The
OXFORD STUDENT
Friday 24th November 2017
oxfordstudent.com
Vol. 81, No. 8
Queen’s bans JCR committee from Oxford drops exclusive dining societies in graduate employability rankings Nathaniel Rachman Staff Writer
Simononly
Anisha Faruk
Deputy News Editor
The Queen’s College’s JCR has voted to ban all exec members from also being members of “exclusive and/or secretive dining societies” in Oxford. Participation in these societies, which hold regular social events, is by invitation only. They are also granted access to the SCR wine cellar. In a meeting that lasted around 2 hours and 45 minutes, the motion passed with 94 votes for, 19 votes against and 5 abstentions. The vote was conducted by secret ballot due to
Grad sues Oxford for “inadequate” teaching Charlie Willis News Editor
Faiz Siddiqui, an Oxford graduate who obtained a 2:1 in History in
Screen
We interview Ken Loach, director of I, Daniel Blake p.20
the controversial nature of the motion. Alice Shepherd and Ciara Moran, the proposer and seconder of the motion respectively, said to The Oxford Student: “The presence of exclusive societies like these reinforces the idea that Oxford is not an inclusive space. “We think it’s important we pass this motion to show that this JCR at the very least stands for inclusion. This motion is targeted specifically at the exec because we believe we as exec members need to set the standard and embody the values of the rest of the JCR.” Queen’s currently has 3 exclusive
dining societies: Reginae, Eaglets and Halcyon. The latter is currently inactive. All three were named specifically in the motion but an amendment passed means that JCR exec members cannot be part of any exclusive dining society at Oxford University. A fourth dining society, the Addison Society, exists but any member of Queen’s College can ballot for a place on dinners. It is the official position of Queen’s JCR to discourage JCR members from joining these three exclusive societies if they are invited as they “do not align with the ethos of the JCR.”
It is a constitutional requirement that the JCR President emails every JCR member no later than the third week of Trinity term each year discouraging JCR members from accepting invitations to these exclusive societies. Arguments against the motion centred around the rights of JCR members to freedom of association. The Queen’s College JCR constitution states: “All members of the JCR…have rights to freedom of association, correspondence, movement, expression, [and] speech.”
2000, has sued Oxford University for £1m, alleging that the university gave him “inadequate” teaching and failed to properly handle medical information which could have altered his attained classification. Siddiqui said that multiple members of staff being on sabbatical caused his failure to achieve a First, which he says has cost him a lucrative career
as a commercial lawyer, and that his “inexplicable failure” has worsened his clinical depression and insomnia. Siddiqui’s counsel Roger Mallalieu said: “Whilst a 2:1 degree from Oxford might rightly seem like a tremendous achievement to most, it fell significantly short of Mr Siddiqui’s expectations and was, to him, a huge disappointment.”
He also said that Siddiqui’s employment history after graduating was “frankly poor” and he was now unemployed. Mallalieu added: “Mr Siddiqui has been badly let down by Oxford. He went there with high - perhaps extraordinarily high - expectations.”
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Retelling Tales wows as TED Talks take centre stage p.18
Stage
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Music
Oxford has fallen eight places in the Times Higher Education’s (THE) Global University Employability Rankings. Having held seventh spot in 2016, the university has now sunk to fifteenth, below fifth position Cambridge. The highest echelons of the rankings continue to be dominated by American institutions: CalTech, Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Boston University, Stanford and Yale all feature in the top ten. The most employable non-Anglophone university is cited as the Technical University of Munich followed by the University of Tokyo. Oxford’s drop comes despite Times Higher Education’s placement of the University as first in the world in its overall World University Rankings for the second year in a row. The THE rankings are produced by Emerging, a French HR consultancy that asked 6,000 top recruiters to rank institutions based on how attractive their graduates were to employers. Laurent Dupasquier, associate director of the company, has remarked that this lower position for Oxford may reflect the rise of Asian universities along with weaker ties to industry. He was however, also quick to underline the uncertainty over Brexit as a factor, noting that “It is obvious that Brexit has huge implications for the higher education system in the UK.” The 2018 QS Graduate Employability Rankings published in September have Oxford at eighth, above Columbia, Yale and Princeton, while also awarding it a perfect employer reputation score of 100. Nevertheless, Oxford is once again beaten to the top UK spot by Cambridge, which is currently sitting at sixth.
Billy Brag’s performance at the O2 p.22-3