Student Life
24/7: College porters and the Oxford night shift
You return to your college at night, after anything between a day of work and an evening of cavorting. The view admits the welcoming glow of the porter’s lodge and the reassuring presence of a porter behind the reception desk. Past the gates, you enter the secluded safety of the inner-college dark, smelling now of grass and early summer cold. The perfect picture of an Oxford homecoming.
Late one evening, I paid a visit to John, Somerville College’s night porter of 19 years. As he let me through the gate, he was curious about the article. “We don’t get much attention, us night porters”, he explained. The warmth of the lodge fanned my face. His colleague was out patrolling the premises. Between the two of them, they are responsible for everyone on site from eleven at night to seven in the morning. The students, engrossed by their term-time miseries, appreciate their presence only occasionally: when they stumble into the lodge bleary, intoxicated, tearful, or lacking keys. For many, the night lodge exists as a background certainty, noticed chiefly in moments of crisis, vulnerability, or inconvenience.
Most Oxford colleges and accommodation sites have porters on duty around the clock. Since March 2025, every college with a porter’s lodge manned overnight is in the University’s Safe Lodge scheme, providing support and ensuring safe return for any student seeking help at night, regardless of their original college. So for a majority of college residents, 24/7 lodge availability is a matter of course. Colleges like Somerville, Hertford, and Oriel employ permanent night porters, while at others, porters work variable hours on a rotating day-or-night shift system. St John’s College told Cherwell that the College recently updated shift arrangements to a three-on/three-off rota pattern, following feedback from the lodge team. This is to ensure porters have structured rest periods and sufficient time to adjust and recover from nocturnal work.
Overnight staffing is neither universal nor standardised across colleges. Working hours vary, and pay is not centrally regulated by the University, in a city currently ranked amongst the most expensive in the UK to live in. Some lodges see eight to nine-hour night shifts, which John at Somerville describes as relatively comfortable compared to his previous employment, as compared to the weekly twelve-hour shift rotations at colleges like St John’s and Worcester. A number of colleges offer porters a Grade 3 to 4 salary, some with an additional monthly night workers’ allowance. Regent’s Park College, which employs casual evening porters on select days of the week, lists in 2025 hourly portering rates of £12.60 (lower than the 2025-26 Oxford Living Wage, at £13.16) with holiday pay and meal allowance. The college’s night porters are available from Wednesday to Saturday, with junior Deans on call on the remaining nights of the week. When asked about the particulars of the night security system, the College declined to comment. These disparities reflect a broader feature of Oxford’s collegiate structure: welfare and security systems often depend on the budgets and priorities of individual colleges.
What happens in a night? A shift at the lodge involves more than dealing with late-night mischief and drunken mishaps, and tending to students who have accidentally locked themselves out of their own rooms. The role combines security work, customer service, emergency response, and informal welfare provision. Night porters are first responders to any emergencies that arise, from fire and security alarms, to medical emergencies, calls for assistance, and emotional distress. First-aid training is usually mandatory or provided by the college. Front-of-house business proceeds as during the day, for any student or guest arrivals. Like John and his colleague at Somerville, night porters working in pairs take turns carrying out random security patrols, though for his first 13 years, John was the College’s only night porter. Some night porters are also asked to clear litter while doing site checks. Inside the lodge, they are vigilant of anything out of the ordinary as they monitor the CCTV screens.
Students often most clearly notice the integral role of night porters when they are no longer there. After University College removed its overnight lodge staffing on the grounds of financial limitations in the 2021-22 academic year, JCR condemnation and further discussions with the college’s Governing Body brought it back in 2024. The common perception remains that the overnight lodge is the staple feature when it comes to feeling safe at Oxford.
John drew attention to the fact that colleges’ increasing emphasis on mental health in recent years is reflected in night porter duties as well. This means that porters are instructed to stay attentive to signs of distress among students and follow set procedures if anything raises concern. “If a student is having a mental health issue, there’s 100% support there. If we spot a student not looking too happy or a bit tearful, maybe didn’t want to speak to us, we could refer it on to the welfare team”.
Especially during exam time, many students pass through the lodge visibly struggling with stress. Porters ensure the lodge is a grounding, approachable space for the student body, and that, when needed, the appropriate resources are provided, and wellness information is relayed confidentially. Night porters are among a number of out-of-hours workers at Oxford who provide welfare support to people at their most vulnerable. In practice, they frequently act as students’ first point of human contact during moments of panic, loneliness, intoxication, or distress. Colleges without permanent overnight staffing at the lodge often choose to raise awareness of the local Samaritans and Safe Haven service, and the Oxford Nightline, run by student volunteers.
