Misunderstandings regarding access to Magdalen College’s Student Support Fund have prompted the JCR to advertise the fund, in light of a possible increase in student rents.

Magdalen has a Student Support Fund (SSF) of over £7 million to assist students in financial difficulty. The fund was launched in 2003 to ensure that no students abandons their course because of financial hardship.

The college website states, “These awards are invaluable to ensure students selected to study at Magdalen can actually get the degrees they deserve.”

Some students suggested that not many students have applied for the SSF. JCR President Amelia Ross told Cherwell, “With the development of the Oxford Opportunity Bursary in the last few years the remit of the Student Support Fund at Magdalen has changed slightly, which has led to some confusion in the JCR. Since awards from the fund are made at the Dean’s discretion for those who need it the most, there is no hard and fast rule as to the circumstances under which it should be claimed.”

Nevertheless, Ross emphasised that Magdalen students have been accessing college funding: “Last year, Magdalen awarded more than £330,000 in grants to help students with living and research costs and in the time since the fund has been established, to my knowledge no student has had to leave Magdalen on financial grounds.

“The JCR is currently working with the Deans to change the layout of the form and the advice and information that is provided about the fund so that the money that is available always goes to the students who need it most.”

Last term, Magdalen students boycotted their hall in response to a raise in their Hall subsidy to a termly fixed charge of up to £50. Undergraduate rooms for 2012-2013 cost just under £3675 a year.

Some students have also suggested that the college has used the existence of the SSF to justify putting up rents, which are expected to rise by five per cent this year. One Magdalen student claimed, “It’s ridiculous for college to be trying to raise our rents again; just because we haven’t all been applying for extra financial support doesn’t mean we’re rich. I really hope the JCR is successful in renegotiating the situation with college. With higher hall prices and now this attempt to raise our rent, Magdalen clearly isn’t dispelling its image as an elitist college.”

The Bodleian Library’s search engine SOLO unexpectedly crashed on Friday 25th January, leaving students unable to search for books from 7am. Bodleian staff worked throughout the day to fix the error, and were finally able to restore SOLO to working order by 5.15pm. 

The problem has been described as a highly unusual error that staff had never seen before, and could not have predicted.

Wolfram Horstmann, Associate Director for Digital Library Programmes and Information Technologies, said, “A programme that cleans outdated information from the system was faulty. The programme affected parts of the system, and the data consistency of SOLO and Aleph was endangered. In order to prevent further damage, a security procedure was in­voked.

“Since the Bodleian operates one of the most comprehensive library systems worldwide, this procedure takes time, although the system was restored within less than twelve hours.”

It was the first major outage the Bodleian staff have experienced since changing to the new Integrated Library System in July 2011. Staff were able to restore the programmes success­fully by using secure copies.

Notifications were placed on the website to inform students of the ongoing problems, and librarians were kept up to date so readers could be made aware of the situation. The library also updated their Twitter page to alert followers to the news, providing information about alterna­tives to the SOLO site.

A spokesperson from the Bodleian said, “We continue to work to prevent such an outage happening again. We are currently working with the University with an aim to providing greater investment in the Libraries’ IT infra­structure. We apologise for the inconvenience this caused our readers.”

Phoebe Braithwaite, a second-year English student, said, “I couldn’t believe that at such a crucial moment in the process of writing my es­say, I was abandoned by the institution I looked to for my education. It’s all very well updating Twitter with alternatives, but how many stu­dents follow the Bod?”

Abdul-Rahman Jama, a third-year student studying Hebrew and Arabic at Balliol, agreed, stating, “It was distressing. Writing an essay became exponentially more difficult purely be­cause you couldn’t track anything down. A first world problem of the highest calibre, but still.”

Many others felt similarly, with one student saying, “I understand that technical problems happen, and appreciate the efforts of all staff involved but they just didn’t do anything to let us know what was going on. The notice on the website was fine, but what about sending emails or updates? Nobody knew how long it was going to be down, which was really incon­venient.”

A third-year Classics student from Merton had a more positive approach, telling Cherwell, “SOLO’s crash was one of the better things that has happened to me this term. I was just about to do some reading for a tutorial I had in an hour’s time, but when I logged on to the library computer, it turned out SOLO was down. I brief­ly contemplated looking the books up in the card catalogue, but reckoned I wouldn’t have the time – so I just had to sit in the JCR, drink tea and read the papers.”

