Sunday 5th October 2025
Blog Page 884

“A maelstrom of violence and destruction”

John Mainland
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“A maelstrom of violence and destruction”

With President Trump having recently ordered strikes on Syrian air bases last month, the seemingly never-ending war is back in the news. So, from how the brutal tangled conflict began in the first place, to the role of the West, to Russia—here’s everything you wanted to know about the Syrian war, but haven’t been able to ask.

We’re starting off in March 2011. Rapper Nate Dogg had just died, and the Royal Wedding was a month away. Elsewhere, the Arab Spring was in full bloom—right across the Middle East people were rising up and turfing out corrupt autocratic governments in the hope of shiny new democratic ones. Tunisia’s President was the first to go, with Egypt’s following suit.

Libya’s dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was refusing to take the hint that it might be time to call it quits—and was waging a grisly civil war against rebel groups. By September 2011 he too would have joined the list of vanquished Arab leaders.

A far cry from the tumultuous goings-on in other parts of the Middle East, at this point in time Syria looked relatively quiet. Beneath the surface, though, a storm was brewing. The entirely undemocratic President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, had a family history of beastliness towards his own people and was no doubt on edge as pro-democracy sentiment spreads like wildfire around the Arab world.

In March 2011 a handful of pesky teens were arrested by police for anti-government graffiti in the southern city of Dera’a. The boys were from established and well-known families so the arrests did not go unnoticed. Citizens in Dera’a turned out in peaceful protest to demand that the lads were released.

It could have all ended there—the entire maelstrom of violence and destruction that would engulf Syria for the next years could have been entirely avoided if the Syrian government had just released the boys and made a handful of political concessions. Tragically, though, the Assad regime made the fatal error of firing upon the protesters.

This was where Syria first started to heat up. Protests quickly started popping up across the country as citizens demanded, ever more loudly, that President Assad step down. The regime tried to deal with this using a two-pronged method of reform and violent crackdown, but the reforms were too little too late, and the crackdowns only served to fuel the unrest.

With the deaths that ensue, by late 2011 Syria first started featuring in news around the world. Maybe you remember it. The ferocity with which the government was responding to protests drew international criticism, sanctions, and calls for an end to Assad’s regime. Everyone agreed that Assad had to go—the only question was, would this be revolution à la Egypt (where the leader steps down voluntarily) or, God forbid, another Libya?

As we now know, Syria turned out to be far bloodier, more protracted, and more complex than even the Libyan conflict, which in comparison now seems to have been mercifully brief.

So Assad dug his heels in and by 2012 the situation had deteriorated into an all-out civil war. Rebels across the country had taken up arms and were fighting the regime, which had also been suffering from defections in the army. What’s critical to note is that there wasn’t one unified rebel force, there were heaps of them.

The main headache for Assad was a group known as the Free Syrian Army, which was seen by the West as the main alternative to the Assad government. The Free Syrian Army benefitted enormously from military defections and managed to capture pretty impressive swathes of land from the regime. These were our guys. When it came to liberal secular democracy, they could talk the talk.

Western governments started bending over backwards to support the Free Syrian Army and, before long, the rebel movement was receiving arms and funding from the US and Great Britain. Despite this, the Obama administration, and the West in general, remained highly averse to being sucked into actually fighting another war in the Middle East.

When we remember that Obama had been elected in the wake of the colossal disaster that was the Iraq war, we can understand that the idea of another shoot-from-the-hip American misadventure in the region was unappealing to him.

What this meant for the Free Syrian Army was, though they received a boatload of rhetorical support and money from Western governments, that no Western troops would ever materialise to fight alongside them.

In July 2012, as Fifty Shades of Grey hit the top of Western bestseller lists, the Free Syrian Army had their breakthrough—capturing Syria’s second largest city and biggest commercial hub, Aleppo. Aleppo is a name that would be in the news for years to come. You almost definitely will have heard it at some point. Damascus, the capital of Syria, was never successfully captured by the Free Syrian Army—but there was sporadic fighting in its suburbs. From the outside it looked like Assad, and his whole nasty regime, was in trouble.

We need to take a quick breather here. Syria is one of the Middle East’s most diverse countries. The ex-French colony is about 90 per cent ethnically Arab, and ten per cent ethnically Kurdish. Religiously, Syria really is a mixed bag—most of the country is Sunni Muslim but there are all kinds of other religions sprinkled across the nation—from Christians to Jews to your more boutique options like Druze and Yazidi.

Syria’s ruling elite are Alawite—a subsection of Islam that looks quite a lot like Shi’a. This is of critical importance. You have a country with a Sunni majority being ruled by a small Shi’a elite. This is usually the point where people turn off. Once the terms Sunni and Shi’a rear their big complicated heads most readers throw in the towel and swap over to Netflix. If you can bear it though, understanding the Sunni-Shi’a split does clear up a lot of the madness of the Middle East—including Syria.

The actual difference between the two schools of Islam isn’t enormously important —it’s primarily based on who became the leader of the Islamic faith after the death of Mohammed. What you need to know is that 85-90 per cent of the world’s Muslims are Sunni and that pretty much all the others are Shi’a.

The most powerful and important Sunni country is Saudi Arabia. Indonesia does actually have a larger economy, but they don’t have a dog in this fight. The undisputed king of the Shi’a world is Iran. Whenever there’s a conflict between Sunnis and Shi’as in the Muslim world, the Saudis and the Iranians are inevitably somewhere behind the scenes, locked in indefatigable attempts to expand their respective spheres of influence. As such, the idea of Sunni rebels ousting Shi’a affiliated Assad sounded lip-smackingly good to the Saudis.

From the very beginning of the conflict in Syria, Saudi Arabia was pouring funds and arms into the hands of the rebels. In response, Iran was doing everything possible to keep the regime in power. This helps explain why the war has been so excruciatingly drawn-out. It’s not just a conflict between the Syrian government and rebels, but between various other interests willing to spend whopping sums of money on their side of choice. It’s not just Saudi Ara side of choice. It’s not just Saudi Arabia and Iran that are battling it out: Putin is a close ally of Assad’s and has been supporting his regime since the start of the conflict. On the flipside, Turkey, which borders Syria, has been funding rebel forces looking to topple the regime.

The Syrian war has often been categorised as a chessboard for foreign powers, who are using the conflict to push their own agendas. It’s a decent analogy which has been bandied about at many a cocktail party. Really though, Syria is a Chinese checkers board—different countries have slightly different interests in the conflict—and are all pushing it in slightly different directions.

Sometimes, foreign interests can be neatly compartmentalised: the West, the Saudis, and the Turks all want Assad gone; Iran and Russia want him to stay. However, this war is so impossibly confusing because it has not always been clear which countries have been supporting which groups.

Back to our timeline: 2013 was when everything fell apart, primarily because the moderate rebel forces became less and less moderate. Western powers pulled funding and arms pretty early on, as it became clear that the main opposition to Assad was switching from being the Free Syrian Army, to a ragtag collection of jihadist groups.

This was an awkward moment for the West. By December 2013 moderate rebels controlled so little land that most onlookers had to come to terms with the fact that Assad was probably not going to be toppled. The focus swapped in the West from indirectly combatting Assad, to eliminating the threat of terrorism—even if that meant Assad had to stay in power.

There was now no easy way out for the West. A madman, who’d used chemical weapons against his own people, was pitted against a group of terrorists.

