The University of Oxford announced plans to establish the Oxford Centre for Korean Studies, at the official opening of the Schwarzman Centre over the weekend. 

Approved last month and set to open in October, the centre – which will have an estimated budget of  £3.76 million – forms part of a gradual increase in Korean language and history academic provision at the University over the last two decades. 

In 2006, the University also created an Associate Professorship in Korean History, followed in 2007 by a Professorship in Korean Language and Literature. The new centre is being led by the two current holders of University of Oxford professorships in Korean history and language, Professor James Lewis and Professor Jieun Kiaer, respectively, as well as Dr Young-hae Chi, a Korean language lecturer.

For undergraduates, Korean can be taken as an additional language if they are on a course with Japanese or Chinese as the primary language, whilst for graduates, a Master’s of Korean Studies program is available. Since Michaelmas Term 2024, Korean classes have also been offered by the University’s Language Centre.

Korean media outlets have depicted the centre as a response to the “Korean wave” in global popular culture, referencing the growth in popularity of South Korean cultural exports, including films, K-pop, and K-dramas. The Centre for Korean Studies also reflects a broader trend in increased study of East Asia at Oxford, with the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies opened at St. Anthony’s College in 1981 and the opening of the University’s China Centre in 2008.

Professor Jieun Kiaer, of Hertford College, described the centre’s future English-language scholarship into Korean culture as important for the long-term continuation of Korean studies. 

The opening of the Centre included a free day of events and performances, including performances by the Scottish Ensemble and Chamber Choir Scola Cantorum, alongside the display of artwork created using artificial intelligence and theatre productions. Speaking ahead of the opening, John Fulljames, director of the Schwarzman Centre’s cultural programme, described the Centre as a “new public home for the humanities” and “a place where we can all come together to make sense of what it means to be human in today’s world”.

Maternity care in the NHS has become a site of crisis. A series of high-profile reviews into unsafe care, rising maternal mortality rates, and persistent staff shortages has exposed a system under strain, one that disproportionately harms women from minority ethnic backgrounds and deprived areas. Most recently, the government has commissioned a national investigation into maternity care to be led by Oxford’s own Baroness Amos, Master of University College. Reports accumulate, inquiries are launched, failures are identified, recommendations follow – and yet the pattern repeats. The question is no longer whether there is a problem, but why it has proven so resistant to change. 

For Dr Lorin Lakasing, a consultant obstetrician who has spent more than three decades working in NHS maternity care, the answer is not especially mysterious. “This is not a system that’s working for anyone at the moment”, she says, describing a service that is failing both patients and the staff tasked with caring for them. Speaking to me from her clinic whilst still in her scrubs, it is clear that Lakasing’s life revolves around her profession. What is equally clear, however, is that she finds the job she loves increasingly untenable. 

What is striking, when speaking to Lakasing, is the sheer difference between the current system and the one she entered. Obstetrics was not a long-held ambition: she had initially been drawn to renal medicine, working with young patients on a dialysis unit, but found herself pulled in a different direction during a placement on a labour ward. It was, she recalls, “pandemonium”, with every room full – but also energising. “I just like this buzz. I like the adrenaline. I like all of this.” The appeal wasn’t just in the pace, but also the immediacy of the work – that decisions had to be made quickly but that their consequences were visible. It was possible, as she puts it, to “shift the dial”. The work was hard, but it was also clear in its purpose and grounded in shared responsibility.

That clarity, Lakasing argues, has eroded over time, not through a single reform but what she describes as a “perfect storm” of smaller changes. These shifts have accumulated slowly, reshaping both the structure of care and the experience for patients. “The minute-to-minute care [has become] less rewarding”, she reflects, describing a system that has become “less human, more process driven”. Care delivered by a team from a wide range of specialities, now central to how maternity services are organised, often manifests as a fragmented model in practice, with decisions made in meetings or on screens by clinicians who may never actually meet the patient. At the same time, the demands placed on doctors’ time have also changed significantly. Junior staff, she notes, are increasingly preoccupied with documentation and compliance, to the point that “they’re not actually interacting with the woman and explaining to her what’s going on”. What was once a patient-focused environment has become layered with bureaucracy.

The consequences of this shift have been profound for clinicians. Where Lakasing once remembers camaraderie and a shared sense of purpose, she now describes “a culture of fear and worry and blame”. The pressures of the job haven’t diminished but they have been redirected, demanding a  “constant sort of firefighting… just being able to survive to the next shift.” In this context, rising levels of burnout are understandably inevitable. This is compounded by the changes to the broader experience of  those entering the profession: “I think now you guys are all qualifying with debt, with all sorts of uncertainties about job prospects… I see how the mentality changes.” The result is a workforce navigating not only the demands of clinical care, but also a far more precarious professional landscape.

