Oxford

The characters in Sarah Vaughan’s thriller Anatomy of a Scandal include rich Oxford undergraduates from Eton whose main preoccupations are drinking and trashing rooms. They are what it is fashionable to call ‘privileged white males’; while the typical female Oxbridge student is ‘slim, tall, well dressed. Entitled… they knew they belonged there’. The truth, however, is that although Eton is one of the top academic schools in the country, its ‘beaks’ are puzzled by the sharp reduction in the number of their brightest pupils gaining places at Oxbridge. The number of offers has halved between 2014 and 2021. Not very different to Vaughan’s narrative is the argument of the Sutton

Dons and students at Oxford have in recent years been deeply exercised about Cecil Rhodes, who died 120 years ago. Some politically sensitive students removed a portrait of the Queen in the Magdalen graduate common room, and others even persuaded the geography department to remove a portrait of Theresa May. Yet they seem strangely silent on the implications of taking money tainted by fascism. This month it was announced that the university had been given £6 million from the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust for a chair in biophysics. Two colleges have also taken money from the Trust — St Peter’s College received £5 million for a new block of student

The mob is at work again in Oxford, protesting against the existence of Oriel’s statue of Cecil Rhodes. But this is a mob of dons who, rather than doing anything about it, have decided just to stop teaching at Oriel. And that will solve the problem? The Romans were a little more proactive. ‘Statue’ derives from statuo, ‘I place X so as to remain upright’. That was its correct position, where it could be kissed, garlanded and so on. Cicero mentions a deity whose mouth and chin had been worn down by worshippers. Vandalism and indeed theft were known, but it was damnatio memoriae (‘condemnation of memory’, a designation invented

There is a spectre haunting British universities: the spectre of institutional racism. ‘There is a lot of evidence that points towards universities perpetuating systemic racism, being institutionally racist,’ the University of East Anglia’s vice-chancellor, David Richardson, told an upcoming BBC Three documentary ‘Is Uni Racist?’. Viewers are likely to be left in no doubt that the answer to that question is ‘Yes’. Two people I know appeared in it, and it was moving to hear them share their experiences. Yet the reality is that for most black students there has never been a better time to study at a university in Britain. Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t still

It is worth taking a moment to stand back and applaud Sarah Gilbert and the Oxford vaccine team’s achievement. The data released this evening by Public Health England shows that a single dose of both the Oxford /AstraZeneca vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine cuts the risk of hospitalisation by 80 per cent in the over-80s, the most vulnerable group. It also suggests that the Oxford one, despite its messy trial data, is slightly more effective than the Pfizer vaccine in preventing symptomatic infection among the over-70s. The efficacy of the Oxford vaccine has completely changed the outlook for the UK. This country has enough doses of it ordered to cover

I quit the ‘poor people scholarship’, also known as the University of Oxford’s Crankstart scholarship, halfway through my first year. I was only four hours into my 25 annual hours of volunteering, tediously spent peeling vegetables for a charity roast dinner – a requirement set by the university itself that I had to fulfil in order to receive my bursary – when I made my decision. Peeling parsnip after parsnip, I felt no warm glow about giving back to the community. My more cynical side thought it seemed like those patronising skill-building exercises for the unemployed. I felt only resentment at how more privileged students at Oxford hadn’t peeled a

Oxford is famous for its pubs. Inspector Morse reveals that they are as much a part of the city’s life as any of its colleges. The insatiable undergraduate demand for cheap beer has meant that pubs like the Turf Tavern and the Eagle and Child have permeated (and intoxicated) the minds of students for centuries. So when the Lamb and Flag closed last week, it was as much a story as any of those bizarre murders John Thaw used to stick his nose into. No Jag-driving detectives are needed to work out why it has shut. A year of missed terms and lockdowns dramatically cut the pub’s revenue. Owned by neighbouring St

Robert Jenrick’s pledge to protect monuments and statues from mob iconoclasm with new laws and powers is very welcome. It’s an issue on which the Government has been quiet in terms of legislation, even if the Prime Minister made clear last summer that ‘we cannot try to edit or censor our past’. Now that the initial wave of Black Lives Matter activism has subsided, it’s essential to stop left-wing councils from renaming our streets, removing public monuments or, worse still, hanging a badge of opprobrium on them. There is more going on here than many realise: Policy Exchange’s History Matters Project, which is chaired by Trevor Phillips, has so far