Try to understand the intricacies of the jihadist factions who are fighting Assad in Syria and you can be sucked into a never-ending blackhole of long Arabic names, ever shifting alliances, and constant re-branding exercises. Only a couple of groups are really worth noting. The first is called Jabat al Nusra.

They’ve since gone through a series of unsavoury mergers and acquisitions, and have transformed into a revamped conglomeration named the “Levant Liberation Committee”—undoubtedly the single most accounting firm-esque name ever given to a violent terrorist group.

Don’t get distracted by all the names though, you already know these guys— they’re al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and other equally nasty groups started capturing territory off the government and off moderate rebels like the Free Syrian Army in December 2013. Over the course of 2014, more and more of Syria fell into extremist hands.

In June 2014, so-called Islamic State (or Daesh) entered the fray. Daesh’s leader, a man by the name of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, split from al Qaeda to do his own thing. Daesh quickly made headlines around the world, mainly due to their slick marketing campaigns partnered with their unmatched savagery.

Before long even their old chums at al Qaeda were criticising the unnecessary brutality of their tactics. The problem was, Daesh proved to be alarmingly good fighters, and before long they’d captured a huge amount of territory not just in Syria—but also in neighbouring Iraq.

Daesh’s military breakthroughs triggered a rapid shift in international priorities. You probably remember this period. Daesh was in the papers every other day and none of it was good. From beheading Western journalists, to destroying UNESCO world-heritage ruins in Palmyra, to waging genocide against the Yazidi people, they quickly established themselves as both barbaric and highly effective.

By August 2014, the West had had enough. The United States, Australia, France, Jordan, and a number of additional nations began bombing the jihadists. To re-cap, it’s mid 2014. The moderate rebels we liked are basically holed up in Aleppo, and aren’t looking particularly moderate anymore.

The West is bombing Daesh and a couple of other equally unsavoury groups. Saudi Arabia and Iran are still battling it out by funding groups on either side. Finally, Assad is chugging away, fighting both extremists, and moderates, and is now more or less being left to his own devices by Western governments.

One extra group should be mentioned before we go on—the Kurds. The Kurds are harder to fit in naturally because they’re fighting for a slightly different set of reasons. They’re a group of people with their own language, culture, and ethnicity who live split across four different countries (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran) and have historically had a pretty tough time in all four.

As such, Kurdish fighters aren’t interested in marching on Damascus, their goal has primarily been to carve out and secure an independent Kurdish region in the North East of Syria. That Kurdish area is surrounded by Daesh-controlled land, and from 2014 onwards the Kurds have been the ones putting in a lot of the grunt-work on the ground against Daesh—both in Iraq and in Syria.

To complicate matters a bit, Turkey doesn’t like anything that smacks of Kurdish independence, as they’ve been battling the Kurdish independence forces in their own backyard for quite some time. What this means is that even though Turkey is a key Western ally and doggedly anti-Assad, they’ve actually been bombing the same Kurdish forces that the West is relying on to fight Daesh. Confused? Welcome to Syria.

The final hopes of a moderate rebel victory came to an end in 2015. This was largely the fault of one key international player: Russia. We’ve already heard that Russia had, like Iran, been providing money and arms to the Assad government over the course of the conflict. Around September 2015, though, Putin ramped up his involvement significantly and began bombing the rebels directly.

Much of this bombing was directed at terrorist groups, but Russia also targeted CIA trained ‘moderate’ rebels. It was seriously downhill for the non-jihadist rebels from this point on. Over the coming months they gradually lost ground, and in December 2016 they lost Aleppo. Nowadays they’ve basically been pushed back to the Turkish border, with no realistic hopes of turning their situation around.

What’s important to note though, is that even at his weakest point, Assad controlled 13 out of 14 provincial capitals in Syria. It remains highly unlikely that, even with additional Western air support and without Russian bombing, the rebels would ever had had a serious chance at taking Damascus.

One final element of the war, which has re-surfaced recently, needs to be mentioned. Way back in 2012, when Obama was coming up with reasons not to get militarily involved in another Middle Eastern war, he specifically mentioned that if Assad were to use chemical or biological weapons against his own people, he would be crossing a “red line” that could prompt military action from the United States.

The problem was, Assad did. America looked weak. Basically, Obama’s bluff had been called—which has since been held up by those on both sides of the political fence as one of the greatest failings of his presidency. Rather than attack Assad directly, the Obama administration sought to make a deal (assisted by Putin) with Assad, which led to the destruction of the Syrian government’s chemical weapons stockpile.

At the time it looked like this had done the job, but recently there have been new chemical attacks against rebels. In response, President Trump ordered the first American air strikes directly against Assad forces since the beginning of the conflict.

This brings us to the present day. The war remains far from over. Daesh controls what appear on a map to be an enormous amount of territory to the East of Syria (though the reality is most of the land controlled is empty desert). The Kurds have held on in the North West and Assad, despite his critical victory in Aleppo, is still at war with disparate jihadist and non-jihadist rebel groups around the country.

Putin is still strongly supportive of Assad, and has harshly criticised the recent Trump airstrikes. Only time will tell what changes the new White House administration will bring about, but one way or another the conflict is unlikely to end any time soon.

The Greek poet Meleager of Gedara once described Syria as “one country which is the whole world”. It’s fitting then, that the Syrian conflict feels very much like the whole world is at war.

Keble JCR: no boat burning after Summer VIIIs

Akshay Bilolikar
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Keble JCR: no boat burning after Summer VIIIs

Keble College JCR has narrowly voted in opposition to the College’s provisional decision to burn a boat on its front quad ahead of Summer VIIIs, in a non-binding vote held this evening.

The College’s Governing Body had voted last week to allow the Keble College Boat Club to burn an old boat in the centre of the College’s Liddon quad if the men’s first crew (M1) or women’s first crew (W1) finish Head of the River next week.

Members of the JCR were presented with three options in an emergency motion at a JCR meeting earlier today. JCR members were asked whether they supported the burning of the boat, a celebration of the boat not based around burning, a rejection of the burning altogether, or abstention.

50 students voted to reject burning the boat altogether, with 73 choosing to celebrate the boat without burning it. There were 120 votes in favour of burning the boat and four abstentions, leaving a narrow majority of three votes in opposition to the Boat Club proposal.

One Keble JCR member, who did not wish to be named, told Cherwell: “It says something about Keble that we sent this motion to debate. We are not afraid to question even the most traditional of traditions. The debate that we had was well-mannered, mature and ultimately helpful for the whole college I think.

“Everyone here supports the Boat Club and will be very proud if they gain headship but we also want to ensure that Keble’s values of progressiveness and modernisation are represented in everything that we do.”

Keble MCR, which was polled on the question on Sunday, voted 21-18 against burning the boat. Both the JCR and the MCR motions were wholly advisory, with no power to mandate the Boat Club.

Sven Jaeschke, the men’s captain of the Boat Club, told The Oxford Student: “The grass won’t be touched and we would use fire retardant blankets to further protect it. The old wooden boat that we intend to burn, however, hasn’t been used for over 40 years and is of almost no value anymore”

The Governing Body voted in favour of burning the boat 12-9 with three abstentions, with JCR and MCR representatives not allowed to vote.

Keble College Boat Club and Keble College JCR have been contacted for comment.

