“I will never believe in minds kept under glass; but I believe that a table has only four legs, but I believe that the fifth leg is a chimera, and when the chimeras rally, my dear, then one dies slowly of a worn out heart.”
It was the year 1955 in communist Poland when Adam Wazyk published ‘Poem for Adults’. Formerly one of the most ferociously Stalinist members of his nation’s literary world, Wazyk’s text was a damning indictment of the corrosive power of the communist regime over his nation and its people.
In a brief moment of reduced cultural control, the explosive material was published – and once released, could not be contained. Attempts at retrospective censorship were in vain. The poem was widely circulated: written copies were passed hand to hand, or fetched huge prices on the black market. In many ways, Wazyk’s poem is that of a man looking around himself and not understanding what he sees. Its ruthless criticism of the decay of society, the Russian exploitation of Polish resources, and the ruthless deception of its citizens, exposes the lies that his nation had been forced to live with: the promises that have been made and not kept.
The ongoing claim to universal equality and national prosperity, and its exploitation. The chimeras that have gathered round. It was often in the cultural sphere that these illusions were created and preserved. For artists that did not conform there was no place in the Soviet world, and part of Wazyk’s poem focuses on the life and death of one such individual: “They threw her out of art school,/ For lack of socialist morality./ She poisoner herself once – they saved her./ She poisoned herself again – they buried her.”
The story of the extremes of communism, and the brutality of the communist world that was born with the October Revolution, is not a surprising one in retrospect. We know that the communist dream manifested itself into a disaster where a systematic duplicity between the Party line and reality obscured a misled economy, inviolable state power, and the continuous infringement of this power into the lives of its citizens.
What becomes more difficult for us to remember is the role of personal agency and choice in this obscure world. The Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski asked in 1999: “Could half of Europe and half of Asia have been raped by a handful of bloodthirsty madmen, by Lenin and Stalin? Such things do not happen, it is nice to believe that they do.” It is all to easy to blame tyrants, and the organs of force and violence – the dictators, the secret police, the armed forces – for taking whole nations hostage. What’s much harder is to reconcile these shadows with everyday life: those who voted for communism, who lived through it, and who fought battles for it – the Adam Wazyks of the world.
What we can learn from individuals like Wazyk is that communism was not a historical aberration or an unprompted disaster, but, for many, it was a choice. And for more still, it was a world they had an active part in shaping. Wazyk was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1905. He was a soldier in Berling’s army, fighting the Nazis as a resistor alongside Soviet allies, and as a staunch communist. Like many others, he had seen his nation torn apart by the experiences of occupation, collaboration and resistance. His voice had been part of the chorus that welcomed the accession of communism in Poland after the war, and had continued to be one of its great supporters.
These voices may not have been a majority in post-war Poland, but to forget they existed is to forego an understanding of choices made in difficult times, and in the promise that comes with revolution. Just as 1917 promised the Russian worker a utopia, the subsequent revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War promised its people a brighter future, and the chance to make it for themselves.
In ‘Poem for Adults’ we see Adam Wazyk sever ties with his own past: old beliefs are exchanged for a realisation that the revolution he had been part of had given birth to terrible things. For over a decade, he was not only a proponent of the Party, but one who ruthlessly supported its suppression of people’s cultural and literary freedom. In publish
ing ‘Poem for Adults’, he went from being part of the literary establishment, to a dissenter and an infidel. The fact that this work was so extensively bought and circulated, and that the authorities fought so hard to suppress it, makes clear that his sentiments struck a common nerve.
In the centenary of the revolution that captured the imagination of huge numbers of people, we can spare a thought for those, like Adam Wazyk, who were a part of its legacy. He and many others would come to look around at a world they had helped to build and no longer recognised as their own. These individuals came full circle, and in art like ‘Poem for Adults’, they again made radical acts of revolution
Ahead of the England cricket team’s flight to Australia before this winter’s Ashes, the Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA) tweeted a picture of the 16-man squad suited up with the series trophy and the historic urn. The photo was something of a botched job: certain players were shoddily dressed, with a casual approach to footwear and featured a startling pair of socks worn by Stuart Broad on the front row.
However, the response to this tweet was not one of support for the squad. Instead, all eyes were on one player in particular: Moeen Ali.
Travelling in a squad containing fifteen white men, of which nine attended fee-paying schools, and one British Muslim with a full beard, Moeen is used to standing out.
But this time, Moeen wasn’t being heralded as an inspiration to British Asian children in the UK. Instead, he found himself as the target for a mountain of vitriol and criticism.
“How come Mo isn’t wearing a poppy? Please, how do I explain this to my teenage son who loves him?” read one reply. “Disgrace that Ali wouldn’t wear a poppy…it symbolises those who gave their lives so idiots like him can play cricket” said another.
This sort of trolling is nothing new for those who live their lives in the public eye. News presenters Charlene White and Jon Snow are put down on an annual basis, labelled ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘disrespectful’ for their refusal to wear the symbol. Northern Irish footballer James McClean is booed all year round at English stadia by fans who consider his choice to not wear the red flower as a demonstration of anti-Britishness. It’s no surprise then that when searching his name on Google, the top suggestion is ‘IRA’.
