Magdalen College library is to undergo a renovation due to the need for an increase in the amount of space available to students.

This will result in no student being able to use the library during the time it takes for the building work to be completed, starting in July 2014.  A replacement book service will be available instead, and a replacement library provided.

An email sent out to students of the college by the Fellow Librarian, Christine Ferdinand, said, “We will need an alternative library during the 18 to 24 months it will take to complete the project. Our aim is to continue to provide a high quality library service during that time.”

The email also noted the steps that would have to be taken regarding the books currently stored in the New Library.

It said, “The New Library collection will have to be decanted and the whole building cleared during June after final examinations. While the details have yet to be finalised, we will ensure that more heavily used books will be available here at Magdalen.”

It was also stated that the intention was to provide access to the less frequently used books within 24 hours’ notice using the automated system, used by the main Bodleian Library, to request books from closed stacks.

The library was originally a single hall school designed in 1851, and was extensively redesigned in 1930 by Giles Gilbert Scott, who converted it into a library with space for 12 readers and a librarian. The college now requires room for 120 readers and additional space for storage and staff facilities

It  also requires 3,000 linear metres of book space. Half of this will be on mobile oak storage in preparation for a less book-based future.

The renovations will prove the solution to these as yet unfulfilled requirements, proposing to rework the original interior. A new L-shaped extension will also be added, which will stretch along the rear and continue at right angles to the original along the Longwall boundary, where the edge of the college grounds are marked by the 15th-century city wall.

There are also plans for new landscaping work to be done adjacent to the extension to create external seating in the quad within a ‘scented garden’. The work will be carried out by Wright & Wright Architects. The Fellow Librarian told Cherwell that college authorities were looking at options for temporary library accommodation and that no complete decision had been made yet.

She also said, “Magdalen Library staff are as pleased as anyone else that the project to renovate and expand our New Library is going ahead next July.” The Fellow Librarian has reportedly moved her office out of the New Library in order to create more space for library staff to work in. Despite this, the staff have still had to “endure cramped working conditions, share desks and computers, and take their coffee breaks on the New Library Porch (which is the main entrance to the library).”

Amelia Ross, the Magdalen College JCR President, said to Cherwell, “The New Library renovation and extension is absolutely essential to address issues that students at Magdalen have been raising with the work space for years.

“Whilst unfortunately it will inevitably affect students, we are confident that the college will do everything they can to help with both book availability and in providing an alternative workspace for the time that the work is being done, which will hopefully be as short as possible.”

The Home Bursar at Magdalen College  was unavailable for comment.

Arieh Frosh, a second year Fine Art student at New College, presented a motion last Sunday to the JCR asking for a sum of £100-£300 for gambling purposes. The motion stated that Mr Frosh would pay double the amount back by the next meeting in two weeks’ time.

Initially, it was unclear whether the motion was entirely serious. However, when questioned, Mr Frosh was remarkably resolute:

“I can’t say too much about my strategy, but it definitely works. I’m so confident that I only really need around twenty pounds seed money, as then I’ll be able to keep ploughing my earnings back in- but I thought I should probably be on the safe side.”

The motion noted that, “The Michaelmas budget has decreased significantly in the first half of term. Money is good for the JCR.” It is indeed true that New College’s JCR has been low on funds due to a flurry of new sports kit requests.

In light of this, it seems that Mr Frosh’s intention was to raise money not just for himself but for the JCR, stating in the motion that, “giving Arieh some money for controlled gambling purposes would benefit the JCR as it’s [sic] money will be doubled in a short amount of time, which is worth the investment.”

The terms of the motion were:

“To give Arieh £100-£300 for gambling purposes, resulting in £300-£600 returning to the JCR in time for the next meeting. In the unlikely event that the money is lost, Arieh will pay back the loaned sum in monthly instalments over the course of his degree.”

During the short factual questions part of the policy discussion, in reply to whether he was a good gambler, Mr Frosh observed that, “I used to do scratch cards. It’s sort of up and down I suppose, but yes I’m fairly good.”