College Insider at Keble

Anonymous
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College Insider at Keble

When I told my grandfather that I had got into Keble College, Oxford (or, as Monty Python called it, Keble Bollege, Oxford) he said two things to me. The obligatory congratulations were followed by a short pensive pause, in which he concocted the right words to say, “pity about the architecture though”. He is not alone in this view of Keble College. Oscar Wilde once named Keble in a list of things, including the Union and the “screaming of rabbits” suffering from vivisection, which, despite their flaws, could not damage the beauty of Oxford. But what Wilde failed to realise is that Keble is unconventional but brilliant, exactly because of its architecture. The immensely complicated brick pattern, which could have been ruined by the slightest mistake from a hungover or sleep-deprived builder, surrounds the college students, reminding us daily that complication is a virtue not a sin.Yes, we may not be at the peak of the Norrington Table and our alumni list may not boast the most prominent members, but we don’t really care about those things.

Keblites care about shouting slightly confusing chants, which have little rhyme and even less rhythm, whilst we watch our rugby players, most of whom enjoy a cigarette at half time, raise the Cuppers trophy above their heads. We care about the little duck, who has been affectionately named Dorothy, that has decided to make its nest in one of the flower pots, and has gained such a renown that it was cordoned off during the Keble Ball. We care about those little interactions when we walk around the campus and bump into a third year that you saw in Anuba the night before, or a blues rower of whom, as a fresher member of the boat club, you are equally terrified, and in awe. Keble is the college that had the cheek to build its magnificent hall one foot (or one metre—the story changes every time it is told) longer than Christ Church. We boast the fact that, unlike the aforementioned College, we turned down Harry Potter when they tried to film it in our hall, because we didn’t want to move our pictures. We are the College that chose, democratically, an inanimate brick as our mascot. We may be weird and, quite literally, off the beaten track but talk to any member of the College, and they will tell you that we are proud of that fact.

Are we still evolving?

Calum Stephenson
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Are we still evolving?

Over the last 150 years, Homo Sapiens have largely stepped down from their celestial pedestal and taken their rightful place alongside their organismal brethren. But this step was taken not in the publishing of Darwin’s magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, where he in fact shied away from human evolution, worried about the predicted disgust from society towards being lumped with the pigs and plants. We had to wait for his second great book, The Descent of Man, before such ideas were revealed. But while Darwin showed that we are very much a product of natural forces, what of our current state? The question of whether or not humans are still subject to evolution has become hotly contested ever since the publication of Darwin’s book, leading to debates over the very nature of evolution itself.

It is easy to follow the argument that humans are no longer subject to evolution. At its base, evolution describes the process where the variation in the reproductive success of organisms within a population leads to the spread of some characters that are well adapted to the environment, and the extinction of others which are less well adapted. With the advent of human society, and by extension medicine, the majority of individuals that are born in developed societies today survive to reproductive maturity. We are no longer looking over our shoulders for lions in the dark, or terrified that every cut or scratch could lead to infection and eventual death.

The invention of the vaccine is a modern miracle: we are now able to combat and sometimes even eliminate infectious disease. If someone who, ten thousand years ago, would have fallen prey to the natural world in childhood can now survive well into their eighties, is it right to say that we have truly broken free of evolution’s chains?

Well, unfortunately evolution has never been that simple.

The women living in the small town of Framingham, Massachusetts were the subject of a long-term study that collected complete medical histories, centred around the function of their heart. First conducted in 1948, it was the longest running study of its kind, with data overlapping multiple generations of women. Utilising this information, evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns found that each generation was in fact shorter and plumper than the previous, as smaller, heavier women on average had more children. These changes in height and weight were accompanied by lower cholesterol levels and systolic blood pressure. Despite the fact that the rate of evolution is slower due to the stability of the environment, character frequencies still change in response to differences in reproductive rates between the individuals involved, however minor.

Though our evolution in a physical sense has weakened, we are not in biological stasis. Our societies are unique because we possess culture, which can be defined as social behaviour that can be shared between individuals through learning. Humanity is unique even among other animals that have a form of culture. Our culture is cumulative: each generation is able to build upon the achievements of the last, gradually improving the design and allowing the ‘brainpower’ of many individuals to contribute. With this, we are capable of rapid technological evolution, changing our genetic makeup even within a single generation. For example, when new methods of travel are invented, populations separated by previously insurmountable distances are able to intermix, introducing new adaptations into novel populations. This can result in new traits appearing.

In a study between fathers and children, the possession of a nicotine receptor allele that makes it more difficult to stop smoking has been correlated with early mortality in fathers. In the 1950s, a pack-a-day smoking habit was the norm, meaning that possession of the gene could effectively be considered a death sentence for a smoker. In the modern day, smoking habits have changed and been reduced, after societal realisation that smoking kills. The selection pressure has changed with changes in culture.

Though it is impossible to say the direction in which human evolution is moving (the predictions from Disney’s WALL-E of overweight, technology-dependent humans are so far unverifiable) we can at least say that it is happening. Culture is progressively shaping our biology and will continue to do so in ever-accelerating rates as our species becomes more genetically mixed and interconnected.

Play-off heartbreak for men’s hockey Blues

Caitlin Rigler
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Play-off heartbreak for men’s hockey Blues

After a very successful season for the Men’s Hockey Blues, during which they gained promotion in the Saturday league as well as a long-awaited Varsity win, crowds congregated at Iffley on 10 May for their final match.

In an attempt to avenge last season’s relegation from their BUCS league, the Blues met Reading University at home in the second leg of a two-match play-off.

Oxford were in a good position, having held Reading to a 2-2 draw away courtesy of two flicks by Noah Francis, so were hoping for a good result.

Despite the vocal support of the large crowd that the out-of-season fixture drew, the Blues conceded two early goals, putting the away side 2-0 ahead at half time. Impressive individual play by Mark Lilley and Will Mooney provided the Blues with numerous chances in the early second half.

These opportunities eventually paid off, as Jolyon Dannatt finished off a slick move featuring a beautiful link-up between David Jones and Andrew Oxburgh. As the Blues made it 2-1, hopes were high as it felt like another goal was just around the corner.

Unfortunately, despite notable saves from George Oyebode, the Blues were unable to pull it back and conceded at last minute goal to leave the score 3-1 to Reading.

Oyebode, recently awarded man of the season for a sublime year in goal, told Cherwell that the team were “all gutted” about the result.

“The whole season’s work, [which included] winning some big games against Cambridge and Cardiff, was undone, so to have to do it all again next year…it’s quite sad.

“In the first leg we probably should have come back a couple of goals ahead of them. They were on top in the first half of the second game, and they used their chances [more than us],” he continued.

When asked if it was a case of rustiness after a long Easter vacation, Oyebode said “maybe we hadn’t played as much together, and didn’t have as many games together as Reading had,” but still expressed his delight at how the season had panned out overall.

Indeed, this loss should not overshadow the overwhelming success of Ryan Kavanagh’s side this season. With a new Saturday league in which to make their mark, as well as a Varsity title to retain, things are only looking up for the Men’s Blues.

Oriel confident of Summer Eights success

Matthew Roller
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Oriel confident of Summer Eights success

The pinnacle of Oxford college rowing begins this Wednesday, as Summer Eights gets underway.

The event takes place in the traditional ‘bumps’ format, in which boats chase each other in single file, as each crew tries to catch—or bump—the boat in front. Eights includes over 1500 competitors annually, and draws crowds of thousands, who flock to the Isis both to support their college and to enjoy the summer weather.

Last year, Oriel and Wadham finished head of the river in the Men’s and Women’s competition respectively, but Keble, Christ Church, Pembroke, and Univ will all be in contention for the prestigious honour.

Lower down the divisions, colleges will compete for the honour of winning Blades, a triumph bestowed on a crew which manages to bump a boat ahead of them on each of the four days of the regatta.