Indeed, wearing a poppy from late October to mid-November has become compulsory for those who face media attention – failure to do so inevitably leads to an onslaught of poisonous vitriol from self-proclaimed patriots.
In Moeen’s case, the abuse stopped soon after England landed. The team’s account tweeted a handful of pictures of the players arriving, and it was pointed out that whilst Moeen was wearing his poppy in Perth airport, various other players weren’t – “Poppy fell off!” he tweeted.
But the intense anger directed towards Ali shows not only the extent to which the poppy has become politicised in the past few years, but that it is now being used as a symbol of division.
For example, take the interview that then-UKIP senior advisor Raheem Kassam was subjected to by Sky News anchor Dermot Murnaghan last November. In a bizarre three-minute conversation – which was meant to focus on Nigel Farage’s meeting with Donald Trump after the US Election – Murnaghan repeatedly asked Kassam why he hadn’t been wearing a poppy. Kassam responded with a series of reasonable explanations: the poppy was on his other coat, it had become “a bit tatty”, and emphasised the difficulties of finding a poppy in New York.
But despite this, he was attacked as some sort of traitor by Murnaghan: “Well you can tell that to the Royal British Legion, can’t you? Would you like to apologise for it?”
It was a display of the toxicity attached to the symbol that has had its meaning gradually eroded away over the past decade. Kassam had, it transpired, donated £300 to the Royal British Legion that very morning, But somehow, that didn’t seem to matter.
The virtue-signalling few that try to make poppy-wearing compulsory miss the point: if everyone wore a poppy all the time, its meaning would be undermined to the extent that the symbol became meaningless.
Indeed, wearing a poppy should and must remain an issue of personal choice. For some, it ignores the millions of civilian deaths at the hands of wars involving Britain. Equally, others object to commemorating wars that they believe should never have happened – after all, the poppy honours those who have died at war, including in recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, not just those involved in World Wars.
The victimisation of those who choose not to – or forget to – wear a poppy must stop immediately: if we fail to respect personal choice, then we risk turning a symbol of respect
into an excuse for division.
College football inspires a unique level of commitment among players. Obviously, you’re not going to let anything stop you playing, but nor are you necessarily going to miss a night out because you have a match the next day. This particular recipe of priorities sometimes makes for a somewhat stomach-churning concoction – the hungover game.
No matter what you might think, eventually it creeps up on you, and when it does, you just have to face it. 2pm kick-off, you say to yourself as you crack open that first cold oneat pre’s, plenty of time to have a lie in and wake yourself up after a night at Bridge/Park End/miscellaneous other venue. If Paul Gascoigne could do it before Euro ’96, why can’t you
Because you aren’t Gazza, you realise as you awake the next morning, just in time to see it turn into afternoon. You might have all of his charm and grace on the pitch, but it won’t count for anything if your beleaguered legs can’t even carry you to the ground.
The thought of bailing on the game crosses your mind, but is soon shattered as the college crest on your shirt catches your eye, its radiance engulfing your bleary-eyed vision. Of course, you could never turn your back on the team. When destiny calls, college footballers answer, their voices echoing through darkness and adversity. Also, it’s your job to bring the kit this week, and you’d never hear the end of it from your teammates.
So, how best to deal with the situation? Drinking copious amounts of water before setting off is a must. Not only does rehydration reduce the effects of the hangover, it’s a well-known fact that players perform better when on edge, and nothing puts you more on edge than slightly needing a wee during the game.
However, that could be the least of your bodily concerns, as you become increasingly aware of last night’s Hassan’s impeding your pace and movement. There are two potential solutions to this problem, the first being to keep pace and movement to a minimum. Dictate the play from deep and use your natural vision and ability to read the game to become the pivot on which the team moves, à la Andrea Pirlo.
Alternatively, those of a more box-to-box persuasion may have to indulge in a discreet tactical chunder in the toilets before kick-off. This was a strategy perfected by the Leicester City team of 2015-16, whose boundless energy on empty stomachs carried them to the Premier League title against all odds.
Jamie Vardy may have been having a party, but he always managed to recover in time for the next game. Hectic fixture schedules mean that college footballers often go without the luxury of time, so the path through hangover hell is a well-trodden one. With that in mind, players can take comfort in the fact that, when they face their next hungover game, at least they’re in good company.
The excerpt of Lady in the Sheets that I was treated to was brief, but packed in a generous bounty of tones, themes, and moods.
This ambitious new piece of writing takes stories of sexual oppression and violence, and builds a comedy around them. This combination always brings risks of insensitivity, inauthenticity, and reductiveness. But Lady in the Sheets tackles this head-on, drawing on the collective experience of the cast of four women to create a shockingly honest and real-feeling window into a life not often shown in Oxford’s theatres.