On Tuesday 22nd January, OxCERT an­nounced, “The University was hit by an unu­sually large batch of phishing emails, which went to several thousand users. These were sent from a greenville.k12.sc.us address, had a subject of ‘Emergency Clean-up Needed’, and directed users to a phishing page on Google Docs.”

On Wednesday 23rd, the team said they “were dealing with no fewer than four compromises of Nexus accounts, from which spam emails were sent” but hoped the “combination of the sender rate-limiting and prompt action from multiple teams within IT Services” would allow legitimate emails to be sent to external sources. More accounts have been hacked since.

The University Computing Services alerted colleges to the issue and told students to be vigilant, fearing that more accounts will be af­fected.

An email to staff and students from the LMH ICT Technical Services Officer reported, “[The emails] have a sender address of Maggie.Mon­[email protected] and a greeting along the lines of ‘DEAR University of Oxford EMAIL OWNER’, and directs users to a docs.google.com URL.”

Merton IT manager Steve Bowdery con­firmed, “We have had a handful of users who have responded – their email accounts were abused to send a significant volume of spam.”

Thomas Yeomans, the Assistant IT Manager at Hertford College, warned students, “You may from time to time be contacted by the University, but they will NEVER request your username and password information. If you are unsure about a message the best course of action is no action. You can always contact the IT department for further help.”

The IT Manager for Oriel and Corpus Christi colleges forwarded a copy of the phishing email to students and gave tips for spotting spam emails. He noted that “many fake emails begin with a general greeting”, are sent from “an address that is obviously from someone not associated with the organisation/system” and may include “a threat that something bad will happen if you don’t act immediately.”

Keble IT manager Steve Kersley advised stu­dents to be vigilant as even if a Nexus account does not contain personal details, “contact details and personal information about you and your friends could be gathered and used for more personalised scams.” He emphasised that if the hacked email address is linked to other internet accounts with a ‘forgotten password’ feature, such as Facebook, eBay and Paypal, then scammers may also be able to gain access to those.

Kersely further advised students to ensure that junk mail features are config­ured correctly, computer software is regularly updated and an up-to-date antivirus software installed.

Last weekend, many students and members of staff received emails from Lashzone, a Canadian company offering to write essays for a fee. IT services confirmed that over 58,000 university email addresses were tar­geted.

A spokesperson commented, “Many University addresses are public and/or have been harvested by spammers from a wide range of sources, but by no means all. IT Ser­vices is investigating how the spam­mers in this case may have obtained the addresses but may never know for sure.”

Successful spam attacks on this scale are rare on Oxford email ac­counts. A spokesperson for IT ser­vices explained, “This was just one of hundreds of spam runs that hit the University each day. While exten­sive anti-spam defences are in place, spammers are constantly adapting their tactics to evade our counter­measures. IT Services have to balance the risks of spam attacks against the risks of disruption to legitimate email traffic. Unfortunately this means that it is inevitable that some spam will get through the defences.” Regarding the most recent round of spam emails from Lashzone, the spokesperson said that he was “satis­fied that reasonable technical coun­termeasures are in place, but these are continually reviewed in view of evolving threats.”

Lashzone describes itself as “a team of Graduate and PhD students that major in different programs” and claims to be “trying to make this painful path of brain torture a bit easier, a path that will get these poor students nowhere but to make them the future slaves of society.”

The company offers an individu­alised service where assignments are written by their employees in exchange for cash. In response to an inquiry on behalf of Cherwell, Lash­zone offered a quote of 130 Canadian dollars (£82) for a 2000-word Politics essay.

The company attempted to recruit students to work for them, stating, “We want to localise Lashzone in eve­ry campus possible. Let’s call it fran­chising, but not in the usual way. We want every campus to have its own little (secret) Lashzone group that has its own writers, advertisers and customer service team.”

Cherwell contacted Lashzone for more information on this franchise scheme, but the company was un­willing to provide details, explain­ing, “Participants help spread the word throughout different campuses around the world, creating a web of connections between students. Their reward is protected by employee pri­vacy policy.”