Moreover, after Mr Frosh revealed he would be primarily focussing on roulette, he admitted, “I have noticed that there aren’t really systems that work for roulette.”

Regarding the motion, JCR Treasurer Kara Verkroost remarked, “It’s all a load of testes.”

However there was considerable support for Mr Frosh’s motion. Anya Green, who seconded the motion, endorsed, “Arieh’s motion was a novel way to solve the JCR’s financial stress. I absolutely backed him to be able to win us some money.”

During the discussions, Mr Frosh requested, “Can I add an amendment that if I lose the money, I get more money to get myself out of it?” Subsequently, amidst the confusion of the somewhat unordered discussion, two more amendments were made: one to fly Mr Frosh out to Las Vegas in order to gamble there; and another to give Mr Frosh all the money in the JCR’s possession. Both of these amendments were however then withdrawn, upon Mr Frosh’s request to “unamend”.

After some considerable discussion, a move to vote was called, of which the outcome was 25-13 in opposition. Mr Frosh declined to comment on the failure of the motion. However a close friend of Mr Frosh’s commented, “it was probably for the best- he’d have been in a pickle if the motion had passed.”

A recent study has found that people who study a social science at university are the most employable after they graduate. The study showed that 84 percent of social science graduates are in employment three and a half years after their degrees. This is in comparison with 79 percent of graduates who had taken a humanities degree and 78 percent of graduates who had studied a science, engineering or mathematics based subject.

The study was undertaken by the Campaign for Social Sciences, an initiative that began in 2011 to work on raising the profile of social sciences. James Wilsdon, the Chair of the Campaign said, “the Campaign was set up a couple of years ago to try and raise the visibility of social sciences in policy debates, in the media and in broader public debate.”

He commented on the results of the study saying, “It should help to remind decision makers of the critical importance of those subjects and of the value that they are bringing to the workplace.”

Oxford students were similarly enthused by the news. An E&M finalist said “As a finalist job hunter, it’s heartening to hear that social science students are seen as more employable. When facing such a grim jobs market, it’s good to know that the skills I have developed whilst doing my degree can translate into tangible results.” Paul Moroz, who studies PPE, said “It’s great to know that all those 9am lectures will be worth it.”

Other students however were not intimidated by the success of social science graduates. A third year Classicist commented, “As a classicist, I think that my degree, or any arts degree, fosters skills of analysis and communication just as much as a social science degree does. I do not think that I’m disadvantaged by studying for an arts degree, nor would I have picked a social science degree in preference because it may be more employable.”

This sentiment was shared by Shearer West, the Head of the Humanities Division at Oxford who claimed students should not be put off studying humanities or scientific subjects because they might be less employable. She said “Generally, I feel that the collective evidence demonstrates that pupils at school should feel confident in choosing an academic subject that reflects their interests and passions and not feel deterred by anxieties about their future career prospects.”

The study also found that not only do more social scientists find employment after they graduate, but there are also more social science graduates in jobs like senior officials or managers. 7.6 percent of people who have social science degrees are in jobs like these compared to only 3.6 percent of people who did mathematics or science based degrees.

A Balliol Chemist however was unconvinced by the findings; he said “I find it hard to believe. The statistical maths and computer programming, and complex problem solving learned during a science degree can be applied almost anywhere. Scientists have the widest range of transferable skills and I think employers know that.” 

An Arabic businessman in his thirties is offering a €146,700 a year job to anyone who can tutor him so that he can gain a place at the University of Oxford.

The successful applicant must ensure that the businessman is taught English (which he does not currently speak), jazz piano and  an appreciation of Shakespeare. He must also receive enough formal schooling to enable him to pass GCSEs and A-Levels. The businessman is currently unsure as to which subject he would like to study at Oxford.

The advert, placed in the Times Education Supplement, recognises the businessman’s “hugely ambitious goal, which will take several years’ hard work”. It however suggests that a “highly intelligent, erudite, well read, musically accomplished, and both socially and culturally versatile” tutor should succeed in gaining him admission. Certainly the criteria for applicants are stringent and the job itself is no less daunting.

