Student Life
On being an introvert – Cherwell
As a university characterised by exemplary achievements, Oxford tends to cultivate an environment where you feel you must perform at your best in every aspect of life – and your social life is no exception. This pressure is more apparent than ever to the introvert. College activities like attending BOPs, or even meals in hall, can start to feel like checking off a box, one that proves you are meeting the minimum social criteria expected of an adequate student. Hearing other people in your accommodation getting ready for Indie Fridays while you’re watching Friday Night Dinner alone is enough to make anyone feel like they are somehow failing. And yet, despite this ever-present pressure to socialise, some of us find ourselves deliberately choosing the latter option most evenings.
Moving from home to a new city, meeting new people, and adjusting to new routines can be a jarring transition for any student, but above all the introvert. After hearing one of my (more extroverted) friends thrive during her university’s freshers’ week, I hoped that my experience would be just as positive. But, as someone who prefers spending most of my time alone, spending day after day talking to multiple strangers, the challenge of not instantly forgetting their names proved to be taxing. Although meeting as many people as possible is a perfectly reasonable way to settle in at university, I quickly tired of the repeated “what is your name?” and “what do you study?” cycle. In fact, I found myself oddly frustrated at this sensible series of initial questions. I could not understand how so many people seemed to be having the time of their lives with people they barely knew; this is where the introversion-extroversion distinction became so clearly apparent to me.
Most people acknowledge these terms in an overly simplified way, with the prevalent stereotypes being that extroverts are the ‘life of the party’ while introverts remain the ‘wallflowers’ (that is, if they attend the party at all). The reality is more complex than this: introverts don’t necessarily avoid social interaction but rather prefer the company of a smaller group in an environment that is not so overstimulating, resulting in a general reluctance to go into any potentially overwhelming situations. It stands to say that a bustling place like Oxford tends to favour the extrovert. I distinctly remember having a conversation where I was complaining to a friend about the concept of networking, to which she responded networking is “just talking to people”, not realising that is, in fact, the part I find offputting.
It’s not the talking that introverts hate, though. Rather, it’s the constantly being surrounded by people, the expectation that you join various societies and go on regular nights-out, while also getting to know everyone in your college. Suddenly, you go from being in the comfort of family members and friends to living in a building with close to 100 other students, all of whom you have never met. With everyone forming friendships so quickly, it can be hard not to feel that you are falling behind, and no one wants to be seen as boring. Despite the reputation of Oxford being a rigorously academic place, saying to people that I was looking forward to visiting the libraries more than meeting new people brought judgemental looks from some of my peers. This, in addition to the romanticisation of university as the ‘best years of your life’, when it is not an environment that is catered towards you, can leave an introvert feeling out of place.
Although university is widely expected to be the pinnacle of your social life, it is often described as a lonely time for a lot of students. An article recently published by The Guardian reported that two thirds of university students experience loneliness at university, with many attributing this to the set-up of their accommodation not encouraging social interactions. Perhaps this is unsurprising. With greater independence also comes the greater responsibility to seek out friendships in a more intentional manner, rather than relying on school settings to facilitate this. Yet Oxford’s collegiate structure and regular events seem to compensate for this transition – many people find their friendships from being part of the same college, a characteristic that most other universities lack. And despite being an introvert and feeling largely content alone, all humans require some social interaction. Oxford does feel like it promotes some performative sociability. Being part of a college community means you are constantly confronted with people who seem to have more friends, are part of more societies and go to more events than you, furthering the feeling that you should be doing more – a feeling that I expect is not unfamiliar for most Oxford students. However, the college communal set-up does have its benefits, as it does encourage connection and serves as a helpful reminder to introverts that there is value to having friends to share the highs and lows with.
Even with that in mind, it can feel natural to be envious of extroverts in such a setting. There feels like an invisible boundary between the people who thrive in Oxford’s social climate and those who find it overwhelming. Outside of university, the separation is rarely this distinct. Instead, we have to adapt to the situation we are presented with, which is why I, one of the most introverted people I know, am often assumed to be an extrovert by my peers. Yet Oxford is not exactly optimal for extroverts either: long hours studying alone in a library, with nothing but the sound of occasional coughing, are likely to be much more difficult for those who prefer to be surrounded by the chatter of their peers. And during life after Oxford, there will be situations in which being an introvert is beneficial. It is likely that the transition to living alone and being more independent after university will be much easier for the introvert than the extrovert. In my experience, there is some comfort in knowing that no matter where you go – to another university or another country (or both as I am intending to do) – you will be able to shape your experience as you please, without relying on the presence of others as an extrovert might do.