Many observers will look to Torpids, the main Hilary regatta, as a guide for form—but with Blues rowers only available for Eights, and finalists present for Torpids alone, there can be large turnovers in personnel between the two competitions.

In the top division of Men’s Eights, Oriel will be hoping to repeat last year’s success. However, after a disappointing Torpids campaign, they know to expect tough challenges from the Blues-heavy boats from Keble and Christ Church.

Indeed, for Oriel, there is more riding on this year’s Eights than in many previous, with M1 rower Stevan Boljevic telling Cherwell that “a win this year would give us the all-time record [number of headships] with 33.”

Oriel currently sit level with Christ Church, who are boosted by the presence of Boat Race winners William Warr and Ollie Cook on 32 headships, but it is Keble, who have four Blues rowers, who are seen by many as clear favourites, having finished third in 2016.

“This is a three, rather than a two-horse race,” Boljevic continued. “Any of the top three could take the crown, but if you’re not backing yourself [to win] then you’ve lost before the cannon is fired.”

There have been mutterings from those in rowing circles over the past few years about the suspiciously high numbers of graduate rowers who end up at Christ Church and Keble Colleges for their studies. Of the sixteen who rowed for Oxford at either Blues or Second Boat level in 2017, ten study at those two colleges, and nine are graduate students.

There is more than a hint of scepticism from Boljevic as he comments that this happens “coincidentally right in line with the 200th anniversary of the foundation of Christ Church Boat Club.”

“In all my previous racing, my opposite man has been a ‘regular’ college rower. This time round…my opposition have Olympic and World Championship medals under their belt and I know that as an individual I will never reach their level,” he commented. “This really focuses the mind on putting in the best performance you can in training to be able to get to the best absolute level you can.”

In the Women’s Eights, Wadham start head of the river after their 2016 success, but the spread of the Blues boats means that the field is wide open. Oriel’s W1 cox and Women’s captain Edward Carroll told Cherwell that Wadham’s “tenacity and drive to prove themselves will result with them on top.”

Despite starting bottom of Women’s Division I at Eights, Oriel go in with a typically confident attitude having finished head of the river at this year’s Torpids. Carroll said: “It was one of the most stressful weeks of my life and we were all so proud to have been a part [of the headship].

“We are looking to move back up into the heart of the first division after many years hovering at the bottom. As we train at Wallingford, we can’t really tell how we will fare against other boats—time will tell.”

Clearly excited about the prospect of the week ahead, Carroll described Eights as “a strange and unique competition [that] you can’t help but get completely caught up in… the buzz in the air and the nervous excitement from everyone competing makes it the most memorable experience.”

Wadham’s main competition for the headship will be Univ. and Christ Church, who are both boosted by the return of a Boat Race rower. University College’s Rebecca te Water Naudé was the tallest of the women’s crew this year at 5 ft. 11½ in, and will bring some power to an already-strong boat. Christ Church are hoping that New Zealander Harriet Austin will prove to be a good addition: her crew starts fifth, so it would take a monumental effort to finish with the headship, but they will definitely put pressure on those above them.

Cherwell Summer Eights Predictions:
Men’s Head of the River: Christ Church
Women’s Head of the River: Wadham

Corpus end five-year cricket dry spell

Peter Woodcock
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Corpus end five-year cricket dry spell

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the founding of Corpus Christi College by Bishop Richard Foxe, and will now mark another watershed moment for the Merton Street College.

For the first time in five years, Corpus Christi College have beaten another college’s 1st XI cricket team. The unfortunate victims: Magdalen.

The resilient team had endured five years since the last league victory for CCCCC, a run that started after a six-man Lincoln side didn’t quite hold on against former captain Sean Ravenhall’s 2012 vintage.

Since then, many captains have been and gone, but the sub-par quality of cricket found on the Corpus grounds on Abingdon Road has remained constant. However, on a sunny day in the east of Oxford this five-year duck was broken in emphatic fashion.

With Corpus put in to bowl by the Magdalen skipper, it took just three overs for the first Magdalen wicket to fall, as Max Phillips swung one from leg onto the toes of their opening batsmen. Former Corpus skipper Arthur Hussey came into the attack and was seemingly determined to not let the new captain break from their losing tradition, kicking off his spell with three wides a long way down the off side. Eventually, he managed a wicket with a dreadful full toss that he managed to hold on to as it was lofted back to him.

Kavi Amin came into the attack and took two very good wickets, turning the ball through bat and pad, before getting smacked around at the end of his spell and leaving the field. His replacement, Shiv Bhardwaj, had arrived too late to come into the attack so Woodcock was left with a conundrum as to who would bowl the ‘filler’ overs at the other end.

The nod was given to Miles Partridge, who initiated proceedings with two wides and a full toss that was deservedly clapped for six. However, ever-persistent, Partridge plodded on and was rewarded with a wicket despite the efforts of fielders Hugo Shipsey and Will Hamilton-Box. Some tight overs at the end left Magdalen 100 for seven off their allocated 25 overs, a target which was bigger than ones that had been bottled before.

After a very splendid tea, Partridge and Amin went out to open, and didn’t look back: the opening pair made the whole thing appear very easy indeed. Despite a nervy moment on 33, Partridge charged on to 57*, winning the game in style with a sweetly-struck cover drive that raced over the boundary for four.

With that one collision of willow and leather, and just 8.5 overs into the run chase, Corpus had won their first proper game in five long laborious years.

College cricket is a strange beast. In the vital hours of an ever-packed Trinity Term, 22 athletes turn out every week to play fixtures of a highly questionable quality. Every year it plods blindly on with teams able to find at least a handful of positive results even when struggling in their respective division.

Yet for a generation of Corpus players, there has been no ‘W’ in the results column of a match they have played in, no justifiable reason to go to the pub afterwards, and no real chance of getting to pat each other on the back as they walk back to the pavilion past a glowing scoreboard.

Finally, the long suffering troops of CCCCC got to taste an aspect of the game they had never encountered before, and one that they may possibly never experience again.

Although it may not necessarily be the taking part that drags eleven Corpuscles out of college every week, five long years play testament to the fact that there absolutely has to be something other than winning that matters; because if there weren’t, they really would have given this up a long, long time ago.

A rhetorical revolution on Trump?

Ethan Croft
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A rhetorical revolution on Trump?

We have all become accustomed to the cry of ‘fake news’, pronounced since last year from the mouth of the new US President, or his Twitter handle @realDonaldTrump. When he vanquished the Clinton machine in November, Trump turned his gaze fully to the fourth estate, declaring media organisations the new opposition in America.

Over the course of the campaign, voices of articulate criticism were best given a platform in the spindly pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. But now, as we see the bookstore shelves dedicated to discussions of Trump steadily lengthening, perhaps lightning fury has finally given way to weighty contemplation. Following Trump’s ascension to the White House, I wanted to see a revolution in the discourse surrounding his election.

In the weeks and months surrounding November 8, searching for a substantial exposition of the Trump phenomenon was a fool’s errand. There were two main ports of call. First, a thin volume entitled Trump & Me—Penguin’s hastily published reprint of Mark Singer’s 1996 profile of the Manhattan Megalodon.

This humorous enquiry made for leisurely reading in the summer of 2016, when all bets were on a Clinton victory. But it is not of the likes of post-election literature. The other option was investigative journalist David Cay Johnston’s critical biography of Trump’s “tremendous success,” The Making of Donald Trump.