This play has some absolutely hilarious moments. This tightens the tension and discomfort you will feel as the characters quickly switch to stories of knives and orgasms – “God bless that fucking knife!”. One actor, Charithra Chandran, tells me that audience members can expect to laugh out loud or feel very uncomfortable, but either way it will be an intense experience. “We’ve achieved our aim if people come out and say what just happened?” Charithra tells me.
My impression is that this reconciliation of humour – and it is funny – with the anxieties of sexual violence strikes an uneasy but effective balance. If the balance tips slightly in one direction, it is on the laughter side. Cast member Taiwo Ayebola described the play as “the best way to beat the 5th week blues”, which encouraged me that there will be ample material to help me laugh away my tears.
I ask the cast what they feel will be the biggest gamble they are taking with this production. They tell about their collaborative writing process, starting out without a fixed script, and building it up from their experiences. Each performance will be unique, they say, with elements of improvisation. This will reflect life – one of the strengths of the play, but in life things do seem to go wrong at the worst possible times.
The details of the play were largely written in this collaborative manner, but it hangs loosely on the framework of a new translation of Tutta Casa, Letto, e Chiesa by Italian feminist playwright Franca Rame. Rame’s strong, funny, personal writing has often been overlooked by the theatre world (often in favour of her husband and frequent collaborator, Nobel laureate Dario Fo). It is exciting that this work will be given a new lease of life in a contemporary experimental adaptation.
This would be enough to make Lady in the Sheets stand out as unusual in the Oxford theatre scene – worth seeing because you can be sure it will be different from the last student production you saw. The production distinguishes itself further by highlighting the talents of a very diverse cast and crew: the majority of the cast are women of colour, and the director, producer and members of the crew are also predominantly people of colour. The play showcases relationships between women of different backgrounds in nuanced ways, bringing together first-generation immigrant characters and later generations, with the resulting culture clash not combative but fruitful. The diversity of the cast again mirrors life, and brings to the stage more that is too rarely seen in our theatres.
Lady in the Sheets looks like it will be a short, sharp, wild ride. Chaotic, hilarious, and uncomfortable – you will leave with dick pics in your eyes and Grease song parodies ringing in your ears, wondering what just happened?
I asked the cast for any last points they wanted to make before I set off to write this preview, and was told “We love Beyonce! And we hope people will fall crazy in love with this play”. A bold comparison to invite – I would suggest you try to see for yourself whether it was justified.
Lady in the Sheets is playing at the Michael Pilch studio, Wednesday to Saturday of 5th week.
Being a finalist and a university rugby player undoubtedly brings its own unique set of challenges. Having said that, I don’t make life easy for myself a lot of the time – as my friends will undoubtedly agree.
I’m fortunate that studying History allows me to manage my time a lot more (with so few contact hours a week, it’s actually difficult to manufacture a clash), so I’m normally able to hurry back to bed following 6am gym sessions which happen far too frequently for my liking.
Assuming I don’t have to drag myself out of bed when it’s still dark to go and push some tin around, I’ll generally get up between the unholy hours of 8am and 9am. Most of my day, however, seems to revolve around making and eating copious amounts of food, so that’ll generally take up far too much of my time in the morning.
That being said, yesterday I was in the Rad Cam at opening time – watch this space for some continued improvement in morning productivity. Fatigue is definitely an issue I face when attempting to get enough quality work time in throughout the day – the post- lunch lull, as anyone (sporting or not) will tell you, is akin to pushing through the notorious ‘wall’ in any fitness session.
I suppose in my ripe old age as a finalist, it’s become less of an issue, with the result that the hours from 2-5pm are generally my most productive. I can then rip into training in the evening and come back and hang out with my housemates for some relaxation away from the books.
I’ve never understood people who are late night library shift enthusiasts – my suspicion is that it’s half done for attention the next day, inspiring jealousy and anxiety in their friends and a sense of huge achievement in themselves. When it has to be done, it has to be done, but for me my bed is always a preferable alternative.
It’s undoubtedly a busy life, but I wouldn’t change it for the world: balancing sport and academics keeps me sharp for both of them, with each having their time and place. I’m sure my tutors would rather I spent more time on the latter, and my coaches the former, but famously you can’t please everyone. I just hope I can keep hanging in there and get through this year with a degree and my body intact!
Few things seem to cause as much ire and irritation as hacks who take themselves too seriously for their own good. A cup of coffee and some meagre patronage for a vote and a position in a student society. You might even get invited to a leaders’ event by a top management consultancy firm. But you’re not important – not really, anyway – unless you somehow combine the intricacies of student politics with the seeds of radical political change.
Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP since 1999, did not invent Euroscepticism, and was in no way the sole architect of Brexit. But if Britain’s political class really are still bred at this university, the founding of the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain at Queen’s Lane Coffee House in 1990 seems a seminal moment. Three years before the European Union was officially born, the campaign to take Britain out had begun in infancy.