So, to any introverts, do not fret about Oxford being the best years of your life. Whilst it is important to embrace the ‘university experience’, you will have many years ahead of you to soak in your own company without the constant pressure to present a thriving social life. My advice would be this: do try to go on the occasional pub trip or night out (it’ll do you good, I promise), but also remember that an evening alone reading, crocheting, or simply rotting in bed, can be an evening well spent.
Student Life
Oxford Union holds “This House Believes the West is Right to be Suspicious of Islam” Debate
Background
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, otherwise known as Tommy Robinson, is due to speak at the Oxford Union at 8.30 pm this evening at a debate on the motion “This House Believes the West is Right to be Suspicious of Islam”. The event has drawn condemnation from University societies, local politicians, and local faith leaders.
The debate comes days after Yaxley-Lennon was detained at Heathrow Airport on Saturday evening under the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, following his return to the UK from Russia. His phones were seized, but no further action has been announced by the Metropolitan Police.
Thames Valley Police (TVP) has confirmed a significant policing operation across Oxford city centre from 3.30 pm today. St Michael’s Street, where the Oxford Union is located, has been closed to vehicles and pedestrians since 4 pm, and will remain shut until 1 pm. Despite earlier statements, it has been confirmed that no other roads will be closed.
Businesses in the city centre have also been closing early: The White Rabbit pub announced in advance it would shut from 3.30 pm, citing safety concerns and solidarity with other independent businesses. The Handlebar Kitchen on St Michael’s Street closed at 3.00 pm – their pavement licence was revoked for the day. Activate Learning, which runs further education colleges in the area, has also written to parents and carers advising students to avoid large gatherings and allow extra time for journeys through the city centre.
In a statement, Oxford City Council Leader Susan Brown has raised the question of the cost of the large-scale security operation. She wrote that the Oxford Union “must meet the full costs of staging their event, rather than leaving Oxford’s taxpayers to pick up the bill”. The Oxford Green Party has also issued a statement, demanding that the Oxford Union “cover the entire cost of the security operation it is requiring” and that “compensation be paid by the society to local businesses forced to board up their windows and close”. Cherwell has previously reported that the Oxford Union is just years away from insolvency.
The Oxford University Islamic Society issued a formal statement warning that the invitation posed a direct threat to Muslim students’ safety, arguing that “extending a platform to individuals whose reputations are built upon targeting minority communities is not without consequence”. A group of Oxfordshire Liberal Democrat politicians, including MP for Oxford West and Abingdon Layla Moran, have also called on the Union to reflect on whether proceeding “was consistent with “the values of respect, inclusion, and community cohesion that Oxfordshire strives to uphold”.
Individual colleges at the University of Oxford have announced that they will remain closed to the public this afternoon, and have reached out to remind their students to take the requisite precautions. Wadham College, for example, urged students to “please act responsibly, stay safe and vigilant and take the disruption into account when planning your afternoon and evening”.
The debate is due to feature Laurence Fox and Jonathon Sacerdoti (alongside Yaxley-Lennon) on the proposition, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, Abdullah Al-Andalusi, and Michael Doward on the opposition.
Defending her decision to invite Yaxley-Lennon in an article in The Telegraph, Elrayess wrote: “For more than 200 years, the Oxford Union has existed to host debates – not to platform views uncritically, but to subject them to the most rigorous scrutiny. You do not invite a speaker to endorse them: you invite them so that their ideas can be examined, and their claims tested.”
A spokesperson for the Oxford Union previously told Cherwell that the Union gives “members the opportunity to challenge…a broad range of speakers” and “only host[s] speakers who agree to be challenged”.
The University of Oxford has shared a reminder that “welfare services are available to support all students”.
I was very close to rejecting Oxford for Exeter. While this is not why I eventually accepted my offer, I couldn’t stop thinking about the prestige the name ‘Oxford’ connotes. This ‘prestige’, however, was historically incubated through empire, slavery, class hierarchy, and elite political power. For these reasons, especially, I feel that studying here is nothing to boast about at all.