Whilst this was, at first reading, an admirable dissection of Trump’s moral and often fiscal bankruptcy, the book now leaves us feeling cheated. How could a man as repugnant as this lie his way from the Trump Tower penthouse to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

But while the new President hurtled through the first 100 days with pause only to tweet and swing a golf club, the writers of America (or at least those who could face the ‘American Tragedy’ of Trump’s victory, as David Remnick called it) were working away.

The first major fictional offering post- presidency is Howard Jacobson’s Pussy (he might have been warier of the title). This half-satire, half-elegy to liberal America, was written in the immediate weeks after the election. While Jacobson’s prose is intended to show us the inadequacy of Trump, I am afraid it more clearly demonstrates the inadequacy of his opponents in their reactions to defeat.

Indeed, the fact that Trump is so objectionable in so many ways presented a goldmine of potential attack lines to Clinton and her supporters last year. To many Republicans, the inexcusable behaviour of their candidate was anathema, for they were the ones who had to defend him publicly whilst attempting to masquerade as people with a shred of decency.

For his opponents, Trump’s various misdemeanours could be fashioned into a cache of poison dart invectives throughout the campaign, targeted expertly to turn designated sectional interest groups. For defence hawks, there was Trump’s professed isolationism. Women were given a heavy dose of his misogyny and allegations of sexual assault.

Clips of Trump’s race baiting and his support from the white supremacist David Duke were aimed at black and ethnic minority Americans. Of course, his ‘America First’ economics were given a good airing for Hillary’s big buck donors who have done very well out of globalism.

But as the Clintons have now quietly retired to walk their dogs and write pulp fiction political thrillers, the attacks have turned disparate. The precise crossbow of the Democratic machine has been packed up until 2020, replaced post-inauguration by the chaotic firing of scatterguns by those, like Howard Jacobson, who are still searching for answers.

The title of Pussy and accompanying front cover illustration of an infantile Trump, dressed only in a nappy and holding a doll of a naked woman, clarifies the novel’s main polemical line—the new President’s attitude to women.

In this roman à clef, Prince Fracassus (obviously Trump), lusts after his his female teacher Doctor Cobalt, is open about his taste in hardcore pornography, and demonstrates an intense hatred of intelligent women such as Sojjourner, who engages in sex work to finance her degree: “He resorted to Twitter. ‘Met a bitch called two js. Great piece of ass with two as. Moved on her, not close.’”

These points, though not particularly original, satirise Trump’s misogyny quite well. While reading the book, one oscillates between titillation and despair, a credit I think to the accuracy of Jacobson’s caricature. But this is all slightly undermined by his shtick toward the fictional Ivanas, the Ivankas and Melanias of the tale, who the writer describes as dressing “in a vertiginously low-cut sequined evening gown that appeared to be entirely open, but for a paper clip.”

I wonder if it is credible to hold dual outrage, on the one hand at Trump’s attitude to women, and on the other at the chosen dress sense of the scantily clad women around him. Herein there seems to be a contradiction, which is endemic in many attempted takedowns of ‘The Donald’, whereby liberals accept a Republican prejudice as their first premise and then hold Trump in contempt because he violates it.

This is the case in Jacobson’s fictional account, where we are supposed to take a disliking to Trump because the women around him aren’t ‘classy’ enough. But it can also be seen in David Cay Johnston’s The Making of Donald Trump. On the subject of revenge, he quotes the Sermon on the Mount, professing that Trump’s business dealings are “in direct opposition to both Christian and

Jewish theology.” During the Republican presidential primaries, this was the critique that such shining lights of secularism as Ted Cruz offered, appealing to the theocratic instincts of much of that party. It seems misguided for the liberal opposition (now more portentously named ‘progressives’), to be endorsing right wing principles in the hope of landing a cheap shot on Trump.

In Pussy, Jacobson also ridicules Trump on similarly religious grounds: “Fracassus was frightened. He’d seen a television programme in which a father took his son to the top of a mountain to slit his throat but then God stepped in to stop him. Not a great storyline but he liked when the father slit a ram’s throat instead.”

It is unwise of liberals to form an unholy alliance with those who do not accept the fundamentals of women’s liberation or the separation of Church and state in a desperate attempt to do the President harm.

Through the course of most significant political careers, we can see development of personal belief systems executed in office, be it Thatcherism, Stalinism, or Kissingerian realpolitik. But with Trump, things seem to be going in the opposite. Faced with the power of his office, we are not seeing Trumpism, only Trumpery.

His individual consistency is in being a showman, but one who is essentially worthless and devoid of substance. To run on a platform of non-interventionism, and then subsequently provoke a diplomatic incident by bombing a Syrian airfield (though not necessarily unjustified) highlighted the volatility of Trump’s behaviour, and his lack of beliefs.

In Pussy, it is unclear whether Jacobson objects to Trump the man, or to what he represents about “a society that set great store by fantastical coiffure.” In a pointless rehash of Marco Rubio’s futile attempt to emasculate Trump in front of the fickle Republican primary debate crowds, Jacobson insults Prince Fracassus as being “slow-witted,” and having “small hands.”

This trivial kind of venting—which is more prominent in the earlier chapters—shows how writing the book so soon after 8 November affected the quality of Jacobson’s prose. As the novel goes on, the author’s remarks on Fracassus become more perceptive.

Focussing on Trump’s famed relationship with cable television, Jacobson presents the young Prince Fracassus as a critical viewer. He writes, “whatever was combative and divisive he liked; whatever was discursive and considered he didn’t.” Jacobson also considers how far television nasties influenced the relative cruelty of Trump as he grew up into a ruthless entrepreneur: “sadistic surgeons, bent cops, the Discovery Channel’s dictator of the week—it was on these that he grafted his own image.”

He seems to be raising the question of whether Trump was born repugnant, or that he is a product of the America in which he grew up, and America that gave him the great final endorsement of the Presidency at the 2016 election.

The result in November certainly made a lot of liberals angry not only at the new commander- in-chief, but also at the public at large. In his essay ‘None of the Old Rules Apply,’ the writer Dave Eggers reveals how in a post-election conversation with fellow Democrats, “we all talked about where we will move: Belize; New Zealand; Canada. We no longer knew our own country.”

The implied sentiment that a kind of unbridgeable gap opened between liberalism and the United States last year, is reflected in Pussy. Despite quite forcefully making the point that Fracassus and his real-life counterpart President Trump were bad eggs from birth, Jacobson also shows a sneering attitude to those who elected him. He doubts the very ability of the electorate to make ‘sensible’ choices: “voters, in all likelihood not knowing what they were voting for, felt the same. Lie to us, lie to us.”

However, it seems unwise to predicate a movement of democratic opposition on the founding premise that the voters are typically idiots. Those who want to remove Trump from office as soon as possible do themselves no favours by describing “Caleb Hopsack, leader of the Ordinary People’s Party (OPP)” as “championing of all things unquiet and unrefined.”

The first step to regaining power is destroying the entire poisonous notion, ironically propagated by billionaires like Trump, that liberalism is elite. Some like Jacobson disapprovingly tut at the electorate.

Others, like Linda Sarsour in her essay ‘The Ultimate Wake Up Call’ revert to repeatedly shouting through caps-lock “THIS IS NOT NORMAL”, and emphasise the value of “OUTRAGE” in obnoxious tones not far removed from the President’s own tweet storms. But all this is only solidifying the received idea of ‘metropolitan elitism,’ or to use one of Jacboson’s own lines: it is ‘ironising the archetype.’

