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Deputy Editors: Ayomilekan Adegunwa, Anmol Kejriwal Meet: Section Editors: Charlie Aslet, Lay Mohan, Samuel King oxstu.profile@gmail.com

the team behind the paper

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Jason Chau and Dominic Enright, Editors-in-Chief of The Oxford Student this term, are manning the paper’s Freshers’ Fair stall when I meet them.

Jason’s journalistic experience primarily lies in journals and magazines, especially those that relate to law and politics. Interested in a career in journalism, Jason joined The Oxford Student and has self-evidently climbed the greasy pole. As an editor, he prizes transparency and accountability. When I inquire into the role of newspapers in society, he professes his belief that they ensure citizens have accurate information and function as a crucial checks and balances instrument in our political system.

Dominic points out that he and Jason form a successful partnership because their goals for the paper lean in slightly different directions. He describes himself as a ‘basics man’. While focus on new possibilities or plans can drive a sense of progress for the publication, Dominic is keen to perfect crucial journalistic skills. In his words, ‘make The Oxford Student more like a paper’. In particular, Dominic wants to work towards a standardised writing style, especially for sections like News. As he puts it, ‘people don’t read the paper for a journalist’s opinion’ and few ‘care about their opinion per se’; ‘reporting is the most important function’. Students turn to publications to ‘hear an objective voice tell us the facts’ of a situation.

Dominic prizes objectivity and aims to clarify uncertain stories which mainly travel through gossip and rumours. The Oxford Student’s role, for him, is to take topics restricted to the periphery and position them centre stage. Quick to admit its ostensible lack of glamour, one story which he cites was about sewage leaks from a water plant north of Oxford and into the Thames which, by extension, affects the river in Port Meadow. Dominic points out that although the subject is ‘literally sewage journalism’ the importance of such a news item should not be underestimated for students, many of whom swim there regularly during the summer.

I turn the conversation towards the big changes the pair hope to make over the course of the term. The investigations team is a priority for both of them. After a period of inaction, Jason and Dominic have restarted the group which, Jason says, has only reminded him how fun the work is. Investigative reporting is an increasingly important tool with which newspapers can convince readers of their value. Social media monopolises breaking stories and analysis found in the pages of a paper risks polarising and turning people away more than it functions to increase readership. The most valuable weapon in their arsenal is the slow, thorough and dedicated research into stories about which the facts are not immediately apparent. Investigative reporting is a product which other media platforms struggle to provide.

The editors tell me that the paper’s news section works well for short pieces which aim to inform the readership, but investigations presents the possibility of long-form articles which reveal information that would not otherwise be in the public domain. Alongside increasing the number of people on the team, the editors want to improve the team’s resources to ensure due diligence. Above all, protecting the identity of people providing the paper with tip-offs is their main concern. The editors decided that the identity of the journalists on the team would not be revealed, unlike all other sections, for whom the editors are displayed on the website. I am only able to squeeze out the information that the investigations team is currently working on five to six investigative stories and collaborating with one national newspaper.

When we discuss the business model for The Oxford Student, it becomes clear they hope to make some tweaks. The paper’s financial structure is currently built around its relationship with the Student Union. In a break from previous terms, they have established a team solely dedicated to outreach and access. Part of their responsibility is to explore the possibility of circulating the paper beyond the colleges. Specifically, they are in talks with several companies about stocking the paper in their establishments. Although the editors are not able to disclose specific establishments, they cite Pret a Manger and Costa as examples. In addition, discussions are underway with major banks and law firms about the inclusion of advertisements or sponsorship. Another prong of the outreach strategy, they tell me, is to approach sixth forms across the country both as a way to increase awareness of the paper and drive recruitment among incoming students each year.

I ask the editors to pitch the newspaper to a budding writer. Aside from the huge readership, print as well as online capacity and the passion of its journalists, Jason tells me it’s a particularly exciting time to join the paper. Alongside investigations and outreach, the senior team are working on creating a board of trustees. They are aiming to tap into the stream of illustrious alumni and persuade them to join the board. The editors hope this will provide strategic advice, recommendations and legal support when needed. Dominic recognises the initiative as a brilliant idea because a more permanent group, responsible for helping the paper, would improve continuity and make the rapid termly editorial takeover a little smoother. The BNOC duo have big plans for The Oxford Student, time will judge their success.

The Oxford Student | Friday 14 October 2022 Profile

Heather Allansdottir, graduate of the week talks about her experiences with Oxford Anti-Semitism

TW: anti-Semitism, assault

Last year, a colleague assaulted me after spending the evening making derogatory comments about the fact I went to Tel Aviv University. The police don’t seem to think the anti-Semitic context is relevant.