The company claimed that it has “helped more than 600 students in UK and over 7000 students world­wide” but when questioned about the legitimacy of their service, Lash­zone responded, “If your question is whether we provide worthless work and expect money then no we do not do that and we would not be growing this strong across three con­tinents if we did. And helping/tutor­ing students with assignments has been around since the beginning of civilisation, we do not see anything ‘illegal’ about it. Therefore the onus is on you to prove to us whether we are committing a crime or not.”

120 students from St Edmund Hall partook in a quiz night that was held to raise money for the Surviving Winter Campaign, which supports the elderly across the country during the colder months.

James Arwyn-Jones, a third-year medical stu­dent, was responsible for organising the quiz, which took place in the dining hall. Arwyn-Jones told Cherwell, “The quiz was a really fun event to be part of. For such a big event, requir­ing a lot of equipment and space from college, I thought it was incredibly easy to run.

“We had teams of six people answering 10 rounds of questions. We charged £3 for tickets and sold drinks that had been left over from a recent bop (which was a surprising amount!). The costs of putting the quiz on were extremely low, as I just had to top up the drinks slightly, but other than that everything was free. This meant that essentially everything we earned was profit and all went to the Oxfordshire Com­munity Foundation – £454.32, which with the help of GiftAid made about £560.”

According to the Surviving Winter Campaign, last year there were over 170 excess winter deaths related to cold weather conditions, with dozens of others suffering illness and hardship. Through the campaign, the Oxfordshire Com­munity Foundation has promised to “continue to support those most in need and make sure they can afford to stay warm, eat well and re­main mobile, as well as help them in practical ways such as ensuring they can make doctor’s appointments, get to the shops, and maintain an active social life.”

The OCF announced last week that it would be giving this donation to the Great Milton Good Neighbours’ Club, which in recent years has found it increasingly difficult to pay for speakers and events. The club, funded by grants and membership fees, was established in 1961 by a village resident Gilbert Pickett, who wished to bring the community together.

Arwyn-Jones explained, “We wanted the mon­ey to go to local people, rather than one of the big national or international concerns, and so I went on the OCF’s Localgiving.com website to see who was looking for help. Everyone enjoyed the evening and it was so successful that we’ll be doing more in the future.”

A campaign to raise awareness of the problems caused by the buying up of large areas of land in developing countries saw members of the Oxford Students’ Oxfam Group taking over monuments all over Oxford on Saturday, including the Bridge of Sighs, the Radcliffe Camera and the tower of the University Church of St Mary.

The campaigners argued that because LEDCs lose an area of land the size of a football pitch every second due to governments, banks and investors purchasing enormous plots to grow food and crops for biofuels. They argue that in consequence, those who live on the land are often suddenly evicted from their homes and lose the land they rely on to grow food to fund themselves and their families.

The campaigners emphasised that many of the investors who purchase such large swathes of land produce food crops to export abroad, or crops to be used in biofuel. Such actions, Oxfam argues, make the hunger problem faced by many of the countries affected by land grabs even worse.

Oxfam is demanding that the World Bank takes action against land grabbing by freezing big land deals, many of which are funded by the World Bank itself, and protecting the rights of the inhabitants of the land, who often live in poverty.

The charity seeks to create a fairer way to buy and sell land, protecting the rights of poor inhabitants while encouraging positive investments to fight against poverty instead of entrenching and exacerbating it.

The Oxford land grabs involved students emulating the actions of land grabbers in developing countries at many popular Oxford sights, aiming to raise awareness of Oxfam’s campaign throughout the city.

Nathaniel Rees, President of the Oxford Students’ Oxfam Group, said, “Post-Live 8, with economic uncertainty and disillusionment, it is easy for people to block out the great problems still faced by the developing world. Our land grabbing was a creative way to reengage with the public. Throughout the day we talked to many people genuinely interested in the issue and in what we had to say.”

He added, “Seeing our placards at the top of St Mary’s Tower from across Radcliffe Square, or the incongruity of construction tape hanging from the Bridge of Sighs, caught their attention in a way that handing out leaflets on Cornmarket never could.”