A successful applicant must be able to “ignite a passion for reading across the gamut of literature, including plays, poetry and all manner of novels. The client also wishes to learn to speak English so that his Arabic background is no longer evident”. Clearly recognizing the need for a cultural education to pad out his personal statement the advert stipulates that the tutor must draw up a “life-curriculum”. This will necessitate “planning a culturally rich range of musical and dramatic performance, visits to art galleries and museums, restaurants, sites of historical or contemporary interest”.

Despite being very specific on certain points (“should lead a healthy lifestyle and be in good physical shape”) the advert is strikingly vague on the matter of whether men can apply for the job. Despite never excluding them directly it talks only of the tutor using the pronoun “she”, implying that a man would be unsuitable.

A further area of contention within the article is the matter of the hours the successful applicant would need to work. “Typically the Tutor should expect to be available 8am-11pm, five days a week… Friday and Saturday evenings will be spent with their charge”. For time off the tutor will be entitled to two consecutive days off per week on average.

Student reactions to the advert have been largely cynical. A first year PPEist at Jesus commented, “The intentions of the advert are clearly not completely above board, essentially if he wants a middle-aged ‘retired head-teacher’ to live in his apartment having ensured she’s ‘in good shape’”.

A University of Oxford spokesman was keen to quash the suggestion that one can effectively buy a place at the university, stating, “There is no trick or secret to getting into Oxford University – selection is based purely on academic ability and potential.”

More than a dozen Xbox games, with a total estimated value of £500, have disappeared from Wadham College JCR in a recent spate of thefts.

The latest incident, involving the theft of FIFA 14 and Grand Theft Auto V, is said to have occurred on the evening of Wednesday 6 November between 7pm and 11pm.

This has prompted an investigation by Wadham’s security staff and student union. SU technical officer Sam Greenhalgh issued a circular to the student body, offering an amnesty on returns of the stolen goods, but so far none have been forthcoming.

JCR president Anya Metzer described college members’ reaction as one of “annoyance and disappointment”.

Although confident in the integrity of her fellow students, Metzer said it would be “naïve” to dismiss the possibility of a culprit from within.

“The JCR is accessible only with a Wadham Bod card, though we are considering the possibility that external people have stolen the games.

“It is hoped that if they have been taken by a student then offering a chance to return them without repercussions would accelerate their return.”

Greenhalgh has told Cherwell that college members reported four people acting “suspiciously” and “out of place” near the common room on Wednesday evening. No one recognised the interlopers.

Witnesses later spotted the individuals playing one of the games before being escorted from the JCR.

While external suspects remain unconfirmed, Greenhalgh suggested, “It is possible that they are members of the general public and gained access to our JCR through tailgating or a propped-open door.

“We are investigating all avenues of inquiry,” he asserted. “I have taken appropriate steps in cooperation with the lodge to retrieve CCTV footage from the time, and shall notify members of the SU to be more vigilant.”

However, he expressed pessimism about retrieving the items, and said it is “unlikely” they had been “borrowed”.

The replacement of the most recent thefts will cost Wadham’s student body at least £90, and has disrupted the college’s FIFA tournament, organized by sports officer Jack Firth.

He said, “The football team use FIFA as their main training tool and their performances have since slumped, including a 2-0 defeat by Worcester today. However the tournament will continue on older formats of FIFA.”

One irate third year issued a stark warning to the thieves: “I don’t know who you are. But  I have a very  particular set of skills… I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”

Due to government cuts to tertiary education, UK universities are increasingly being left to source their own funding – with Oxford and Cambridge leading the way, according to the findings of a recent report by the international credit rating agency Moody’s.

The report, which looks at data from the last six academic years, also suggests that universities are increasingly  following the funding model of American universities. Although the £13.8 billion in charitable donations received by top US universities still dwarfs the record £774 million that UK institutions received, the rate of growth of private donations was far higher in the UK. It was further suggested in the report that the growth in both the number and size of donations comes out of necessity.

However, the highest ranked universities received far more funding than their academic rivals, with Oxford and Cambridge collectively receiving almost half of all charitable donations made over the last six years.