But the idea was never, until the referendum last year, taken entirely seriously. It was a fringe position, for shire Tories, outcast libertarians, and old-school socialists. But like many political positions with- out a home on the national stage, it found a space in Oxford’s student community – and not just amongst student Tories. Last year, over 70% of students voted Remain, but if you favoured radical change from the status quo in the early 1990s, you opposed Britain’s membership of the European Union.
“In my day, being Eurosceptic was a sort of anti-systemic view”, Hannan tells me. “It went with being against big corporations and big government, and the establishment. It was for the people, against the elites. The shift in the last five years is one of the most extraordinary changes between then and now it’s such a shift to see people lining up on the same side as Goldman Sachs, arguing for the existing racket.
“I don’t think that reflects any changes in the EU. I don’t think you could plausibly argue the EU has become any more democratic, progressive, or whatever – just look at Greece. Frankly, Ukip rose to a position of public prominence at the end of 2014, and a loud and negative argument started being made against the European project. A lot of this student enthusiasm wasn’t really people thinking the EU was a fantastic democratic project, but that they didn’t like the people they perceived as being against it.”
When, a week before the referendum, Nigel Farage declared “the EU has failed us all” alongside a poster showing a queue of mostly non-white migrants, perceptions of the xenophobic nature of the Leave campaign seemed all but confirmed. But from its outset, Hannan’s brand of Euroscepticism eschewed nativist arguments in favour of a more liberal case. However much the accusation of xenophobia is repeated, it’s the argument from free trade and democracy that swung the poll in Hannan’s mind.
“I think that if Euroscepticism really had been the nativist and anti-immigration phenomenon that some Remainers believed, it would never have come close to winning the referendum. Most people were voting for democratic and constitutional reasons.”
But, as ever in politics, narrative may have trumped reality. And it’s the nativist narrative that has gained momentum a year and a general election later. “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market,” Hannan said during the referendum campaign. It’s clear that Vote Leave always intended to prioritise trade over immigration. But the contradiction between Single Market membership and the perceived political need to end the free movement of labour remains, and at present it seems like the former will be sacrificed for the latter. For Hannan, however, this demonstrates the success of the liberal case for Leave – it’s not about immigration, but about a renewal of our democracy.
“Three-quarters of the cabinet and two-thirds of Conservative MPs campaigned to stay in the EU, so the idea that this is a kind of extreme government bent on ideological separation for the sake of it is quite difficult to sustain. When you look at the official documents that have been published, it’s clear we will have a relationship with the EU going forward that is much closer than just a friendly third country relationship.”
“We’re looking at remaining in a number of EU programmes, of keeping some institutional links. I’m sure that part of that will mean that going forward, at least in the short run, future immigrants from the EU will continue to have a privileged position over those from the rest of the world.”
On immigration in particular, Hannan is at odds with the government. In September, a leaked Home Office policy paper revealed plans to impose new bureaucratic hurdles and stricter time limits for new migrants, with overall numbers – including for students – arbitrarily remaining in the “tens of thousands.” For Hannan, though, the question is not about numbers but about the fairness of the system – EU citizens, through freedom of movement, are jumping the queue. If you don’t see yourself as part of a broader European nation, the argument is compelling.
“I think it’s quite odd that arguing for treating EU migrants just like everybody else is now somehow a xenophobic position, seen on Twitter as akin to mass deportations. I think you could at the very least make the case that ceasing to give EU nationals an automatic queue-jumping privilege over people from India, the Caribbean, South America or wherever is the less xenophobic view.”
Hannan became Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) president in 1992, and swiftly moved onwards and upwards through the ranks of Conservative youth politics until he became thoroughly enmeshed in the Tory libertarian wing. After the Conservatives went into opposition, Hannan was given a place on the European Parliament list and – at the same time as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were considering joining the euro – Hannan was elected for the first time.
But, despite Hannan’s seemingly effortless entry into Conservative politics, he is far from the typical career politician. Dubbed the “brains of Brexit”, Hannan has championed ideas for reform all centred around decentralisation and local democracy. Brexit was always in part about bringing power back to the people, but in many respects attempts at localisation have faltered. Police and Crime Commissioner elections, originally proposed by Hannan with fellow Eurosceptic Douglas Carswell, saw turnout as low as 15%. Hannan, however, insists on the essential merit of the idea.
“It’s always easier to argue for these things in opposition than deliver on them in office. It’s one of the hard truths of politics – although people are intellectually convinced of localism, once they get into power they suddenly become a lot more relaxed about it. The really big objective for me is a proper link between taxation and representation at the local level. If we could move towards a higher degree of fiscal autonomy at local level, I think that would really revive local democracy and revive political engagement.”
More than anything, however, it’s the sense of mission which makes Hannan’s politics distinct. Hannan isn’t a revolutionary, but his reformist instincts bring him into conflict with almost every aspect of the establishment. And yet, after the referendum result, he is something of an establishment figure himself.
Removed as he is from the corridors of power, Hannan nevertheless bears a heavy responsibility for Britain’s immediate future. There’s more to Brexit than just leaving the European institutions – for Hannan, Brexit is about bringing power back to the people.