For patients, these changes have made a significant difference in terms of how they experience maternity care and care across the NHS. Consultations become shorter and interactions more impersonal. It is in this context that Lakasing understands the growing turn towards online sources of information: “If you get some five minutes of very bland midwifery interaction where they’re looking at the screen more than they are at you and you have a list of questions and you don’t feel like they’re answered, then you will look elsewhere.” 

What concerns her isn’t this instinct to seek the information, but the nature of what is found. She describes the rise of “harmful birthing narratives” – belief systems that present particular approaches to pregnancy and childbirth as inherently superior, often tied to moralised ideas of what it means to be a “good” mother. These narratives can often be difficult to challenge, particularly since they resonate with patients who already feel unheard or ignored by the system.

In extreme cases, the consequences can be devastating. Lakasing points to a recent case involving the deaths of both mother and baby, shaped in part by decisions influenced by online advice following a traumatic first birth. But her emphasis isn’t on the advice itself, but what preceded it: a failure of care that left the patient unwilling to return to the system. The problem, in other words, isn’t simply the misinformation available online, but the absence of relationships within healthcare that feel trustworthy enough to counter it. “The biggest victims are of course the patients”, she says, though she is equally clear that staff are also caught within the same failing structures.

A significant part of the issue, in Lakasing’s view, lies in how success is defined and measured within the NHS. Targets and regulatory frameworks have come to dominate the assessment of maternity services, often in ways that distort rather than support good care. “They are the crux of the problem.” The emphasis on measuring the service, she argues, has led to a system in which “we’re so process driven that we’re pretty much treating patient outcomes as an incidental byproduct of a great process we have”. 

The problem is not inherently the metrics, but that they frequently fail to capture what actually matters. The widely cited case of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust clearly illustrates this. The trust was praised for its low caesarean rate yet, just months later, became the focus of an inquiry that exposed significant failures in care, which may have led to the deaths of more than 200 infants and 9 mothers, and left other babies with life-changing injuries. “When we have metrics that don’t make sense, we get really bad behaviours”, she notes.

Attempts to address these problems through public inquiries have consistently fallen short. “They’ve all failed”, she says, arguing that earlier investigations have been too shaped by management perspectives that fail to reflect the realities of delivering care “on the shop floor”. More recent inquiries, focused on amplifying the voices of ‘harmed patients’, risk creating a different kind of distortion by implying that all adverse outcomes are preventable. “That’s clearly not true”, she says, explaining how “there are people who have very good outcomes whose care has been pretty ropey”, just as there have equally been “people where all the right things were done, but unfortunately, things didn’t work out as we had hoped”. The danger she suggests is that these approaches also feed a culture of blame without offering meaningful solutions. “What we need is action… proper, sensible, focused action.”

Digital reform, often framed as a solution to many of these challenges, sits uneasily within this picture. Lakasing acknowledges it as an “inevitable consequence of the modern age” but questions its implementation and impact. NHS systems remain inconsistent and under-resourced, with different trusts using incompatible software and “trying to run those ever more sophisticated software programs on pretty archaic hardware”. More fundamentally, digital tools don’t always translate into better care. She describes the example of patients accessing blood test results online, only to have them flagged on the NHS App as abnormal despite being perfectly typical in pregnancy. At the same time, digital innovation also risks exacerbating existing inequalities. “We do have refugees, asylum seekers… women who are homeless, women who are trafficked… I just worry that anything that might add to that would be a problem.” Access to digital healthcare assumes resources and confidence that just aren’t as evenly distributed as the policies imagine.

None of this, Lakasing is clear, lends itself to quick fixes. “This is my problem with politicians”, she says, “they’re always looking for a quick fix”. But the issues she describes are cumulative, and so too must be the solutions. “If you’re playing the long game, you need long-term strategies”. What she returns to, therefore, is something more fundamental: the need for a “unified set of aims” centred on safe outcomes rather than the processes used to demonstrate them. Without that maternity units become “very good at ticking the boxes that we’re being assessed on… that doesn’t mean that our outcomes are good”.

For those entering the profession, her assessment is both candid and cautiously hopeful. “Truthfully, we are in a particularly bad place at the moment, but it’s got to get better. It can’t not get better.” There is, in that, a sense of inevitability: “People are always going to want to have babies”. The future of maternity care, she suggests, will depend less on top-down reform and more on those moving through the system: the next generation of doctors – the medical students that will one day be our obstetricians and gynaecologists – who may be more willing to question its assumptions and reshape its priorities. “I tell the world to be hopeful and to come and see the wards and get stuck in”, she says, emphasising the enduring appeal of the work itself.

Lakasing, for her part, remains deeply committed to that work. And despite everything, her final reflection is unequivocal: “I have not regretted being an obstetrician, not for a singular minute of any day of my life.” It is a striking statement – a reminder that, even within a system under strain, the value of the work itself remains clear.

Several student societies have condemned reports that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, has been invited to speak at the Oxford Union. Yaxley-Lennon is alleged to have been invited to speak at the Week 5 debate on the motion “This House believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam”.