I’ve been associated with Oxford University three times, for my undergraduate degree, my doctoral degree, and last year as an employee. Each time involved an assault by a man. The first cut was the deepest; he was a famous professor, I was a nineteen year old nobody who read everything he’d ever written. I thought for years that if I ever told anyone he’d make the necessary phone-calls to ruin my career, in the power he had over me he may as well have been God. I left England as soon as I could, but I think on some subconscious level I did my doctorate in his area of study and country in order to prove myself on his territory – narcissists are so good at tricking you into thinking you have to prove yourself to them. The second assault was more informal – a colleague, a peer – just before the #MeToo movement but recently enough that our careers became in my mind like twin planets, one always keeping an eye on the other, affecting each others’ orbit. ‘Who will get tenure first?’ became my way of processing what he did to me.

And then last year. I’d gone for drinks with a colleague to ease myself back into Oxford life last summer, having spent the first year of the pandemic in Iceland, the gentle, neutral country providing a little sanctuary for me to mentally decompress. The Oxford I returned to was in all ways more intense and more broken. The complex debates around the Rhodes Must Fall campaign had ripped apart friendships and faculties, adjusting to online teaching had raised huge questions about what we want academia to look like, and a new generation of students was teaching me new ways to think.

I’d grown up, in the meantime, partly by moving away – Israel, Australia, Iceland – and so could look at the parlour games of Oxford social life from the perspective of knowing this is not the only way that things could or should be done. But coming back to Oxford last year, no-one wanted to talk to me about my time in Australia, or my time in Iceland, the articles I’d written or the personal progress I’d made. Returning to the site of my past education and past pain, there was one topic about my life that every old friend and every new acquaintance gravitated towards inevitably – why had I gone to Tel Aviv for a year after my doctorate?

In the time I’d been away from the UK, the Corbyn/ anti-Semitism debates had pungently popped up in every corner of public life, kudzu of political discourse, the toxic poison of anti-Semitism seeping in to everything. I, generally, didn’t want to engage. Upon returning, I wanted to talk about polar law, the Australian constitution, and my new love for space law and exploration. But in the year since I’ve been back in Oxford I could barely go a week without someone asking me why I went to Tel Aviv University, usually followed by an un-asked-for diatribe about their position on the BDS movement. No-one was interested in my experience of Tel Aviv as a lived reality – the recipes, the music, the natural beauty, all the other complexities of interpersonal realities and inevitable struggles of daily life – nor in my experience as an academic of law, as they would have if I’d gone to the Sorbonne or Berkeley or McGill. It became an exhausting hurdle at the start of any new acquaintance or meeting an old friend – “so, what’s your position on BDS?

It was four months into this unpleasant re-entering to Oxford social life that I met with an old acquaintance with whom I’d studied alongside during my doctoral degree five years earlier. He was also newly back in the city, suggesting we should catch up to talk about our work. He worked in a similar field, so when he suggested meeting for drinks I told him I’d be happy to catch up. After one drink he started ranting about Israel. After two he started ranting about, well, which ethnicity constitutes the main population of Israel? This should have been my cue to leave, but I was Bambi-inthe-headlights bewildered at the experience, and so sat it out until, another drink later, we walked out of the pub.

Oxford is a strange ghost-city for me, composed of many years of sedentary layers of memories, and it is as disappointingly apt as it is awful that when this man groped me, I was standing metres away from the building where, when I was nineteen years old, the famous professor had given me my most brutal and startling introduction to the worst of what humans can do. This time, older and more hardened by the world outside the little academic bubble, I navigated the situation with more firmness and got him to stop. He left for his home country the next day, and I decided not to file a police report because I wanted to move on and pretend it hadn’t happened. 2021, remember, was meant to be the summer we’d be rewarded for having made it through 2020 – I decided to focus on my future and reassured myself that, especially as he’d left the city, our paths would likely not cross and even if they did, I was hardly that helpless nineteen year old any more.

It was only when I heard he was back in the country at the end of the summer and began having panic attacks at what he’d done to me that I realised how badly he’d traumatised me. I kept remembering the comments he’d made all evening, as if in preparation for his assault; the dehumanising language he was using about Israelis and Jewish people in general, his sneering face, his thinly-veiled contempt and desire to dominate. I filed a police report knowing I had no physical evidence of the assault, but hoping his name could be kept on file in case other victims come forward.

The police listened to my concerns with one exception –when I stated clearly that I believed the assault was racially motivated, they seemed to wilfully ignore me. Later, when I followed up to ask if the attack was being treated as a racially motivated assault, they said that the original police officer who’d interviewed me hadn’t noted or categorised it as such. For some reason, this hurt me more than the original unpleasant experience. To be so ignored and not taken seriously, it felt like confirmation of the background music of noise that I’d heard ever since I’d returned to Oxford – well, you did go to Tel Aviv University, what did you expect?

Something I’ve encountered frequently over my last year in this city is the idea that it isn’t anti-Semitic when people say these types of things because they’re criticising the institution, not the ethnicity of the people who attend it. The idea is that ‘we’re not anti-Semitic, just anti-Israel’. But a problem arises when people who claim to just criticise the institution spiral into acts of anti-Semitic violence and assault. My experience with the man who assaulted me was one such case: after one drink it was Israel, after two drinks it was Jews, after three drinks it was violence.