Hard Pressed
There was once a time when an Oxford degree meant a little more than they do today. With the higher education system reaching near saturation point, there has been a natural erosion in the value of study at the oldest university in the Western world. The general public are partly culpable. Their perception of Oxford is misguided at best, and dangerously illinformed at worst. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are continually held-up as bastions of academic excellence.
The result? Oxford students believing themselves to be experts on subjects of which they know little about. This is absurd; it’s true to say that Oxford is full of experts, but all of them sat their finals many decades ago, and none are currently working toward prelims, mods or second public examinations. What compounds the problem is that some of these self-styled ‘experts’ emabark on ill-advised attempts to share their thoughts with a wider audience.
Student publications and writers should write about student issues, or national issues that affect students directly, not things that they have relatively little grasp of. The opportunity to share views with 16,000 captive readers is one that should be cherised, not abused. Students should write on issues over which they have some vested interest.
After all, who really wants to read an article written by someone who most probably only has a vague grasp of the issues at hand? Writing about remote national and international issues, with little relevance to a publication’s target demographic is a joke.
Since when has genocide occurred at Oxford? How many students are interested in botany, and how many of those are expert enough to write about the subject? What do elitist toffs know about ‘yob culture’, except what they read in The Daily Mail? And when is any Oxford undergraduate qualified to decide if poverty will ever become history? Bless them for trying. Yet most of the rubbish that streams from such student features is laughable, not laudable.
There are myriad outlets for national and international news with contributers who know what they’re talking about. That students aspire to be like them is not in itself a bad thing, but the rest of us should be spared their ridiculous musings. It’s about time student publications wrote about what students are actually interested in, and not what student writers think will look good in their portfolio.
9th Jun 2005