Reminiscing about my freshers’ week last year, the mandatory talks on alcohol awareness and sexual consent were hardly the highlights. However, news this week that students over the UK, including at Oxford, had been walking out of or protesting against sexual consent classes really shocked and upset me.

This year, for the first time ever, freshers at every Oxford college were told to attend mandatory sexual consent workshops as part of freshers’ week. In previous years, whether students were made to attend was at the college’s discretion. This decision has caused much debate about whether students should indeed be forced to attend them. In recent weeks, similar scenarios have occurred at other universities, notably York, where there was a mass student walkout in protest of being forced to attend sexual consent workshops.

I have heard people claim the workshops are patronising, and are described as “how not to rape” talks. This could not be further from the truth. OUSU training workshops encourage facilitators to lead interactive, informal discussions.

Some students claim that they know it all about sexual consent. Don’t rape. No means no. Both of these statements are true, but they do not cover the complexity of sexual consent. Sexual consent is a complex issue and if you don’t understand that, you probably aren’t ready to be having sex in the first place. “No means no” is very black and white. And rightly so. But that only scratches the surface. I would argue that if you don’t acknowledge the complexity of sexual consent and show compassion for those who have been victims as a result of this complexity, amongst other factors, then you shouldn’t be at university.

Speaking to second-year students who have run sexual consent workshops this year, they explained how they discussed cases of sexual violence and asked freshers to discuss where consent was not given, discuss myths arising from the example (including consent for one sexual act automatically meaning giving consent to another) and then move on to the legal definition of consent, covering intoxication and intimidation.

Of course, these workshops are intended to be informative. There are almost always areas of consent covered on which people are not clear. Looking back to my freshers’ week, these workshops played quite a different role. They showed me that Oxford was somewhere that cared about sexual violence; that it was somewhere people could talk to their peers, their welfare team, their tutors about these issues and not feel they are dealing with a taboo subject.

The sad reality is that sexual violence is incredibly prevalent at university. Last year, The Telegraph reported one in three female students at UK universities is sexually assaulted at university. This is a shocking figure. Many students arrive at university having already experienced sexual assault. Moving to university can be an intimidating time and students often feel they have lost the people that they can talk to about such issues. These talks create a compassionate, inclusive environment.

The second-years I spoke to from five different colleges said the workshops they ran were well received, people generally found them informative and that, whilst they thought that it would be an awkward, boring, pointless talk, they actually found it eye-opening. I also spoke to several freshers. Three male freshers told me they assumed the workshop would paint them as potential attackers and lecture them on lad-culture, but that in fact, the workshop discussed assault toward men too.

So should these workshops be mandatory? Absolutely. If they are labelled as optional, the majority of people are not going to attend. Freshers’ week is hectic and exhausting and most people would rather spend 90 minutes with their new found friends than sitting in a seminar room. More importantly, the people who could benefit most from these sorts of workshops are the people least likely to attend.

During freshers’ week, there are many mandatory activities, including other talks, for example on alcohol awareness. What interests me is that, whilst there are the occasional grumbles about sitting in a seminar room for ninety minutes, there have been no mass walkouts from alcohol awareness talks that have made national news. Surely alcohol awareness is a more straightforward issue that it could be deemed patronising to lecture students on.

Whilst these workshops are deemed mandatory, many people are unsure of what the consequences of not attending would be. This seems to vary from college to college. Some colleges take a register as students come in and will follow up on any absent students. Any students without a good reason could have to attend a meeting with the deans or welfare team at their college. Other colleges apparently do not take any register of students arriving at the talk, but workshops are listed as mandatory nonetheless. All colleges seem to make it clear that students can leave at any point during the workshop if they feel triggered by something discussed. Naturally, it can be incredibly traumatic for a survivor of sexual assault to have to discuss scenarios similar to their own and then pick apart what went wrong.

While I believe sexual consent workshops are useful, I do believe they need to be improved. At my college, what was an interactive lecture delivered by the junior deans last year, has evolved into a student-led workshop. This is a pivotal alteration as workshops lead to more equal, involved participation. It also prevents the feeling of being talked down to or patronised, which seems to be a common concern.

Another problem is that sexual consent workshops seem to use examples involving alcohol too often. Certain students, consequently, believe intoxication is the only grey area of sexual consent. This is simply not true and we have to be careful that other scenarios are given attention. Several freshers I have spoken to claim that the workshop “wasn’t very relevant” to them because they do not drink.

Sexual consent workshops need improvement, but they are moving in the right direction. Most importantly, they are now mandatory. Some people argue that a 90 minute workshop is not going to prevent an inherently bad person from raping someone. Sadly, that is true. But it may help a potential attacker to understand the boundaries between right and wrong in a complex sexual scenario. It may help a potential victim to understand that they don’t have to put up with a certain kind of behaviour. It may make one student feel more comfortable discussing issues surrounding sex, and specifically sexual assault, whilst they are at university.

If it does any of those things, even if only for one student, then it is worth everyone being made to attend.

Politics is an unseemly business and is best confined to bumper stickers and articles by Owen Jones, where it can go safely unnoticed. Every so often, though, the political has an unfortunate tendency to stray beyond its natural territory and force itself upon unsuspecting bystanders, like Donald Trump’s tiny, wandering hands.