Donald Trump will still be the President tonight, and tomorrow, and the day after. Though Mrs Clinton may have won the popular vote in November, the crushing apathy her kind of politics induced allowed her opponent to flourish. It could do so again in 2020 if the Democrats select a similar candidate.

Reading Pussy, I was admittedly disappointed, hoping as I had since the election that Trump’s earth shattering victory would at least trigger a creative renaissance in writing, satire, and political opposition to conservatism. The book left me wanting for all of the things which I hoped it would provide. Instead of getting red in the face, those who oppose the administration should get even, by turning the voters against Trump.

A lively discourse on the American Left over the next few years, about what went wrong and what can go right in the future, will be far more productive than trotting out the attack lines of ex-Republican candidates and calling the general public stupid. It is the politicians, not the people, who should seek redemption.

Oxford University is a risky investment

Michael Shao
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Oxford University is a risky investment

If the University of Oxford were a stock, I would short it.

As tuition fees across the world continue to spiral upwards, attending university in of itself is one of the greatest initial investments that young adults make in their lives. It seems that everyone has something to say about the value of Uni. Your friends tell you to appreciate the experiences you will make, society tells you that it’s a rite of passage following secondary education, economists warn you of the opportunity costs of going, Peter Thiel’s telling you to drop out altogether and join his fellowship, and other entrepreneurs are singing the same song.

Looking past all the romanticised reasons one might attend university, higher education ultimately remains an optional, final stage of formal learning, that provides labourers with the skillsets they need for a market that demands college graduates. When your opportunity cost is higher than the value of Uni: that is, when you’re on the fringe of producing Facebook, a rational thinker drop’s out, even if the university in question happens to be Harvard.

A little bit of a depressing perspective, but no different from the one you would get out of a macroeconomics textbook, and one that bears the truth. While individuals might make subjective economic choices regarding their university, they eventually join a unified entity of their choice that becomes their home for the next three or four years.

You may be a member of St. Edmund Hall or a fellow of Pembroke College, but at the end of the day, you are an Oxonian. To this degree, I analyse whether or not in purely economic terms, the great, dark blue umbrella that is Oxford, would be worth investing in on the whole. I find that Oxford does have a place in my portfolio—when I’m betting against it.

In a world where everybody has something to offer, the starting salaries of Oxford graduates lag. The average annual starting salary of Oxford’s recent graduates is £27,000 per annum. At Rice University in Texas, a university that few undergraduates at Oxford would know, the average starting salary of graduates is almost double that of Oxford grads, ranging from £46,000 on the lower bound to £56,000 on the upper bound.

Harvey Mudd College, a small liberal arts college in California, graces its undergraduates students with a median salary of nearly £60,000 after graduation. A difference in British living costs is to be expected, but even after factoring relative prices of expenses, Oxford graduates are grossly undervalued.

Even given Oxford’s low tuition rate, scoring in at 9,250 pounds for all “Islands” students, which is minuscule in comparison to the massive tuition fees of American universities, which border on 70,000 USD per year, this difference in salaries translate to much bigger differences in lifetime earnings. In addition, the price of Oxford’s tuition is deceptive. As a result, Oxford offers far fewer free services, including things like housing, and food, which are typically included in American university tuition fees.

In addition, for a place that produced Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile under four minutes, Oxford’s athletic facilities, relative to American athletic facilities, are pathetic. The hardworking staff at Iffley are not to blame, but rather the lack of money put into the facilities in general. Instead, the offsetting of the facilities by the University to rely on individual subscription money to fund their own expenses has turned out poorly.

A significant cause of Oxford’s lower annual starting salary is the failure to adequately, or even actively, promote its STEM students. The Times Higher Education ranking system has ranked Oxford as number one in the latest World University Rankings–a ranking that the university has gladly embraced and publicised on its home website. Oxford has also been ranked top in four subjects by the QS World University Rankings by subject.

However, the four subjects are Anatomy and Physiology, Archeology, English Language and Literature, and Geography. In this country, where a second class degree in Geography can pave the road to becoming Prime Minister, it might certainly seem acceptable. But in a globalising world that will continue to globalise no matter how many people vote Leave, it is clear that the future is demarcated by students of STEM. Oxford’s lack of an emphasis on STEM makes it a poor investment. STEM is a class that is largely defined by its high paying salary field classification. Even among the Tab’s recently ranked women to watch at Oxford, not a single ranked member was a student of a STEM field. A comparison to any single Ivy League power ranking list, or even lower American college ranking list, is important.

Most leaders will be women who are pioneering in truly male dominated fields–engineering, biotech, entrepreneurship, finance, where they face extreme gender ratios. I have to admit my disappointment at the list, as I know many women at Oxford who, in my opinion, are more worth watching for their truly groundbreaking work.

Earlier in Michaelmas, Maya Lorey, a visiting student at Oxford from Stanford, wrote about “Stanford’s different standards”. She discussed the different attitudes that the academic communities in Oxford and Stanford respectively have towards the humanities, as opposed to the dominance of STEM at Stanford.

I agree with everything she says: Oxford’s attitude towards the humanities has far more humanity, and appreciates it outside of being a tool towards a next job. But I believe that this appreciation has turned to near slacking. In addition to the low starting salaries of Oxford graduates, Oxford students are unlikely to seek work experience in internships, and the OUIP system lacks breadth.

As a result, we generally enter the working environment with less experience, fewer credentials, and a less competitive ego. The general attitude at Oxford is very accepting of this much more ‘chill’ atmosphere, but in real terms, an appreciation for a lack of competition does not transfer into positive results.

As I said earlier, in an increasingly globalised world, where employment is a zero sum game and schools like Maya’s show no sign of disappearing o the map, this rosy perception has its merits, but also its very real consequences. The less competitive students of Oxford will also be chosen second to the hyper-competitive students of Stanford.

It doesn’t help that a recent YouGov survey revealed that 76 per cent of European academics in the UK said they were more likely to consider leaving UK higher education as a result of Brexit. I wouldn’t blame them: if you were an Oxford computer science student, and you had a choice between working in the palm tree laden Silicon Valley, or staying in Oxford, even a hundred Tim Berners Lee’s could not be convincing enough.

In terms of our overall categorisation of Oxford, the appreciation and historical value of humanities at Oxford isn’t at the behest of the mercy of the shrinking global valuation for the humanities. Oxford should not cling onto old ideas that have made Oxford special in the past, because we no longer live in the past.

Maybe Oxford is special. Maybe I should buy into Oxford, because they operate in a niche market that can’t be bested by any of the other choices in the university market. After all, there is no other place in the world like Oxford, and that, I can truly accept.

Where else in the world can you justify degrees that have zero lectures for months at a time, with two to three hours of tutorial time being the only class-time per week? Only at Oxford. Oxford moulds their courses and their direction of student academic life with very little guidance, operating on the idea that students should become independent learners who focus and dedicate their time to their overtly specific degrees.

But is this the right direction to take? Specialisation has long been touted as an effective method in higher education, and in industries in general. There is no doubt that Oxford produces highly specialised students: after all, the degree system leaves Oxford students studying nothing but the span of subjects covered by their degree for a whole three or four years.

To this, I believe that Oxford cannot keep hiding behind the same facetious, denial-swamped, delusional excuse that ‘that’s what makes Oxford special’. The continued system of specialised degrees, that do not offer, or require, students to take courses in other subjects or to study foreign languages, is extremely detrimental to what is supposed to be the production of the brightest crop of students in Great Britain.