Graham Atkins, another member of the group, commented, “Personally, I think land-grabs are an important issue because they amount to a de facto violation of property rights and are a serious injustice, yet few people seem to be aware of what’s happening as they’re ostensibly legal.”

Henry Baker, Vice-President of the group, told Cherwell, “I think it’s important in a place like Oxford, which can be so insular – to the extent that students can tend to lose touch with what’s going on in the outside world – to do attention-grabbing protests like the land grabs, in order to really make people realise what a sheltered and fortunate existence we have here.”

Although the protest was generally well-received by members of the public, Rees admitted, “Our only negative response was from a lady concerned that we were ‘terrorising the bridge’ in University Parks, but we think it is over the trauma.”

At Wadham’s Student Union meeting last Sunday, a motion proposing the restoration of formal hall was voted in, after the event name was changed to ‘guest night.’

The original motion, proposed by Matthew Burnett and Ali Hazrati, called for a weekly formal event on Friday nights, with the wearing of gowns encouraged but remaining optional. “The impetus for this motion was the general dissatisfaction with college hall, especially in regard to the lack of special occasions to which we could invite our friends and family. A large majority of students share this dissatisfaction,” Hazrati said.

After substantial amendments, the motion was passed. The new motion laid out plans for the creation of a weekly three-course guest night, priced between £10 and £15, with no specific dress requirement.

A heated discussion took place as students took issue with the suggested dress code. Wadham’s Access Officer Loukia Koumi said, “I think it is very important that gowns are not introduced as dress code (optional or not) as we are the only college who does without them entirely and this fact contributes greatly to our college ethos and helps us to portray the accurate image of a liberal and progressive college, which is so important from an Access point of view.”

Tom Clarke, who suggested the amendments to the motion, said, “Less legitimate, in my opinion, was the objection based on maintaining Wadham’s uniqueness. A lot of people like the idea of their college being the special one and this is very true of Wadham students. This point in itself seems quite petty.

“We shouldn’t want our college to be an arbitrarily different environment. We should just want it to be a positive environment,” he continued.
The inflated dinner cost also caused concerns about the event becoming exclusive.

Emily Cousens, an ex-Access Officer of Wadham, calculated the impact of such a price rise, “A weekly dinner of £10 in hall has the effect of pricing people out of hall by increasing the termly cost of Friday meals by almost £66. This is a significant amount of money for most people. The price and quality distinction ruins the sense of community by imposing a heirarchy between hall and our earlier dinner sittings in the refectory. Establishing a day every week where only rich students can have the privilege of eating in a beautiful, historic hall goes too far.”

However, second-year classicist Tom Clarke suggested that it might benefit those on a tighter budget. “It is difficult to imagine anyone who is eligible for a student loan not being able to afford an extra £6.50 once every few weeks. Everyone eats out a few times a term and £10 doesn’t go very far in Nandos. These same students were simply being given the chance to vote on whether or not they would like to spend those ten pounds in hall instead of Nandos. Sharing a three-course meal of good food, cooked for you by excellent chefs, with your friends, for £10, is absolutely impossible outside of college. It is exactly the people on a tight budget that this sort of thing would be most beneficial to,” he said.

The amended motion passed with around one-third of students voting against and two-thirds voting in favour.

EVA CLARKE, a Holocaust survivor, visited Oxford last Friday evening to talk to Brasenose’s Ashmole Society about her family’s experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Mrs Clarke spoke to a packed audience of 120 students, tutors and university staff in Brasenose’s ante-chapel.  Andrew Smith, Labour MP for Oxford East, also attended. The event was held in conjunction with the Holocaust Educational Trust to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Week.

Clarke, 67, was born on April 29^th 1945 as her mother, Anka, travelled to Mauthausen concentration camp from Auschwitz. Her father, Bernd, had already been murdered at Auschwitz in January that year.

Describing her mother’s recollections of arriving at Auschwitz in September 1944, “She saw the chimneys spouting the smoke and fire” she said. “It must have looked like hell”.

Anka had given birth to Eva’s brother in February, but the baby had died from pneumonia two months later. Eva said “I owe my life to him.”

“Had my mother arrived at Auschwitz camp holding my brother in her arms, she would have been sent to the gas chambers straightaway.