We often ignore the fact that Oxford did not merely exist during the empire, but helped to produce the people and ideas that sustained it. It was this institution, alongside Cambridge, that was tasked with educating generations of colonial administrators who governed the British Empire. Among them are: Cecil Rhodes, Lord Curzon, Alfred Milner, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, and Victor Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin. Additionally, Britain would offer members of foreign elites a place to study at Oxbridge, a practice that some scholars view as a soft power tactic to strengthen British cultural and diplomatic influence abroad. Perhaps unrelated, today, over one quarter of the world’s countries still have a leader who was educated in the UK.
Oxford further helped intellectually legitimise the empire and colonial hierarchy. Subjects like classics, theology, and my own subject, ‘Oriental studies’ (now Middle East Studies), were historically intertwined with imperial governance. These disciplines provided the ideological justifications and administrative frameworks necessary to establish and manage the British Empire. Even today, I have classmates from ethnic minority backgrounds who have told me about Oxford coursemates and even a tutor who has proudly introduced themselves – to them specifically – as the grand or great-grandchild of the governor of areas in Bangladesh, India, and so on.
Oxford has also benefited from wealth derived from colonial exploitation. The Codrington Library at All Souls College was funded by Christopher Codrington. His fortune was accumulated from Caribbean sugar plantations where enslaved Africans were put to work. When Oxford has wished not to associate with its donors, they have renamed libraries. The Ferdowsi Library in Wadham College was initially the Ashraf Pahlavi Library, as it was funded by the last Shah of Iran’s sister in 1977. Just two years later, when the Shah was overthrown, the College didn’t hesitate to rename the library. The Codrington Library, however, still bears a slave-owner’s name.
Looking back at the last three years, Oxford students organised encampments calling on Oxford to divest from companies linked to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, and criticised the University for insufficient transparency regarding its investments. Oxford was quick to ban and dismantle the encampments. In January 2025, as many students may remember, abseiling police officers were seen scaling the Radcliffe Camera to arrest protesters from Oxford Action 4 Palestine. Would the University’s response have been so harsh if students were protesting a different humanitarian catastrophe?
Another cause of personal discomfort for me is every single time I have to wear my sub-fusc. The same sub-fusc that was worn by Leo Amery and Lord Alfred Milner, who, along with Arthur Balfour, drafted and authorised the Balfour Declaration.
These ongoing and past injustices are easily traced back to Oxford’s alumni and donors. Apart from these alumni and Oxford’s current polemical financial investments, having played a role in fuelling injustice in current ongoing international conflicts, its links to past atrocities can still be seen in its landscape. The relationship between Oriel College and British imperialist and white supremacist Cecil Rhodes (the founder of the colonies of North and South Rhodesia) is perhaps the most high-profile example. Rhodes left a financial bequest to the college, which funded the construction of the building that still bears his name, and his statue remains prominent in Oriel. Again, in the past, Oxford has renamed buildings and can easily do so again. For instance, the Faculty of Asian and Middle East Studies was previously the Oriental Institute – while the name has officially changed, the ‘Oriental Institute’ sign remains.
In 2015, the University of Cape Town, after immense pressure from its student body, removed the statue of Cecil Rhodes from their campus. Our students continue to campaign for the same, especially after the “Black Lives Matter” movement, but the Rhodes statue remains. The global “Rhodes Must Fall” movement has argued that Oxford glorifies the Empire while marginalising those harmed by it. At times, our student body has done the same, like in 2015, when the Oxford Union named one of their cocktail drinks: “Colonial Comeback”.
It is public knowledge that up until that year, academics from Worcester College were drinking from a 225-year-old skull, thought to have belonged to an enslaved woman, and gifted to them by an alumnus. Why did that alumnus feel that human remains, which were passed down in his own family, were the best gift to present to his college? Why did he assume it would not raise any questions? Why did multiple Oxford academics even think to use it for such a purpose, and comfortably do so for years? Even after it was damaged, they used this human skull to store chocolate. All this alone reveals so much.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was some Oxford academics (Julian Huxley, John R. Baker, and E. B. Ford) who were among the elite who perpetuated eugenic theories, and played a role in legitimising racial hierarchy under the guise of ‘scientific research’. In recent times, other Oxford academics, like Nigel Biggar, Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology, have defended certain aspects of colonialism, as can be seen in his article for The Times in 2017. As for Oxford donors whose names are ingrained in stone in the buildings we study in, their names are also found in the Epstein files. If not for word-count sake, this list would go on, all raising questions about the kind of institution I feel I really belong to.