Schools like Stanford and Harvard teach students to build from zero to one: Oxford teaches students to build from one to n. That is to say, the culture of those universities, as opposed to Oxford, is strongly entrenched in ideas of creation, invention, entrepreneurship, and a coverage of a variety of abilities. Whereas, the academic focus at Oxford is laser sharp on the revision of existing material (usually that of Oxford authors promoted from within department reading lists).

At Oxford, doing a degree is enough. Outside of Oxford, doing your degree does not even come close to the bare minimum. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you want to become a professor in the future. But it is not a coincidence that Facebook started at Harvard, and not at Oxford.

Ben Sasse, a junior Senator from the state of Nebraska, puts things into perspective surprisingly well in an editorial he writes for the Wall Street Journal titled ‘The Challenge of Our Disruptive Era’. In it, he argues that, given we live in a context where college-educated employed adults are expected to cycle through more than five industries within their lifetimes, broader education is necessary in all tiers of education.

That is, in a modern world, Oxford must change its focuses if it wants to remain in its dominant position in higher education, and certainly do so if it wants to ever come close to amassing the endowments of American universities.

The university doesn’t even have a mascot. Oxford does have the Oxford Blue, Pantone 282, and a very dark tone of azure that serves as the official colour of the University of Oxford. This lack of a mascot at Oxford points towards something larger: the lack of a unifying identity.

Generally, there are two prevailing systems of higher education: small liberal arts colleges of one to two thousand students that focus on providing concentrated communities and the formation of close relationships, and universities, which are much larger and expansive in nature. Oxford, seemingly unable to decide on one or the other, has a strange, disfigured combination of the two.

Students either resign to insular college life, or get involved in broader university life, only to be constantly questioned on their absence from college in their attempt to leave the five hundred square metres. This mix has caused Oxford to become the child who has moved 17 times before he turned 17, lost, without a real identity and a place to hold onto.

Arguably, this loss of identity has contributed to an equally huge loss in alumni donations to Oxford, or even individual colleges. Inarguably, the alumni donor culture and the strong ‘connection’ to the alma mater is nowhere near as powerful as it is at American universities, at Oxford. In the lack of a strong identity to hold onto, and even big games with huge crowds to come back to, alumni gatherings are a rare sight in the Oxford summer.

While the green may be present in the leaves, no green goes into the pockets of Oxford’s endowment. Despite reporting by Cherwell last week referencing Oxford’s topping of a UK university donations list, I could only help but laugh. Even with their relative ranking, Oxford’s donations were dwarfed by schools in the US like Notre Dame: past that, schools like Harvard are on a different level of comparison.

If Oxford doesn’t have the money, can it still keep up the quality of teaching? Many believe that the plethora of incredible academics at the university can make up for its sad state of finances. Not long ago, Faiz Siddiqui made nationwide news by suing Oxford for the sum of one million pounds, on account of “appallingly bad” teaching during the course of his degree, which he argued prevented him from having a successful career.

Not one, not two, but half of the teaching staff on Siddiqui’s module were on leave. The University knew of the situation ahead of time, and made no extra accommodations for Siddiqui. These problems were reflected in lower results for all of the students in Siddiqui’s year.

Commentary continues on the quality of teaching at Oxford, from Giles Coren to T.S. Eliot, who once said “Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead”. The lecturers too, largely continue to be academics. This is not always the case at other top universities.

JB Straubel, who lectures on energy storage integration at Stanford, is the Chief Technical Officer of Tesla. Oxford could do with having teachers who are not used to the mechanic nature of University academics, but rather people who have made a real mark on the industries that academics often love to produce commentary about. Oxford, of course, justifies this by arguing that students are supposed to do most of their studying in their own time.

Then there’s the story of Alistair Herron, the student with seven A*s in his A-level who was accepted by Harvard and Stanford, but rejected by Oxford. In the United States, this kind of story is actually commonplace, where universities seek to fill their class with a diverse set of students, and as a result, have specific wants (athletes, students from more disadvantaged backgrounds, etcetera).

But for Oxford, who is markedly behind the rest of the world in terms of their refusal to enlist positive discrimination practices (even Chinese universities practice affirmative action), their justification for such stubbornness is apparently a desire to keep the admissions process as meritocratic as possible. Unless Alistair swore at his tutors during the interview, I can hardly see a shred of consistency in that narrative.

So perhaps this has something to do with the way Oxford is built from the ground up. Oxford’s entrance policies are a catastrophic failure. In Malcolm Gladwell’s aptly titled David and Goliath, he writes about how many of the universities most successful in creating amazing graduating classes, like Harvard, target high achieving low income students.

This not only contributes to creating a more diverse community, but also fills these universities with students who are more likely to appreciate and make of the time that they have been given. Financial aid packages bring in students who display incredible gratitude and are likely to work harder and more efficiently at university: at Oxford, financial aid is doled out like we are living in a famine.

Oxford does not actively search to recruit underdogs—it never has. It has, instead, opted to create a racial monolith, with about as much global perspective as a migrating flock of seagulls. As a result, the university produces, year after year, classes of students who are unable to think globally, who are restricted to old works and Eurocentric sets of authors, and even a sadly ironic progressive sect of students who are unable to think intersectionally.

Thus, the ‘dinner party elite’, as Owen Jones calls it, is created and fed into, repeatedly. On our terms, when looking at Oxford economically, this is disastrous in a modern world. The ability to speak foreign languages, and to genuinely understand and be able to communicate with people of other ethnicities and cultures is crucial. In forming lasting business relationships, connections, and friendships on a global scale, Oxford students are ill prepared.

In a passage of Merchant, Soldier, Sage by David Priestland, the author, a history fellow at St. Edmund Hall, talks about how the education of Oxford has always been designed to train an elite, for careers in public service at home and in the empire. He writes about how many tutors, sitting in tweed suits, would give hour-long ‘tutorials’ on an impossibly wide range of subjects contained within the degree, where mastery and communication of knowledge was not the real priority, but rather the development of the confidence and writing skills of tutors to leave ample time for ‘gentlemanly pursuits’.

To some, his description might sound eerily familiar. In a lot of respects, things at Oxford have not changed. In hoping that a model that once worked would continue to work, the rigidity of the administration has led to a refusal to accept positive discrimination practices on the refusal to ‘lower standards’. To that, I ask, what standards? In a world where the ruling elite are no longer provincial gentry, but guys wearing hoodies and jeans building billion dollar empires with their minds, rather than with extractive colonial institutions, Oxford desperately needs to adapt.

I have declined to write extensively about what I love about Oxford, among which include things like the endless number of vibrant student societies, the incredible people that would be incredible regardless of their status as an Oxonian, the Oxford Launchpad.

Sunny days as rare as they come, my brilliant politics and philosophy tutors, the student who sits every Sunday in the Social Science library across from me and works on her problem sheets until her third finger bruises purple, the Olives sandwich shop, and so on.

So, before I face the waves of diehard screeching bearing semblance to Tories yelling at immigrants to integrate or leave, I would like to note that there is indeed much to be appreciated in the pulsating intellectual community that is Oxford University.

In addition, Oxford is no Greenlight Capital and I’m not David Einhorn—all is far from being lost, and I don’t intend on preaching that kind of message. But when it comes to the market, there are two ways you can go.

You can ride the bull, or you can face the bear. Justine Greening has talked a lot about reforming higher education. That might provide a little bump for the bulls, and hope for Oxford to take it’s own initiatives at reform—but until then, unfortunately, there’s no doubt that I’d bet against Oxford.