“But because she arrived in Auschwitz alone, and although she was pregnant with me, nobody knew, so she lived to see another day.”

Shortly before giving birth to Eva, Anka was moved across Europe on a three week train journey. “It was filthy, there was no food and barely any water,” Eva said. “By the time they arrived, my mother was nine months pregnant and she weighed five stone. She was a scarcely living pregnant skeleton.”

During the question and answer session a graduate student at Queen’s provoked the ire of the audience when he suggested that “there were no death camps outside of Poland”.

Andrew Smith described meeting Clarke as “humbling”. It was “immensely moving” he said, “to hear of her family’s dreadful experiences of the Holocaust, to learn about her mother’s suffering and bravery, and the extraordinary story of her birth at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp.”

“As a society, and as individuals, we must do everything we can to remember and commemorate the people who died, and to try to ensure the lessons of the Holocaust are learnt.  It was very heartening to see so many students come along to hear Eva’s presentation, and clear from their reactions that it had enormous impact.”

St Anne’s JCR debated a motion to abolish High Table on Sunday night, ultimately voting it down by a count of twenty-nine to forty-six, with ten abstentions.

The motion, proposed by second-year History and Politics student Joe Collin, read, “The JCR notes that: St Anne’s is renowned for being a mod­ern and informal college, which has always championed equality. The JCR believes that: High Table is an out­dated tradition that is a physical and visual expression of inequality.”

Collin told Cherwell the reasons for his motion, arguing that High Table “cannot be reconciled with our col­lege’s values, a college founded on the basis of equality, in giving women an education.”

He continued, “pre­tentious and outdated traditions like High Table damage the external im­age of Oxford and the college. As Ac­cess and Equal Opportunities rep at St Anne’s, I know that ridiculous tra­ditions like this do have some impact in discouraging some students from applying.”

Collin also attacked the concept of a High Table: “If you believe tutors should sit there because of academic achievement, should graduates sit physically above undergraduates? If you believe they should sit there due to their service to the college, why don’t scouts, or porters sit there?”

Second-year PPEist Ben Rosen­baum, who seconded the motion, explained how it came about. “A few days ago, Joe and I were having an ar­gument about High Table with a few of our friends and we were surprised by how many extreme reactions it got on both sides (although we were in the clear minority). We heard that Wadham had abolished High Table and thought it was worth a go here, although it was pretty speculative at­tempt – we both thought it was very unlikely to pass.”

Collin intends to propose this mo­tion again a year from now; Rosen­baum added that they would be able to pass the motion if St Anne’s had “a liberal intake of freshers.”

During the debate, second-year Sam Rodrigues argued that High Table is a sign of respect in a merito­cratic system; Rosenbaum replied, “if we lowered [tutors] a metre, I would not lose respect.” Will Dufton, a fresher, asked, “Do you see them with anger when you see them up there?” concluding that High Table does not affect daily life enough to justify the cost of change. Another student com­mented, “Many traditions are actu­ally simply very nice.”

St Anne’s is not the first college to try to abolish High Table this year. In Michaelmas, Somerville’s JCR debat­ed and rejected a similar motion.

An Oxford Professor is to start a Tolkien Spring School for members of the public with an interest in the author.

Dr Stuart Lee, who lectures in Old English, has organised a series of introductory lectures by world-leading Tolkien scholars to take place in the English Faculty this March.

Talks will range over a variety of topics including Tolkien’s life, his work as an academic, his mythology, the influences of medieval literature on his fiction, his languages, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and his other lesser known works.

There will also be panel discussions looking at Tolkien’s place in the literary canon.

Tolkien spent most of his life in Oxford, first as an undergraduate at Exeter, and later in a teaching capacity at Pembroke and Merton.

There will be opportunities to see the sights of Oxford that were so important to Tolkien and his colleagues, as well as an introduction to some of the Tolkien collections at the University.

Dr Lee said that the recent film of The Hobbit has been useful for stimulating interest in the talks: “it allowed us to advertise it at the height of the publicity for the new Hobbit film.”

He argues that interest in Tolkien has never been greater: “remember The Hobbit was published in 1937 with only a print-run of about 17,000 all told. It did well enough for a ‘sequel’ (which became LotR) but this did not appear until the 50s. Since then interest in Tolkien and the books have grown.”

