YES! – Alexander Rankine

Dear tutor,

Although we once met in the pub after a scheduling fiasco, I think it is fair to say that we are not really friends. We might occasionally share a dash of mirth
during the grim and earnest tutorial grind, but we’re careful to laugh about something safe; preferably the weather, a minor mishap, your rival’s most cherished theory. I now see that starting our relationship out by questioning the intellectual basis and credibility of your subject in my first ever tutorial was probably not very wise.

There are certainly a great number of bridges to cross as we try to rebuild our amity. We are separated by years and intellect. But then, by the end of 6th form we were often quite pally with our teachers, sharing gossip and meeting them out of lessons, and promising to stay in touch. Of course, the Oxford tutor poses their own particular difficulties. Some of you are just a bit strange, with touchingly circumscribed extra-subject conversation, profoundly alternative senses of humour, or a pronounced and intolerant dogmatism. But real human hearts beat under most of those priggish suits and ill-chosen denim jackets, just as they do under the elbow patches which are now worn – confusingly – mostly by the student body. And you yourself seem like quite a nice sort, with a good variety of interests and cultural references hinted at in our tutorial conversations.

But how can we get to know you better? Well, if fresher’s week teaches us one thing, it is that alcohol is the ticket to instant friendship (or a three-year long avoidance of certain other members of the college community).College is certainly willing to provide here, what with its entertainment allowance.

After we had dinner together in the SCR you even suggested that there might be enough left over in the kitty for a whisky tasting night. Indeed, I saw you drunk (at fresher’s formal) before I ever saw you teach. Bring on the booze. I believe that Tolkien used to hold tutorials in the pub, this too might be a way to go.

But no booze-broken-ice can stay melted for long without mutual respect. I now recognise that brazenly attacking an academic’s position during your tutorial whilst repeatedly failing to correctly pronounce his name was a daft position to take with your thesis supervisor. To the contrary, I now regard his theory as a shining paradigm of reason and sense.

Equally, the next time my tutorial partner sticks his head out the window, it would be nice if you did not threaten to slam it shut. A little guillotining between friends can do a great deal of harm. Your acts of kindness also seem like a nice way of building up trust between us, giving us pringles to explain maximisation problems was inspired, even if I did eat the relevant study tool before you could explain the theory.

Ultimately, friendship must be based upon shared interests. I already see hints of these, like the time we carried on our tutorial in the quad after the ‘official’ end. Offering us one of the roll-ups you smoked during our chat would be the next step, but it was nice to see that not every conversation with a tutor need conclude with awkward silence.

Here’s to a new friendship,

Alex

NO! – Anna Cooban

True friendships do not spring suddenly into existence, they take time to develop and certainly cannot be nurtured during the course of a one-hour tutorial discussing Darwinian theory and the numerous pitfalls of my essay.

Friends are your literal crutches on the long journey from bop to bed, friends upload horrendous photos onto Facebook and kindly remember the tag, lend you money at dinner when your bod card balance runs low and provide the simplest of comforts.

Would my tutor turn up at my room at 3am armed with a tub of Ben & Jerry’s because my boyfriend dumped me? No. Any friend who treats you as an
academic punch-bag at the beginning of every term is simply not worth keeping. Collections are perhaps the bane of every Oxford student’s life, turning every vac into a six-week-long procrastination where relaxing is something of a luxury and not an expectation.

Socialising with your tutor in the weeks that follow when your collections papers are still unmarked, underscores any dinner or drinks event with a palpable tension and fear of the dreaded email asking for a ‘chat’.

Friends also have a habit of mincing their words to protect your feelings and often the best advice has the harshest delivery. Half-baked criticism for a truly shoddy essay is helping no one and sometimes being told that you’re crap is the most helpful and truly motivating thing you could ever hear. Friendships, like relationships, are supposedly based on honesty, but in practice the white-lies told by friends are designed to spare you heartache where it is needed.

Instead, the brutal, bare-faced honesty of a tutorial report gives you heartache where it is most certainly needed. This is why OxCORT exists – to shatter any illusion that your tutor was ever, or could possibly become, your friend.