It’s Bridge Thursday. Robbie Williams has sung the last chord of ‘Angels’ and Anuba has closed its doors for the evening. What next? Give the top floor a go! Because after a couple hours of the same groovy reggae remixes from every week previous, you’ll definitely want to liven things up with some classic house tunes and an embarrassing pole dance.
As is the case with many other Oxford clubs, the toughest hurdle you will face in actually leaving the club is attempting to cross the smoking area. A head down, brisk walk approach normally does the trick, but in lieu of that grab a mate by the arm employ a good cop, bad cop technique. One relentlessly pushing through the throng, one behind with an apologetic smile plastered onto your face. You’ll be out of there in no time.
Avoid the irresistible pull of John Maier’s unforgiving questions. You may think you are spurting outrageously sharp witticisms, but Shark Tales is never your friend in the cold light of day. Once you’ve made it to the other side of the bridge, you are free! Pick yourself up some cheesy chips for the walk back and hope that ‘Mysterious Girl’ will stop ringing in your ears.
Next stop, Park End. You’ve probably had an awful night that started with a crew date but has ended up with you pressed up against tall sweaty rugby players. Spend some time in the smoking area, and enjoy the sensation of being pushed up against a fence and sporadically heckled by bouncers. Go home, it’s not worth it.
Let’s turn to Cellar. You mill about in the smoking area for at least an hour before you go because you sure as hell didn’t turn up to Cellar just to boogie in a sweaty box. Look after your mate who will inevitably need a wee down one of the roads off Cornmarket, and make sure to spend the majority of your time complaining about how hot it is inside.
To make your move homeward, begin to drift towards the kebab vans, either feigning fatigue or just owning up to the fact chicken strips and chips will always trump a slightly damp DnB night. And finally, Emporium. Get ready to be stuck in a series of endless concentric circles thanks to the terrible layout: you will lose everyone you know as well as the exit.
When I was told I needed to go into hospital rather than embark on my British Council placement in Germany, it felt like the rug had been pulled straight from beneath my feet – like my whole world was falling apart. I completely resisted it.
Although I could accept that I was at a point where intensive treatment had become necessary again, I didn’t really care: work was my priority, my degree was my priority – I had to go on my year abroad, no matter what that did to my health.
I had always told myself that my year abroad would make up for the linguistic skills I lacked compared to some of my peers. I’d spent so long working out the best way to do this, and settled on the British Council. It had to happen – it just had to. But it couldn’t. No one would insure me, and so the choice was hospital, or risk not being able to spend any time abroad at all.
When I finally began to accept that the placement would not be happening, I sat down to work out how I could make up the time in order to ensure that my language was up to scratch before finals.
I began to think that I might as well drop out, because that would be less humiliating than returning for fourth year with poor skills compared to my fellow students who had spent months immersed in the language and culture of a foreign country, just as I had dreamed of. I thought that would be the end of the world. I spent the weeks between making this decision and waiting for my admission date to switch in a volatile state of flux between accepting my circumstances, and planning to go ahead without insurance.
But, with the help of my family and friends, I made what I can now see was the right decision, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. I realised that I had to accept the treatment, not only for my degree but for my life, and it is the latter part of that realisation that I think is most important.
I have been in hospital on two other occasions, and my sole moti- vation for these admissions was to be ‘allowed’ to return to university and achieve my academic potential. I didn’t really care about improving my quality of life, I just needed to be able to work, and succeed. I got myself through each day and each meal by telling myself that eating and engaging in treatment would make me a better student: I would write better essays, get better marks, speak the languages I studied better. But now I see that this wasn’t ‘recovering’, not really, and it most certainly contributed to my multiple relapses.
Despite a rocky start, this time treatment has felt different and I think that the main reason for this is my realisation that I am more than my academic performance. My degree is not the most important thing in my life: I deserve to get well for me.
I have come to the conclusion that as long as you are using the idea of getting well for something specific, it’s never really going to stick.
You never know how long that thing is going to be there for, and it’s a key sign that your self-worth is still too low to care about maintaining this wellness if things start to go wrong in your ‘priority area.’
This realisation in itself also showed me just how skewed my priorities had been, not only whilst at Oxford, but since I began being examined within the examination system. I had forgotten that life in itself is important, that your existence shouldn’t merely be framed by what is regarded as a productive and socially acceptable way of spending your time, and what you are ‘good at’.
In no way am I trying to say that academic study is not important, of course it is. We have all worked hard to get a place at Oxford, and we all want to do our best whilst there, but I think there is a fine line between working as hard to achieve your best, and working so hard it hurts because you are scared of failing and what you would be without academic success.
Recently, I was left thinking that we could almost see the compulsive way many students at Oxford work as comparable to the way many people with an eating disorder exercise.