According to Dr Lee,“Spikes of popularity are in the 60s with the illegal ACE publication in the US, then the rise of other fantasy writers and fantasy role playing in the 70s (when there was also a film of the first part of LotR), then of course renewed again with the new set of films.He is bigger now than he was in the 90s, 80s, 70s, and so on. It is also helped by the steady stream of new Tolkien books edited by his son Christopher.”

Dr Lee said he thought the new film was “OK”. He added that Tolkien would have “probably enjoyed some aspects of it (the opening battle outside of Moria for example, the dragon) but less so others.

“He would have recognised that there had to be plot changes but I think what would have irked him the most were the unnecessary and clumsy changes to the plot. Jackson does seem to put as many fights in as possible, and make silly changes for no reason, or reduce characters to caricatures. The bit that I think would have annoyed Tolkien the most was Radagast. I see no reason for him being pulled along on a sledge by a load of rabbits apart from the fact that it might make a nice new toy to flog to kids …”

Finally he said, “One point I’d like to stress is that all profits from the school are going to a graduate fund held by the English Faculty so it is for a good cause!”

Oxford undergraduates were positive about the course. One student, studying English, commented: “I think this is a fantastic idea.Tolkien is important for many people who aren’t necessarily interested in literature otherwise. There’s also a lot of depths to the books, so I think people would get a lot out of them and it would make a cool introduction to literary criticism. It’s just annoying we’re not allowed to study Tolkien!”

A group of Oxford students from different subjects across the university are using Twitter in order to further inform potential applicants about life at Oxford.

The scheme, christened ‘OxTweet’, aims to record a week in the life of a number of Oxford students. It is hoped that learning about the university from the students themselves will inform applicants regarding misconceptions about Oxford, and encourage more students from less advantaged backgrounds to apply.

The project was launched on Sunday by Magdalen student Jamie Miles, who last Michaelmas started the ‘Applying to Oxford’ YouTube channel, with the help of a college-sponsored Creative Fund.

He told Cherwell, “when I was applying to Oxford I noticed that there was a hole in the access information on what Oxford was like from a student perspective. Hearing from a primary source what it is like to apply, live and study would have helped put me at ease about any misconceptions I had about the university”.

All eight students, who have so far accumulated over 200 followers between them, interact amongst themselves as well as answering questions by potential applicants. Among the student tweeters are Classics, Medicine, Law and English students, all of whom tweet about their daily activities from the perspective of their own subject.

Jamie highlighted the importance that such projects can have in encouraging applications to Oxford, adding that “offering an informal student perspective on the Oxford experience” is crucial. “Hopefully this initiative will snowball and improvements to Oxford access that I can’t even anticipate will emerge on the journey. That’s what makes things like this so exciting!”

“The accounts have been specifically setup for the ‘Week in the Life’ project, so they will remain in cyberspace for the future reference of all potential applicants. Hopefully, the week of tweets will act as an invaluable resource in demonstrating how human the students at Oxford really are, along with the applicant voice being recorded through the questions people are asking.”

Typical tweets range from complaints about essay crises to jokes, advice and answers to questions from followers. So far, #OxTweet has been a success, with many of the participants posting over one hundred tweets in a single day.

Tom Edkins, one of the eight students tweeting about their experiences, explained “we’re opening up the real ethos of Oxford’s student life to those who want to know what it’s actually like, but we’re also offering this insight to people who may never have considered coming here before.

“Rather than read the same old ‘Brideshead Revisited’ spiel rehashed by the Guardian every few weeks, GCSE and A-Level pupils can now speak one-on-one with real students whose only agenda is to let people know that, really, Oxford is a great place for those who love their subject, regardless of background.”

Florence Avery, the Equal Opportunities Officer at Somerville, shared her thoughts on the idea, “Using Twitter is a great idea because it’s such a widely used social media; people will really be able to relate to it. I think potential applicants often feel that they can’t really relate to current students, especially if their school doesn’t typically send many people to Oxford and they might not know anyone who is currently studying there. If people can just passively browse twitter and get a more accurate impression of what studying at Oxford is like then I think it’s likely to reach a lot more people”.