And yet, instead, for reasons I cannot fathom, Oxford is somehow considered by so many to be a source of moral and intellectual authority. In a clothed expression of classism, a former sixth-form teacher of mine even went as far as to describe Oxford students as “the peak of civilisation” to explain why he was shocked that Oxford has one of the highest statistics among UK universities for cases of sexual assault on university grounds.
I will never belittle all that Oxford has given me, including my Oxford education, and I suffered greatly for my place here. However, pride in this institution – in where I study and who has studied here before me – will always be impossible for me.
We cannot pick and choose. We cannot believe that we are inheriting a millennium of intellectual achievement, and also dismiss the moral weight that comes with it. We cannot falsify, erase, or deny history, and a large part of Oxford’s history is shamefully one of empire, elite political power, and built with slavery-linked wealth. Students have every right to question what that legacy means today. If anything, doing so reflects the very critical thinking and values that Oxford claims it champions.
The post Oxford’s prestigious reputation deserves scrutiny appeared first on Cherwell.
The Home Office has proposed a second phase of development to the Campsfield Immigration Removal Centre (IRC), increasing its capacity from 160 to 400 beds. This expansion to the facility – whose reopening in 2025 has been followed by regular protests – would progress through the Crown Development approval process, bypassing the Cherwell District Council.
Located north of Kidlington, Campsfield holds detainees whose custodial sentence has ended and who are awaiting deportation, and those who do not have a legal right to remain in the UK. The facility was previously closed in 2018 following significant backlash for its treatment of prisoners and staff, with 41% of Campsfield detainees in 2018 reporting that they felt unsafe.
The proposed expansion would see an additional 240 beds, 176 staff members, and 10,840m2 of floorspace as part of a broader strategy to increase national detention capacity to 3,500 by 2030. The Home Office has justified both the expansion and the choice to pursue the Crown Development route by referencing its policy goals. In a Statement of National Importance included in its planning application, the Home Office argued that “insufficient detention capacity is a critical bottleneck in the immigration system” and that “both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have confirmed that tackling illegal migration remains a top government priority”.
According to the Home Office, Campsfield plays an important role in government immigration policy, with Phase 2 of construction labelled a “nationally significant development”. They have also acknowledged the controversial nature of the proposal, saying, “Phase 2 is significantly larger [than Phase 1, which reopened the facility] and is expected to attract greater public interest, making the local planning route less appropriate”.
Advocacy groups have already criticised the planned development, with Oxfordshire charity Asylum Welcome Joint-CEO Hari Reed writing in a press release: “We are concerned by proposals to increase Campsfield’s capacity from 160 to 400 and would encourage people to engage with the consultation process.”
In a leaflet shared with Cherwell, the Oxfordshire-based Coalition to Close Campsfield (CCC) claims that the reopening occurred “despite the opposition of the parish, district and county councils” and that the Crown Development route for expansion “is expressly designed to override the wishes of local people and the local planning authority”. The CCC has also criticised the expansion for its proximity to the Oxford Technology Park and disputed the Home Office’s assertion that the expansion is “value for money”, calling for a public inquiry “in view of the issue’s importance and contentiousness”.
A recent Cherwell investigation found that at least 9 Oxford colleges indirectly invest in Mitie Group Plc, whose subsidiary runs Campsfield. The University restricts investments against certain types of arms production companies, tobacco companies, fossil fuel exploration and extraction companies, and funds which invest in these types of companies, but does not limit investment in companies involved in the border industry.
Mitie told Cherwell, “Our colleagues are committed to upholding the highest standards of dignity, safety, and respect for those in our care.”
Public consultation on the proposal is open until 24th July, 2026.
-
Crime & Safety4 weeks agoWhat happens to Halifax customers if Lloyds makes changes?
-
UK News4 weeks agoEx-minister Shapps quits aerospace firm over rule concerns
-
Crime & Safety4 weeks agoRyan Bridge speaks of London arrest after Oxford incident
-
Oxford News3 weeks agoOxfordshire families invited to free day of fun in Bicester
-
Oxford Events4 weeks agoSalon Privé 2026 unveils first concours entries led by one-off 1952 Ferrari once owned by Juan Perón
-
Business & Technology3 weeks agoNew ‘high-quality’ mushroom business launched in Oxford
-
UK News4 weeks agoRussian threats against Baltics ‘unacceptable’ and danger to ‘our entire union’, EU’s von der Leyen says – Europe live | Europe
-
Oxford united FC4 weeks agoOxford United announce League One season ticket renewal prices