The statisticians found that “in both the US and the UK, philanthropic support is concentrated among the market leading, elite and highly rated universities, showing that brand recognition and a strong market presence are keys to successful fundraising in higher education.”

Fire interrupted the lives of Regent’s Park students on Sunday evening as a fresher’s dinner plans turned sour. Lucy Clarke, a first year studying History and English, was cooking in one of the student kitchens and accidentally caused a series of potentially deadly incidents.

At first she burnt her dinner mildly, setting off the fire alarm in the process. Students were evacuated from the building and waited outside whilst University Services investigated and the alarm was reset.

Once given the all clear, the students returned inside and Clarke went back to the kitchen in an attempt to salvage the remains of her dinner. Whilst trying to prepare another meal, she unwittingly knocked a pack of butter wrapped in wax paper on to a still-hot hob. Unaware of the error, Clarke was talking to a friend when the butter went up in flames; they both turned around but the kitchen was quickly engulfed in thick black smoke before they could do anything to put the fire out. The smoke eventually spread to other rooms and students were forced outside once again.

Speaking of the incident, Clarke said, “‘Towering Inferno’ were the only words my mind could provide other than ‘Oh sweet Lord, what have I done now?’”

Fortunately, University Services were already on hand, having arrived to deal with the first incident just before. Students were once again evacuated on hearing the alarm and University Services successfully extinguished the fire before it spread beyond the kitcken.

The hob and the surrounding area were destroyed but the damage was limited to the kitchen. Clarke has been asked to pay damages to the college in order to repair the affected areas but has received no other punitive sanctions. Clarke stressed that the college have been very understanding and sympathetic, as were her fellow Regent’s students who were forced out into the cold twice. Clarke was also pleasantly surprised with the conviviality of University Services given the situation, saying, “I would have thought anyone would get upset with the sort of idiocy I displayed, but they were really kind and sympathetic!”

Regent’s JCR President, Harrison Denner, downplayed the drama of the event, insisting, “The whole thing did not last very long.”

There is a beautiful, tragicomic moment in Norman Mailer’s famous book on the march on the Pentagon, Armies of the Night, where he writes of being beaten and bundled into the back of a police wagon before being carted off to a cell. Thrown in with him is a uniformed member of the American Nazi party, and a dour, slight scholar with a burning fight in his eyes. Mailer says the man reminds him a bit of Woody Allen. It turns out to be Noam Chomsky.

The anecdote above has more to it than just its obvious gallows humour, as it shows Noam Chomsky as the ultimate example of what the activist academic should be. From the very start of the Vietnam War, through long forgotten American wars of aggression in Indochina, Latin America, Africa and South East Asia, to the more vividly remembered conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has been the leading light of intellectual opposition.

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Illustration: Sage Goodwin

He is also the model scholarly academic, considered the most influential figure in the field of linguistics since the discipline was founded. Chomsky has a reputation for extreme generosity — offering his time to anyone and everyone who wishes to consult him for the purpose of political debate or scholarly research. He personally replies to each and every one of the hundreds of emails he receives. He is the utter antithesis of the detached professor in an ivory tower — despite being voted the most influential public intellectual in the world.

We talked initially about the lingering shadow of American power and the hope that was once vested in President Barack Obama to change the direction of the United States. Why, I ask, did he disappoint his supporters on the Left? And why did political anger against the US government manifest itself mainly as right wing populism, such as in the tea party movement?

“Its true he’s regarded as a disappointment on the Left, but there’s really no reason for that. He’s a master of illusion and many people fell for the illusion — even Europe, which is typically much more sceptical about American leaders. But there was never any basis for it. I don’t say that in retrospect, I was writing about that before his first election. Vote for him maybe, but without any illusions. He’s sort of a centrist liberal, and could easily be a moderate Republican.

“He has no particular principles that I can identify. In fact, the advertising industry enthusiastically gave the best marketing campaign of the year to Obama, the year he was first elected. The business press, like the Financial Times reported to executives that they were euphoric at his being elected: they knew he wouldn’t try and rock the system. So, we really have no reason to be surprised.”