Many of you will share in my disappointment that the second presidential debate brought a marked change to the thus far temperate and dignified nature of the race for the Whitehouse. Expecting a thorough and respectful examination of policy, what we instead got was a clash so considerable it could really only be viewed properly from space.

Now, I am not, by nature a decisive person; at least I don’t think I am. Yet, even to me, there seems little reason to prolong this election any longer, other than in the hope that it might yet outlive some of the candidates. With a view to speeding up the whole process, and knowing that the Cherwell comment section could well swing the result of this election, I have prepared the following forensic summary of the second debate.

What is a ‘Town Hall’ Debate?

Those of you who are unfamiliar with the set-up of a ‘Town Hall’ debate may have been surprised to find that it takes place in what appears to be a large Crèche for the politically indisposed, run by Anderson Cooper.

Although the setting was novel, the plot passed predictably enough. Trump and Hillary wiled away most of the 90 minutes pacing aimlessly around the stage and directing hysterical pleas into a silent audience like characters in a Samuel Beckett play.

Must I concentrate?

The question-and-answer format is tailored to those for whom more than two minutes worth of information on any given question constitutes a dangerous overload. Though the two moderators frequently discouraged both the candidates from exceeding their time, Trump was heard to complain at one point that it was ‘one on three’; though presumably that is just the kind of encounter he will bragging about next time he hits the locker room with Billy “ninth-most-famous-Bush” Bush. 

Who best took advantage of the bar stools?

Hillary’s determination to merely sit on her bar stool was really quite uncreative, and in honesty, may well have cost her my vote. The Donald, on the other hand, used his to full effect: standing behind it as if it were a shield, toying with it suggestively with his chipolata fingers, and wielding it above his head in the final moments of the debate to administer the death blow, or ‘Turbo Trump’, to his opponent.

Who provided the best talking points?

It has come, somewhat inevitably, to the point in the election cycle where all anyone seems able to talk about is pussy, specifically ‘grabbing’ pussy. Here we go again, we all sigh. Will these politicians every give up being so predictable and accept that the public are tired of the same old genital-obsessed rhetoric? Thus it was a welcome relief when Trump threatened to incarcerate Hilary, with just the kind of devilish charm he knows the ladies can’t resist.

Who provided the most effective distractions while their opponent spoke?

The split-screen frame in which the debate is filmed invites the non-speaking participant to use mime in order to undermine their opponent’s argument.

Donald, whose lips appear to both be engaged in a ceaseless competition to become the upper one, is at a clear advantage when it comes to this kind of political diversion. Hillary, on the other hand, focused on demonstrating that bemusement, usually a fleeting sensation, can actually be sustained over a one-and-a-half hour period. 

Who Won?

Anyone who actually watched the debate will know there were no winners, only losers.

Timothy Garton Ash has a stern, unaffected look about him. I meet him in his office at St Anthony’s. He is possessed of a rather subdued elegance, his answers arrive in sincere and vigorous phrases, he suggests that we stand as we talk. Of the armful of books he has written, the latest is Free Speech, a defense of his own line of anti-authoritarian liberalism.

I wonder whether it isn’t part of the liberal disposition to be always defensive, continually on guard against perceived threats to essential freedoms. Of course the set of freedoms are a thing constantly under negotiation, Garton Ash acknowledges. But now we really are “in a period where illiberalism is on the rise” and not just illiberalism, but “anti-liberalism”. The history of freedoms is one of troughs and peaks: if the days of Gladstone and Mill were a renaissance of liberal thought, and the post-Cold-War era a time of “liberal triumphalism”, then now we are in a period of bitter contestation: its “liberal modernity versus illiberal modernity”, and the real danger is the silent “salami-slicing” of liberal values.

“At British universities freedom of speech is under threat from two sides”, caught “in a kind of pincers”. On one side is the government, whose counter terrorism legislation “in its original version, was truly insidious”. The bill, which proposed the policing of forms of non-violent extremism, led Garton Ash to make well-publicised comments earlier this year that even Jesus Christ would be banned from addressing campuses under such an ill-conceived policy.

While governing powers can be relied upon to accept essential freedoms only begrudgingly, what might be harder to explain is the pressure on free speech “from below”: the increasing disregard for free speech amongst today’s most activist students. He tells me he wants to be careful though: “I’m very suspicious of middle-aged people explaining the young”; at the same time, he finds illiberalism amongst the young “very concerning”. Perhaps today’s studentry are simply overindulged and hostile to challenge; important too is the “echo-chamber” effect of the internet, that plays a role in buttressing an intolerance of opposition; or, Garton Ash smiles, perhaps it is simply that “liberalism has been the hegemonic ideology for a long period of time. To be young is to kick against the pricks: the pricks are liberals!”