Perhaps it is Facebook and the entire social networking phenomenon which has made ‘friendship’ seem so easy. The simple click of a button enables people with even the most tenuous connection to instigate a virtual ‘friendship’ without the rigorous tests set by physical proximity. These sorts of Facebook friends cannot pull your hair back after a heavy night at Camera, nor can they file away embarrassing anecdotes from fresher’s week to be dragged up when you’re about to sit your finals. Tutors are like these nominal virtual friendships; they show cordiality and respect – the equivalent to a ‘like’ on a profile picture – but in reality they are just as distant, just as indifferent and just as anonymous as the 500+ friends on your timeline. 

And if you think this view of the impossibility of tutor-student friendships is dismissive to those who genuinely do feel as if their tutor would distract them from their work to play pool in the JCR or would scrutinise all potential love interests as unworthy of their time, then, for your sake, I urge you to end this destructive relationship now. Once finals come around and you graduate, the tutorstudent dynamic will be broken and you will wonder why you invested so much energy in the friendship of a middle-aged don with whom, aside from a shared love of 19th century lesbian literature, you actually share very little in common.

Do not feel disheartened at the loss of your tutor’s seeming friendship – you could always add them on Facebook.

This article was prompted somewhat by an advertisement that came into my inbox recently. As deputy comment editor of Cherwell, I was invited to apply for a job writing for Keep Off The Grass, OSPL’s Fresher’s guide.

Given that I didn’t have a Fresher’s period since my lungs decided to unilaterally stop working that week, I felt my input would be inappropriate. However, there is one very important point that I think merits a mention.

I’m not the only person who invested a lot in attending Oxford University. Having always felt somewhat isolated throughout most of my academic career, I thought that I would finally find a safe haven for my self-indulgent geekishness. Of course, what I immediately proceeded to discover was that almost everyone I knew appeared far cleverer than I did.

Generally, if you feel inferior to someone when they recount the details of their interview entirely innocently, that’s not a good sign. To make such a transition, I would argue, is even harder than the move to independence for some people. I easily settled in to a life independent of the comforts of home- but to adjust to a world where what had previously defined my identity was suddenly nothing special was a lot harder.

Pretty soon, I was having daily thoughts of “I don’t belong here”. Every time I hit a wall, I took it highly personally. It was getting to the point where my constant anxiety was a serious strain on those closest to me. Yet I resisted any sort of counselling, convinced that my problems were only temporary.

It was only after 4th week when I eventually sought a GP and was referred to the university service that things started to improve. One of the first things that the counsellor told me was that hundreds of people passed through daily, that I wasn’t alone. This was what gave me the confidence to be able to treat my problems seriously.

I had to be told that this sort of thing was actually fairly common. I’ve spoken to people since who have been through the process, and it’s clear I’m not alone.

But I didn’t know that at the time. And next year, there’s going to be another generation of freshers who will struggle mentally, for similar or even entirely different reasons. What matters is that they don’t feel weak asking for help.

It would have been far better for me and a lot of people close to me had I done so earlier. Oxford is an amazing place, and I wouldn’t wish to be anywhere else. At the same time, it can be incredibly mentally taxing, and some people may need more support than others. It’s a good idea to highlight the importance of peer supporters just as the Wadham fresher’s guide did.

However, this is no use if such occurrences are treated as alien to the authentic Oxford experience, as for some people they are all too real. I don’t want any upcoming Oxford students to feel the sense of shame that I did in seeking help. I want them to have the confidence that they belong here that I was denied, and in some cases counselling etcetera is a perfectly legitimate means of securing that.

There is a huge stigma attached to mental health issues in this country, which is why my proposal may be difficult to fulfil. I suggest to the editors of Keep Off The Grass that they seek testimonials from Oxford students of all walks of life about their own difficulties adjusting. That way, those freshers who need support know that their personal difficulties do not invalidate their right to be here.

Welfare reps in colleges across Oxford do an excellent job of highlighting the importance of seeking help, but if the fresher’s guide acknowledged the frequency with which students seek counselling, it would send a message that it is a perfectly normal part of student life, just as much as embarrassing oneself at crew-dates. Oxford is a world leader academically; let’s make it a world leader in mental health awareness too.