Jess Phillips: If Trump can be president, I can be leader of Labour

Tony Diver
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Jess Phillips: If Trump can be president, I can be leader of Labour

Jess Phillips is a woman of remarkable contrasts. She’d agreed to do an interview with me that I was slightly unprepared for, and so as my phone rang and I scrambled for my dictaphone, I didn’t know whether I would get the Jess Phillips of Prime Minister’s Questions – all fire-and-brimstone and the architect of the Palace of Westminster’s most scathing one-liners – or the slightly sarcastic, but funny and charming Jess Phillips that comes across in her Enfield-esque encounters with Jacob Rees-Mogg on TV.

It started with the former. She’s a busy woman and didn’t take kindly to my bumbling as I ran to a coffee table, fumbled my phone and tried desperately to make small talk with someone I knew would eviscerate me for the odd wrong word or lazy question.

It’s not like she doesn’t have people to take it out on. Phillips is uniquely placed in British politics in that she’s in opposition to pretty much everyone. The Tories, Labour’s leadership and even – in an area that voted overwhelmingly for Brexit – her own constituents. Does that worry her?

“I watch these people now talk literally yawn-worthy hours in all the Brexit debates, and they have been biding their time since 1974,” she groans.

“I don’t think that Britain in Europe is necessarily over forever, but at the moment we have to follow the path that was given to us by the British people. I don’t necessarily like it. I don’t like the terms on which we’re going about it. I don’t like the manner we’re heading headlong into it, but I do think that we have to listen to what the country’s said.”

That resigned take on the nation’s decision to leave the EU is mirrored in her response to my (you might say inevitable) – questions about Jeremy Corbyn. Unlike most Labour MPs, who avoid Corbyn questions as much as the man himself avoids newspaper journalists – Jess takes him head-on.

“I don’t think Seumus Milne is that bright, or that commanding, to be honest.”

I put to her the rumour doing the rounds about him – that the party she refers to as “imploding” selected a man who neither expected nor wanted to be leader – and I can almost hear her waving me down over the phone.

“Well, he obviously did want it! The idea that he doesn’t have an ego is utterly ridiculous. Bollocks! That’s bollocks I’m afraid. And that’s no criticism of him that he wants to be leader of the Labour Party – he’s not a man who’d do something he didn’t want.”

So Seumas Milne isn’t really running the show from the background? She scoffs again. “I don’t think Seumus Milne is that bright, or that commanding, to be honest. I’m not sure he’d be able to get my kids to put their shoes on. I definitely don’t buy the idea that Seumas is co-ordinating the whole thing and Corbyn is just some puppet. Have you ever watched him, loving the attention, loving people get selfies with him?”

Corbyn’s failings are just another part of what Phillips calls the “huge, huge, crisis of leadership” that she sees as the core of the problem in British politics. She blames the Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition and First Minister in equal measure for the feeling she has that “we’ve flipped the switch and everything’s broken”.

“I think that she’s wrongly playing the percentages,” she says of Nicola Sturgeon, “and it’s opportunist and not with the best will of the people in her country or the whole union in mind.

“Of course it’s easy, when things are terrible, to try and get some sort of advantage and to play on people’s fears. I think that, as the leader of Scotland, the stability of her country should come first rather than political agenda which was decided in a referendum not even two years ago.”

In one of her characteristic dressings-down, she calls the idea of a second referendum in Scotland not like breaking eggs to make an omelette but “like we’re smashing the whole kitchen up in order to make an omelette that will be here in twenty years’ time”.

And it’s with that – in her rejection of the British opposition parties but retention of what she calls a “tribal” loyalty to Labour – that Jess Phillips displays the strength of her political brand. She is, in a way, the perfect backbencher. She joined the Commons in 2015, having swung her seat by almost twelve per cent to take it from the Liberal Democrats, and since then has been a tub-thumping supporter of feminist causes, the tackling of homelessness and a vocal opponent of many in her own party. She has exactly the independence and panache that Labour’s long history of renegades have always championed.

Soon after her election, she clashed with one of the biggest names in the Corbyn cabinet, after Phillips “roundly told her to fuck off” in a heated exchange over women in top jobs in the Labour Party. To her credit, Diane Abbot fucked off.

With characteristic acerbity, in the tense post-election politicking that followed Jeremy’s election, she revealed that she had told the leader and his staffers that she wouldn’t knife them in the back – she would knife them “in the front” if she thought they stood in the way of election in 2020.

A year down the line, her commitment to a broad and, frankly, factional Left is unwavering. “It thinks it’s bloody perfect! That’s the reason why it can’t react to other people – it fails to recognise its own failings,” she tells me. “If you think you’re perfect and you have all the answers, you should give up. You don’t. Things change, the world changes.”

One of the key issues she campaigns on is making sure that the people who will make those changes in the future are people now our age. Of course, I point out, readers of Cherwell are only too aware that there are many students that do want to change the world. From the endless discussion on online forums to the heated debate over the most granular issues in JCRs, the picture of youth political engagement doesn’t look all that bleak to us.

Bad question. She’s got me. Politics isn’t “just one white man drinking coffee in a cafeteria” she chides down the phone, as I look wildly over my shoulder in case her uncannily accurate description was more than a coincidence.

“You’re alright where you sit – it’s not like you’ve never been represented in this place [Parliament] at Oxford. I’d say you’re slightly overrepresented on the whole in the reference tests.” Of course, she’s not wrong, but also has a wider point to make about ‘our’ politics. Identity is the “touchstone” of student movements, she says, but it’s not the “bread and butter” of Labour.

Should it be? “Well, the people in my constituency wouldn’t say so. The most pressing concern of my constituents is the ability to go to work, come back at five o’clock, put the telly on, watch their kids grow up, be able to afford to buy some Christmas presents and have a car parked near their house. Not wanting to sound terribly patronising, but as you get older, buy a house and have your kids, I think your priorities change.”

“I’d say you’re slightly overrepresented on the whole in the reference tests”

And in that, I’m suddenly not convinced any more that her backbench credentials are so strong. She thinks the identity aspect of Labour is important and is an ardent Remainer. But isn’t her job to represent the views of her constituents, who she admits don’t think those things?

“I’m not here to satiate people’s needs – I’m here to do what I think is best for them, with them and bring them round to a way of thinking,” she counters.

I’m worried that her view of her role hints slightly at an implied false consciousness of her constituents.  She disagrees.

“If I followed what everyone in my constituency thought – bearing in mind they don’t all think the same thing – and acted like a delegate, it would be an incredibly boring place to work, and they don’t want that.”

“When I don’t write it, it gets said wrong”, she explains, when I ask about her acclaimed new book, Everywoman. “I wouldn’t ever say that I felt I had to write a book – that’s far too pompous a statement. That’s a really arrogant thing to say, but I felt like I had a lot to say and it wasn’t difficult to write it.”

PhilLips is uniquely placed in British politics in that she’s in opposition to pretty much everyone

The moment is now, for Jess Phillips, it seems. When, then, is she running for the leadership? It’s a question she shrugs off at first.

“It’ll probably never happen. I feel like, when I’m asked that question, I have a duty to the kind of people who I want to read my book [Penguin, £14.99], to say ‘yes, of course I could become leader of the Labour Party’ and that I should want to do it. It’s like an obligation to do it. Why the hell shouldn’t someone like me become the leader of the Labour Party?”

Stranger things have happened, of course, as she quickly picks up. “If Donald Trump can become President of the United States, I can become leader of the Labour Party.”

Well, does she want it? “Who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t want to have all that power to do all the things you thought were right?”

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