “social apartheid” last week, but emphasised that his comments have helped to highlight the need for change. The data may have been shocking to many, but according to Oloye: “The data’s hardly surprising, you only have to look around Oxford to realise it has a diversity problem.”

Oloye’s decision to found this programme came when she “realised nothing was being done by my college to combat their incredible whiteness”. She emphasised that one third of black offer-holders do not take their place, in contrast to an average of 13% for all other ethnic groups.

Oloye went on to say: “I think we have to be careful not to further propagate the idea that Oxford isn’t a place for black students, because lot of the current discourse has the potential to deter prospective Afro-Caribbean applicants.

“I know so many capable students that didn’t even consider Oxford because they felt like it was an institution solely for white students, which breaks my heart.

“The reality is that not only are they missing out on one-on-one time with leading academics, the university is missing out.”

Speaking about her initiative, Oloye said: “The ultimate success of this scheme will be measured in the evolutionary changes in Oxford’s demographic intake.

“Through the development of academic skills, the creation of culturally relevant contacts at Oxford and the demystification of the University, we hope to increase the submission of strong, confident applications made by Afro-Caribbean students.”

The scheme operates at a specific school in East London but is open to any Afro-Caribbean students across the capital. It concludes with a celebration day held at Pembroke, when those taking part will be able to tour Pembroke and other colleges.

The day will also include a Q&A with a panel of Afro-Caribbean students. The impetus behind the prize giving is to give pupils the chance “to become more familiar with Oxford and, perhaps more importantly, feel that Oxford is in fact a place for them”.

After this year’s success, Oloye wishes to expand the project to inspire younger children across the country in order to “better combat the complex set of societal issues that affect young, black pupils across the UK”.

The programme is aiming to “demystify” the University and to address preconceptions which Oloye believes “can often prevent Afro-Caribbean students from accepting a hard-earned offer”.

Oloye further criticised the University for inequalities amongst their academic staff, saying: “Only 6% of Oxford’s teaching staff are BAME and even fewer are black. How can Oxford claim to be a world leading academic institution, when their research is conducted by the same voices?”

Speaking more about the need for the programme, Oloye said: “As much students hate to admit it, Oxford is a place that opens doors. “Leading law makers, politicians, journalists and academics, have studied here and to break down the deeply entrenched systemic inequalities that Black people face in this country, we need to be in these positions. Only then will we truly see the change we need.”

University hits back at claims of regional access disparities

Jeremiah O'Mahony
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University hits back at claims of regional access disparities

Statistics obtained by MP David Lammy last week show that four out of five students at Oxford and Cambridge are from the top two most privileged economic groups.

The data also shows that Oxford made only 193 more offers to applicants from the whole of Northern England than it did to applicants from the five home-counties, while Cambridge made 334 fewer offers to the whole of the north of England than it did to four of the homecounties.

Lammy said: “Whilst some individual colleges and tutors are taking steps to improve access… in reality many Oxbridge colleges are still fiefdoms of entrenched privilege.”

While nationally about 31% of people are in the top two social income groups, applicants from these two social classes received 81% of offers in 2015.

The figures also reveal the enduring prominance of regional divides, with applicants from London and south-east England receiving 48% of all Oxbridge offers. By contrast, the Midlands received 11% of Oxford offers and 12% of Cambridge offers, while the North West, the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber between them received 15% of Oxford offers and 17% of Cambridge offers.

A University spokesperson told Cherwell: “David Lammy asked for and focused on very small figures from a subset of the students who apply to Oxford (British students taking A levels), when the data we publish online (and we do publish more than any other university) looks at all applicants and can be broken down in many different ways – but always comparing like with like wherever possible.

“Similarly, Lammy has chosen a socioeconomic indicator (NS-SEC class) that most universities (and indeed HESA, the Higher Education Statistical Authority) no longer recognise as being very useful, because it classifies disadvantage by parental job occupation rather than looking at the indicators that most universities track, such as socioeconomically deprived postcodes or areas with very low participation in higher education.”

They also told Cherwell that, while it is “very easy to focus solely on the raw numbers – ie. the total number of students from any given group who end up here… one of the most important things to look at in admissions is the fairness of success rates, not just the raw numbers..

“In our case, figures for the latest admissions round show that students whom we flag in the admissions process as being particularly disadvantaged (because they attended an underperforming school or live in an area of high social deprivation) actually have better success rates when they apply than their more advantaged peer applicants.”

According to a new analysis by Ucas “Oxford and Cambridge are two institutions that do not appear to show systematic or consistent bias against black or less privileged applicants”.

Figures also showed that Wales had fewer than 100 offers from Oxford last year.

Gareth Molyneux, a second-year Wadham student from Wales, told Cherwell: “In general my view was many people in Wales have faced a lot of abuse and jokes from many English people in general, they found that enough of a deterrent to not apply to many English institutions, let alone one as old fashioned as Oxford.”

Blavatnik professor accuses Oxford of “excommunication” after Trump protest

Susannah Goldsbrough
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

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