In a joint statement posted on Instagram by Oxford Students Against Discrimination and Stand Up To Racism UK, they condemned the invitation “in the strongest possible terms”. They also called on Oxford Union President Arwa Elrayess to confirm that the invitation has been rescinded; “issue a public statement apologising for extending the invitation and promising full transparency with speakers’ events”; and “acknowledge the harm” caused to students by the decision. 

It Happens Here (IHH) raised concerns about the rhetoric used by Yaxley-Lennon, which they described as racialising sexual violence. IHH told Cherwell: “When cases of sexual violence are used to advance anti-Muslim sentiment, the focus is shifted from survivors onto a political agenda…. His presence signals to survivors that their experiences are being instrumentalised, instead of taken seriously.”

In a statement published on Instagram, IHH also joined Oxford Feminist Society, Cuntry Living Zine, Intersectional Uprising Oxford, and Oxford University Women of Colour Society in calling for an immediate withdrawal of the invitation of Yaxley-Lennon. They have demanded “a formal apology and accountable action through new published policy”, and called for “the Union to be transparent about all future speakers”.

A spokesperson for the Oxford African and Caribbean Society (ACS) also criticised the reported invitation. They told Cherwell: “We reject the notion that ‘debate’ requires the inclusion of [such] viewpoints…. Granting Robinson an academic stage at a time of increased far-right activity confers a degree of respectability to ideologies that have historically marginalised our communities.”

In addition, a spokesperson for Oxford Students Amnesty International told Cherwell: “Amnesty International believes in supporting all democratic rights, including freedom of speech and expression. However, Yaxley-Lennon’s history of [criticism] towards Muslims, immigrants and other groups has endangered, and continues to endanger, students at the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University…His presence at the Oxford Union infringes upon the [opportunity] of all students to live and study in an atmosphere of safety and respect.”

The reported invitation comes within the context of longstanding accusations against Yaxley-Lennon of Islamophobia and intimidation. He was a co-founder of the English Defence League in 2009, whose supporters have repeatedly targeted Muslim communities and mosques across the UK. He has also been convicted on multiple occasions, including for contempt of court in 2018 after livestreaming defendants accused of sexual exploitation outside a trial in Leeds, in breach of reporting restrictions. He was jailed for 18 months after admitting to the charge.

Yaxley-Lennon has faced further convictions for assault and harassment, and has been widely criticised for his rhetoric, accused of fuelling anti-Muslim sentiment. His public statements have included describing Muslim refugees to the UK as “fake refugees”, a 2011 threat to “every single Muslim watching….the Islamic community would feel the full force of the English Defence League” if another Islamist terror attack were to take place, and a 2018 admission that he “doesn’t care” if he “incites fear” of the UK’s Muslim community. 

He previously warned members of the press: “If you’re a journalist and you think your office or your home is a safe space…it’s not”, and referred to a female BBC journalist as a “slag” after Yaxley-Lennon was questioned by police over an alleged assault of a man at London St Pancras Station in 2025. Yaxley-Lennon was not charged over the incident.

The Oxford Student Greens told Cherwell that while “a diversity of opinion can be conducive to intellectual debate, there is no space for the kind of inflammatory, hateful rhetoric that these figures promote”. They added that “fearmongering through the persecution of minority groups is a coward’s tactic used by people like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon… to push a political agenda”.

In a statement published on Instagram, the Oxford Labour Club also criticised the invitation, saying it was “disgusted” by the decision, writing that while “free speech is important… that does not mean that Tommy Robinson, a far-right extremist convicted of assault and harassment, should be platformed by the Union”. The statement further accused the Union of choosing publicity instead of taking a stand against the far-right, adding that Yaxley-Lennon “has stirred up racism, xenophobia, and hate”.

Turning Point Oxford defended the Union’s decision on free speech grounds. The President of Turning Point Oxford told Cherwell: “The Oxford Union is well within its right to platform whomever it wants… this would be the perfect opportunity for those who vehemently disagree with Tommy Robinson to put his ideas to the test”. They added that Yaxley-Lennon is “a culturally relevant figure in British politics” and that “the debate is of incredible importance”.

When approached, the Union did not confirm whether Stephen Yaxley-Lennon had been invited. A spokesperson told Cherwell that the committee “works tirelessly to curate a termly programme…[giving] members the opportunity to challenge…a broad range of speakers”, adding that “speakers for this term are still being confirmed”. They added that the Union “only host[s] speakers who agree to be challenged”, and that details of high-profile events are often released later “to mitigate any potential security risks…[which] is not a departure from normal practice”.

The response from across the spectrum of student societies represents extraordinary action, and the spokesperson from Amnesty told Cherwell that they were in touch with other student societies to discuss further action. Oxford Stand Up To Racism have organised a protest to take place outside the Oxford Union on Thursday, 28th May, which has been promoted online by multiple other student societies.