In both cases, the problem is not necessarily that the activity being engaged in is ‘bad’ in itself, but rather it is the sense of duty that drives the participants. Someone with an eating disorder playing football or going for the occasional run if they are physically fit enough to do so is fine. The problem begins when they feel they ‘have’ to do so, otherwise they are doing something ‘wrong’ and not ‘as they should be’. And similarly, work and academic study are at their most problematic when you find yourself feeling guilty for taking the slightest break, or defining ourselves completely by it. Without an identity beyond academia, what is to become of us post-graduation?
I would be lying if I said I am happy to be back in treatment. I would be lying if I said there aren’t times I feel a failure for not being actively pursuing my studies. But I would also be a liar if I said I do not believe I have made the right decision for long-term health, happiness, and success. I can say with certainty that this time, being in hospital whilst everyone else studies, and having my year abroad opportunity taken from me has really has put things in perspective. There really is more to life than simply academic work: I only wish I had realised sooner.
Lola Olufemi, the Cambridge University Student Women’s Officer, came under fire from online commentators after The Telegraph published an article discussing her efforts in leading the decolonisation of Cambridge’s curriculum. Despite The Telegraph’s later amendment and clarifications concerning the article, a plethora of abusive comments were launched at Olufemi on online platforms.
Make no mistake here – the criticisms against Olufemi are not only intellectually dishonest, but deeply damaging to the ongoing progress to empower persons of colour to speak about and share their lived experiences.
The dishonesty is evidenced on two levels. The primary charge levied at Olufemi is that her campaign insists on ‘erasing’ and ‘rewriting’ history. Firstly, the call for the inclusion of more non-white historical figures and academics on the official syllabus does not preclude the inclusion of the works of white intellectuals (syllabus extension is largely additive, not substitutive).
Moreover, white historical figures and academics tend to be over-represented in popular media, library stocks, online resources, and core textbooks for courses – it is unclear why removing a few white names from the syllabus, even if that did occur, would cause substantial erasure of white history. Instead, it should be seen as a proportionately justified reduction in the time allocated to the study of them.
Secondly, the demand for curriculum decolonisation does not equate the erasure or exclusion of periods of history – instead, it calls for the expansion of perspectives that accommodate hitherto subaltern voices. If anything, such diversification enriches and informs our understanding of the past.
Finally, this charge against Olufemi is factually inaccurate – Olufemi is not the sole member of the Curriculum Decolonisation Campaign. It is supported and led by many other individuals, and to purely associate the campaign with a woman of colour is a political ploy steeped in misogyny, designed to construct the false illusion that the well-meaning academic campaign is a racially motivated plot.
The secondary charge is that the University of Cambridge, as a ‘British’ university, ought to focus on teaching ‘British history’.
The University of Cambridge – as per any other high-quality institutions – aspires towards academic excellence across all fields and areas of specialisation within particular fields, independently of regional or political confinements. To say that Cambridge has the primary obligation to teach British history neglects its position as a globally funded, backed, and influential site of academic research and development.
Also, decolonisation does not call for a complete removal of the focus or prioritisation of British history – it merely advocates the inclusion of more options, papers, and texts on the Global South that are currently severely underrepresented in the official curriculum. Above all, it is distinctly myopic and superficial to ignore the connection between British history and global history – particularly with respect to the subjugation of ethnic minorities under colonialism and imperialism.
The refusal to recognise the importance of any viewpoint other than the ‘white perspective’ only hampers our ability to understand and fully contextualise Britain’s past in relation to its contemporaries and counterparts. One of the ways we should judge the quality of an academic community is through its ability to attempt a holistic outlook to disparate and marginalised voices, and to provide them with the platform they so clearly require.
Yet even if it were intellectually valid to critique Olufemi and her associated campaign, the vicious comments deployed against her are deeply regressive towards existing efforts to make campus spaces more welcoming and open environments for people of colour.
The inflammatory rhetoric makes it even less attractive for those with legitimate criticisms towards the status quo to speak out, by placing them under substantial psychological and social costs. The Telegraph’s singling-out of Olufemi (which could very well be unintentional, or not) put her in the negative spotlight for a decision made by a collective group constituting both students and academics.
Ensuing comments have unhelpfully labeled the campaign’s demands as ‘silencing’ academic freedom, conveniently neglecting the fact that academics and intellectuals of colour have long had their thoughts and views repressed and underrepresented in the overwhelmingly white space of British academia. Further, they failed to mention that the suggested changes do not amount to mandated changes, or that the demands have little to do with what academics can choose to research (academic freedom) – but merely the diversity of content and methods with which teaching is offered.
In many ways, Olufemi was the perfect scapegoat for reactionaries. Her ethnic background fitted neatly with the grander, race war meta-narrative of persons of colour seeking to undermine ‘white Britain’. Her unreserved fortitude could be aptly twisted into aggression that was deeply discomforting for individuals who much preferred defending the status quo. Further, her identity as a student activist associated with the Student Union morphs seamlessly into the motif of left-wing ‘social justice warriors’ and ‘snowflakes’ seeking to sabotage academic freedom.