He is reluctant to despair wholesale with today’s youth. “There’s a kind of Colonel- Blimp-like rejection” of much student activism “as being anti-free-speech…I think it’s important not to damn the lot.” The Rhodes Must Fall movement of last year, for instance “was not an infringement of free speech”, he argues, although it may have pushed free speech issues to the fore in certain oblique ways. Trigger warnings too he finds he can accommodate. Of course there are “ludicrous examples”: students at Columbia trying to impose warnings on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “Give us a break,” he exclaims. But in principle they seem no different to the warnings given before distressing news reports, for example. “The one that I really do think is a problem”, he continues, “is no-platforming… This is not a group of students saying ‘we don’t want to hear Germaine Greer or Julie Bindel’. It’s one group of students saying that another group of students should not be allowed to hear someone they want to hear, and that is a clear violation of free speech [that] I don’t think we should accept.”

Would he ever consider no-platforming? “There are many, many speakers I wouldn’t want personally to invite!” But aside from speech which is strictly unlawful, the proper response to outrageous speakers is the challenge of “robust debate—what the Americans call counter-speech.” Students who advocate no-platforming sometimes claim it as their form of free expression, but “I don’t buy that. It doesn’t seem to me to be persuasive.” Garton Ash seems to think that such arguments stem not from a rejection, but a distortion of liberalism. “Partly by taking part of the logic of egalitarian liberalism to an extreme,” we arrive at “a logic of no offence” with a radical edge, whose attraction is its “primary colour, simple solutions.” Liberalism, he adds, is deeply suspicious of all radicalism.

I ask if ideological hostility ever moves him to question whether freedom of speech is really such a universal value; is it something people accept unthinkingly, rather than feel the moral force of? The question of universalism is one that concerns him deeply. It’s no good to simply confront the world proclaiming that “there was a bunch of white men who between 1600 and 2000 worked the whole thing out”. Rather, he aims to present the arguments, “stripped away of their cultural integuments”. He is deeply opposed, though, to a brand of cultural determinism that holds some societies to be fundamentally hostile to free discourse; after all, “free speech…is the freedom that enables and secures most other freedoms”. The cruel irony is the catch-22 of free speech: “you can’t really know what you think about the subject until you’ve heard all the arguments for and against”. Yet despite this, perhaps because of it, what he has discovered in a life spent traveling through and writing about dictatorships is that people there “are a hell of a lot more interested in free speech than many people in free countries are.”

Another aspect of the contemporary retaliation against free speech comes in the form of an intricate “identity politics of free speech”. This increasingly prevalent position holds that the only tolerable form of expression is self-referential, that legitimate speech is limited fundamentally by the identity of the speaker. Garton Ash is keen to point out that “if we’re talking about the experience of African women, then I would want to listen particularly closely to African women” in that instance. “That’s common sense, logic and actually a sort of human decency. But it’s a big, and I think illegitimate, leap from that to say only African women can talk about the experience of African women, because in that case only white middle-aged professors at Oxford would be entitled to speak about the experience of white middle-aged professors at Oxford and then all wider debate logically becomes impossible.” It is vital that we avoid “absolute rules enforcing civility by law”. Instead we ought to “try to achieve what I call robust civility, which has a certain cultural, intellectual sensitivity to these things, but allows all voices to be heard.”

Bertrand Russell had a line that a writer’s most cherished ideals are rarely those he states overtly. During our conversation my impression of Garton Ash is of an owner of a deeply-felt humanism and a borderless sympathy with political struggle, giving foundation to his liberal ideals. He recently wrote of his devastation at the result of the EU referendum, calling it the “biggest defeat” of his political life. He talks of the increasing ruthlessness of anti-liberalism in China, of the iniquities of the coercive, self-interested tabloid press, and the horror at the “assassin’s veto”, played in attacks such as those on the editorial board of Charlie Hebdo. Clear above all things is his desire to spread the conversation wide, and to resolve human differences through argument and reason. “I hope that’s what we do at this university” he tells me; after all, “there’s an art to talking about these things.”

Oxford does a wonderful job at educating historians, biologists, classicists, geologists, and almost any other academic discipline. But it does not do a very good job at educating people.

In the United States, university is a place of experimentation. You try many subjects, before deciding which one you’ll major in. Maybe you take a few classes in biology, a few in history, a few in Russian literature and a few in geology. Maybe you would like to double major in philosophy and geology, or drama and chemistry. That is allowed and normal.

In Britain things are different. When applying to Oxford, I realised that I would have to choose between my two academic loves. One the one hand, biology — the beauty of evolution, the intricacies of the natural world, the moral purpose of conservation and the excitement of field work. On the other hand, I had history—the imaginative study of how life once was, the great intellectual and political debates of bygone eras, and the cast of fascinating characters which shaped the modern world. Faced with such a dilemma, and being unable to study both at Oxford, I flipped a coin and hence find myself studying biology.

There is much to be said about the English style of education. Someone with a BA in any subject at Oxford will know far more on how to do that subject than someone with a BA at a US university. But there is something to be said for the opportunity to shop around, for perhaps a year or even a term, before specializing too deeply into one field.

I love biology, and do not regret applying for it. But for all the joys of biology, I still love history. Oxford is a great university, but it could be greater. There is a benefit in a liberal education, and Oxford and her students would benefit if there was a tad more flexibility in the subject combinations, and the ability to try things before delving head first into only one subject.