He tells me that he did not vote himself. “If I was in a swing state I would have voted against Romney and Ryan, not because I was for Obama, but because they are very dangerous people, and I would vote to keep them out.
“The United States doesn’t have anything close to a functioning democratic system. Democracy is supposed to be a system where public opinion strongly influences public policy; that’s the general idea. In America, we have a very heavily polled society, so we know a lot about what people want. The eminent Princeton authority on elections in the United States concluded that the bottom seventy per cent of the population in terms of low income has no influence on policy whatsoever. The very rich get everything they want, and the remainder get a small bit of leeway on deciding social issues. That’s not a democratic system that I can recognize.”

Chomsky goes on to invoke Gore Vidal’s comment that American politics has one party: the property party, with two right wings. In an interesting example he says the last progressive liberal president was Richard Nixon.
“Nixon was actually the last real liberal president of the United Status, and far more so than the incumbent. The US establishment is now dedicated to dismantling his legacy: the Environmental Protection Agency, the protection for workers’ rights, the properly graded earned income tax, which essentially gives a subsidy to working people who could barely afford to pay their taxes. This was the peak of the 1960’s activism. They’ve been trying to repeal those ‘mistakes’ ever since.”

We move on to the role of the United States’ power over the rest of the world, particularly the precarious position it holds in the Middle East. Should the West ever intervene in the Arab spring to ensure the spread of democracy?

“The West is strongly opposed to the Arab Spring — based on the terminology of course. The US and their allies don’t want to see democracy develop in the Arab world. It’s very obvious why there’s not much public opinion undertaken by leading Western polling agencies in these countries. Take Egypt, in many ways the most important country. A huge majority of the Egyptian population regards Israel as its greatest threat, followed closely by the United States. And yet, the West is trying to press the idea that Iran is the greatest threat in the region. They [people in the Middle East] don’t particularly like the Iranian regime, but they don’t see it as much of a threat. Sometimes they even believe the region would like Iran to have nuclear weapons to counteract the threat of the US and Israel.

“These are not the opinions that the US and Great Britain want to see put into policy. Whenever you see corporate elites or US politicians citing Arab countries fear of Iran, you’re really seeing them cite the opinions of the dictators, like Mubarak or the Saudi royal family. But of course they’re going to be opposed to democracy; they’re going to try to stop and limit the spread as much as possible. The US is often considered opposed to radical Islam, which is why they say they stand up to Iran, but the most extreme radical Islamic state in this part of the world is Saudi Arabia, the United States greatest ally in the region.

“There is a long history of Britain and the US supporting radical Islam as a barrier to secular nationalism. Secular nationalism is a real concern for these powers, because it threatens to use the resources of the country to benefit its own populations, rather than Western investors and so on.
“They don’t like radical Islam, if it negatively affects the interests of the United States, but they also strongly oppose the Catholic Church when it negatively affects their interests. There was a war with the Catholic Church and its associated liberation theology in Latin America in the 1970’s and 1980’s — conveniently glossed over in most accounts of the period.”
We finished by discussing the case of the most controversial activist in the world, Julian Assange, currently languishing in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

“If there are charges against Julian Assange in Sweden he should face them. In fact he’s been entirely willing to when he’s in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the Swedish prosecutors have been invited inside by the Ecuadorian government multiple times. But the sex issues are not what this prosecution is about. The issue is that he acted the way a responsible citizen should. He tried to bring to the public information about what their governments are doing.
He compares Assange’s experience to his involvement in distributing the Pentagon Papers, the controversial files about US policy in Vietnam released in 1971. “We were trying to do exactly the same thing. There are cases where there is genuinely a need for secrecy, but they have to be treated with the utmost scepticism. If you’ve ever studied declassified documents, you find almost nothing that needs to be concealed for reasons of national security. Mostly the classification system is only a defence of those in power against their own populations. He [Assange] was helping release to the population.”

He ends with the perfect note of irony when I ask him if he has any closing comments. “I have a lot of comments, but nothing ever closes.”