There’s something special about being a northerner at Oxford. It’s an extraordinary yet alarming experience. Recently released statistics show that the University of Oxford takes more students from the Home Counties (the few counties surrounding London) than the whole region of the North, and David Lammy MP’s ongoing battle with Oxbridge admissions has highlighted how intakes are “utterly unrepresentative of life in modern Britain.”
As a geography student from Manchester, the impact of these statistics resonated deeply. This issue is one in danger of being appropriated by southerners, so I consider it necessary to express my thoughts on poor northern intake to elite universities and how this affects my daily life as an Oxford student. There might be humorous sides to my northern identity, but perhaps this simply makes it more difficult to illuminate what are serious and systematic disadvantages rooted in the country’s economic North/South Divide. As one friend has pointed out, being northern becomes, to a certain extent, your identity at Oxford. Whilst people obviously define themselves in other ways too, a casual summary description of a northern (or Welsh, Scottish, American or international) student would always include their place of origin in a way which doesn’t apply to southerners.
The fact that we are in the minority makes us distinct from those who might be considered ‘normal’, and makes regional cultural differences obvious in our interactions with other students. This is a sentiment which is probably even more applicable to students of colour – and whilst this should not diminish the struggles of northerners – racial and ethnic minorities are undoubtedly subject to another dimension of alienation, something which was highlighted by David Lammy’s research.
Nevertheless, ‘The North’ seems to be unchartered territory for southerners. Not only have few of my university friends ever visited anywhere other than the Lake District or occasionally York, there is also a basic lack of knowledge about the region which makes it seem like it’s irrelevant to many. I find myself trying not to tell new people that I’m from a village between Bury and Bolton – “near Manchester” is the standard reply to the age-old conversation opener, “Where are you from?”. Literature and the media have painted a picture of the North as an industrial wasteland with constant rain and an impoverished populace, such that southerners maintain negative associations with what are now thriving and developing places. My subconscious response is therefore to identify myself with a city I live forty-five minutes away from, if only to avoid the inevitable groan when southerners hear the word ‘Bolton’ or the blank expression from the word ‘Bury’.
There’s no point in denying that being a northerner here can be hilarious – there are certain personal features, often language or accent-based, which distinguish you from the majority of your friends, and which often become a topic of conversation. I know several people who consistently repeat what I’ve just said back to me in my own Bolton accent, completely unconsciously – it becomes a source of embarrassment when I then point it out to them, but is nonetheless a clear subconscious acknowledgement of difference between us.
Dealing tactfully with southerners’ heinous attempts at northern accents is a challenge in itself, but it’s quite disarming to hear my sentence again without having said anything I consider to be worth imitating. The fact that people never seem to be able to differentiate between, for example, Manchester and Yorkshire accents is also slightly insulting; it’s all in the spirit of joke, but it does highlight a general ignorance about the North and an underlying assumption that ‘it’s all the same up there’.
On a more practical level, the vacations present a challenge. Invariably, visiting university friends will involve the investment of considerable amounts of time and money. London is always the hub, owing to its transport links as well as the fact that it’s the home of most of the people I’m visiting, but being stuck up North often entails disproportionate effort just to spend a couple of nights with friends. southerners have the monopoly in every way. I become unjustifiably excited when I meet a single other person who lives within a two-hour drive from my home town. I didn’t realise how different the situation was for northerners until I saw that my London based friends can’t identify with each other if they don’t live under three tube stops apart.
Whilst the community that northern students at Oxford belong to includes those from Liverpool, Manchester, Yorkshire, Newcastle, Cumbria and further, Londoners differentiate between themselves when they live even in separate areas of the same city.
It’s true that these experiences are shared among the few northerners in my college – a friend’s date telling her that “a northern accent is a very interesting novelty” is probably one of the more blatant ways that a southerner has acknowledged the differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’. But on a deeper level, someone’s voice being novel in the same country is worrying – there is a fundamental divide between northern and southern students here that is constantly highlighted in the everyday context.
Being ‘the northerner in the group’ may confer special status and an exemption from all posh jokes regardless of my private-school background, but I do think it has more sinister implications.
I realised the scale of the problem when faced with the stats: it’s particularly shocking that about three-quarters of the UK population live outside London and the South East, yet this region contributes to nearly half of the population of Oxford students. According to the BBC, only 15% of Oxford offer holders came from the North West, the North East, Yorkshire, and the Humber combined between 2010-2015. In contrast, 48% came from London and South-East England.
Whilst well-meaning southerners are indignant on behalf of their northern counterparts, and angry at the obvious prejudice, it’s northerners themselves that should be explaining this issue. It’s not just about Oxford tutors being subconsciously discriminatory against northern accents, although this may contribute. A 2014 survey of British adults by ComRes found that northern accents (categorised as Manchester, Liverpool, and Newcastle) were consistently rated as perceived to be the least intelligent.
This is, however, an issue that goes beyond the university. The geographical disparities in admissions to top universities are a symptom of the country’s North/South Divide. I don’t mean to justify the appalling statistics, but rather I wish to explain them in their wider economic context.
It is true that in London and the South East, a higher proportion of pupils achieve the standard AAA A-level requirement to realistically apply to Oxford or Cambridge. Whilst around 15,700 pupils from the South and East of the country get three As every year (according to figures from Oxford), this number falls to 6,000 in the North and 3,700 in the Midlands. The divide in educational attainment is obvious, and demonstrative of the regional geography at play: the lottery of where you’re born determines where you’re going to end up.
In general, incomes are significantly lower in the North of England – Londoners on average have twice the economic value of people in the North of England, claims The Financial Times. The connection between family income and educational attainment is well-established, with a higher concentration of well-off families in the South producing a bigger pool of high-achieving students in this half of the country. Whilst there are, of course, exceptions to the rule, the lower grades that northern students get is partly down to lack of ambition, something which is emphasised much more in middle-class families with what Frank Ferudi (author and professor of sociology at the University of Kent) has labelled ‘intensive parenting’.
Then there’s the vicious economic circle: less money in the North means that professionals and those seeking higher incomes move to the South, taking their money with them to only exacerbate the problem. This is something I’m considering myself: with a new base in Oxford, and friends around the country, returning to Manchester to work and earn a significantly lower salary than could be found in London is not especially appealing. London, alongside cities such as Bristol, is sucking in graduates due to its generous salary offers and exciting career prospects: The Guardian reported last year that the North sees a net loss of around 75,000 graduates per decade to the south. This creates a ‘brain-drain’ from the North, which denies that region the money it needs to develop economically. Not only that, but this exacerbates the divide in education, as graduates are typically those who will raise children who also become graduates.
This is something that the government is currently failing to address. George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse Partnership project has struggled so far to provide the transformational transport links the region so desperately needs. In the foreword to a recent NPP report, Osborne despairingly described northern areas of specific expertise as “in pockets across the region, separated by traditional geographic boundaries with proud local identities.” As a northerner and a geographer, I don’t see how differing local identities are insurmountable barriers to economic progress: the former Chancellor is almost painting northerners like tribes that can’t communicate with each other.
Therefore, there is simply less money in the north to create a solid educational infrastructure. The high proportion of prestigious independent schools in the South, particularly in London, act as ‘feeder schools’ into Oxbridge. The Sutton Trust found that between 2002-2006, 15% of admissions to Oxbridge could be traced to just 30 schools across the country. Private education, which is likely to provide better teaching and resources to equip students with promising applications, is less affordable and therefore less popular in the North.
Even those that do get that opportunity seem to be disadvantaged, given that private schools in regions including Yorkshire, Humber, the East Midlands, and the North East send half as many students to Oxbridge as the national average. As southern private schools continue to send more students to top universities (such as Westminster School and St Paul’s Girls’ School, each of which sent almost half of their university applicants to Oxbridge over a five year period, as the Sutton Trust found), they learn what works. Whilst Oxbridge claims that they assess the potential of prospective students, it is worth asking whether this is possible: are they seeing the raw potential of a candidate, or a finished product? The statistics would suggest the latter, with so many of my university friends describing their southern schools as ‘Oxbridge machines’ that are able to mass-produce successful applications through the devotion of time and resources to high-achieving students. The sheer number of people that I’ve met who attended London private schools is staggering: too many conversations involve me listening mutely as people discover or discuss their mutual friends from neighbouring schools.
Yet the biggest contributor to this admissions pattern, in my view, is a result of the social implications of economic inequality. Oxford simply isn’t attractive to many northern students. As Professor Danny Dorling explained in this year’s Access Lecture at University College, only 15-25% of straight-A students from the North and Wales applied to Oxford, compared to 30-35% in the South, even after adjusting for geographical differences in population and attainment.
Many northern students think that they won’t fit in at Oxbridge. The general atmosphere of the South is tangibly different to our home towns. My sister, visiting a few days ago, notably echoed my exact first thought I had on arriving for an open day before applying: she remarked that people dress so much better in Oxford.
This might seem like a throwaway comment, but on closer examination it reveals the greater presence of the middle classes, who can afford expensive clothing through increased disposable income. There is a middleclass feel which permeates Oxford, and which may be intimidating to northern students who haven’t encountered this before and feel that it may not suit them: perhaps this explains why so many of the northern Oxford students I know in fact come from the pockets of affluence which pepper the region. It’s worth acknowledging that university students do tend to choose institutions closer to home (the £50, four-hour train journey home sometimes makes me wish I’d done the same), and the vast majority of my home friends do attend northern universities.
Not only do the aforementioned factors contribute to this, but I would say that we were conditioned at school to apply to these institutions partly through the precedent set by previous years. I was the only student from my school to go to Oxbridge that year, in contrast to the hordes sent from some southern schools.
It would therefore seem that many northern students don’t find Oxford accessible as a result of the monopoly of middle-class, private school-educated students – it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. Oxford life suits me well, and the differences I find myself remarking upon are ultimately all in a jokey way, but there are times when being singled out as regionally foreign can be alienating – we’ve got to work against that if these statistics are going to improve any time soon.