Recounting notable incidents in the past, John found that they had been rare enough during his 19 years at Somerville to list with ease. The college encountered a burglar only once, who broke in by scaling one of the walls, and managed to go as far as the principal’s lodgings before the night porters caught him. In another episode, an abusive boyfriend had to be forcefully removed from college grounds. He had been acting aggressively towards his girlfriend and her friends, and grew violent while being escorted out. John got punched, and had to punch him back. Other than these, the occasional intoxicated student needs to be talked down. Some return to the lodge the next day, embarrassed and apologetic.
But overall: “19 years, I don’t think that’s too bad”! Generally, troublemakers among a new cohort of students can be identified within the first three weeks. The porters concentrate on easing them into the way the college works, and after about five to six weeks, “It’s all happy families again. College life goes on”. John said the priority is simple: to keep the place secure and everybody safe. “You deal with it, thinking on your feet, and it gets you and the College through the night”.
More than burglaries and abusive boyfriends, the COVID-19 pandemic stuck in John’s memory as the most difficult event in all his time working as Somerville’s night porter.
“COVID was just a nightmare… It really was hard work.” It’s a well-documented experience for many non-academic staff at Oxford. In 2020, roughly half of Keble’s non-academic staff were furloughed, and the College went into consultation on a redundancy programme as a result of major pandemic-induced revenue losses. Across Oxford institutions, frontline staff found themselves responsible not only for enforcing emergency rules but also absorbing the frustration and hostility those rules produced. In early 2022, Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) introduced body cameras for its staff after a 125% rise in violent incidents during the pandemic, launching the ‘There’s No Excuse’ initiative in a call for the respect and protection of hospital workers.
The unhappy pandemic-year undergraduates faced by the porters had the excuse of being denied their promised university life. “The COVID intake of freshers was horrendous”, John recalled. The students were resentful of being confined to their ‘bubbles’. The policy was put in place as part of the College’s social distancing measures, and enforced by porters who often bore the brunt of that resentment. Students sometimes grew even more unruly when porters reminded them it was against the regulations to mix outside their bubbles. “They were very rebellious students…They didn’t seem to think it was a risk”. But John, after years of shepherding Oxford’s blithely demanding youth, is sympathetic.
“It was sad because those students never really got the experience of the Oxford University situation, as their predecessors or the ones that followed on afterwards, because everything was so restricted. I felt sorry for them, and I could understand the way they were reacting. But it just went on for a whole year. They tried to rule the roost… but of course you couldn’t let them do that, there were things in place for a reason”. And once the pandemic had passed, “It was like they were different students completely!”
As a porter who only works nights, John is candid about the relative invisibility of his role. “You could work here for 13 years, and no one knows you,” he says, recalling how a tutor who had been at the College for many years had come in one morning, greeted him brightly, and asked if John was new.
Still, grappling with dissatisfied young people and distracted teaching staff on a regular basis, John says that he feels well-supported by the college institution, and is happy working here. “You get so many people from different nationalities… and it works. Everything together works”.
“Apart from that COVID situation”, he adds. “That will stick with me until I die”.
St John’s College told Cherwell that it keeps Lodge staffing under regular review, seeing to both staff wellbeing and effective operations. Considering the reactive and ad hoc nature of much of their work, porters are “trained appropriately and aligned to the responsibilities they may encounter in their roles. They are also supported by wider, well-established welfare provisions, including on-site student welfare advisors and an on-call system, ensuring that any situations beyond routine duties are managed safely and appropriately”.
College porters, typically hired directly by the College as permanent staff, report to the Lodge Manager and Domestic Bursar and are embedded into the College’s administrative structure. There has long been a push, however, for all colleges to formally extend the same protection and wage standards to their sub-contracted staff employed in housekeeping, catering, maintenance, and events – arrangements that vary depending on the wealth and policy of individual colleges. The lodge, therefore, sits within a wider conversation about invisible labour at Oxford: the workers responsible for maintaining the University’s daily operations often remain peripheral to its public self-image.
As the sky grows light and early risers trickle out into the streets, the night porter hands over the shift and goes home to family, or into a routine slumber with blackout curtains. Through personal and collective crises, the lodge and the porters are always there. Meanwhile, the collegiate system remains a patchwork of rota structures, pay scales, budget limits, and levels of transparency. “Everything together works”, as John says. That clockwork constancy depends on labour which most students rarely see, but routinely rely upon.
St Edmund Hall has opened new, sustainability-focused accommodation in Norham Gardens, one of Oxford’s most affluent neighbourhoods.
The College describes the buildings, which took three years to construct, as an “exemplar” of sustainability. Designed by architects Wright & Wright LLP, they are certified with a Passivhaus standard, widely regarded as the industry benchmark for energy efficiency, and were built using “sustainably sourced and low-embodied carbon materials”. According to a press release on the Teddy Hall website, the buildings will use 70% less energy than the typical modern building.
It contains 127 en-suite study rooms, split across three new buildings: Willis House, Ashton House, and Elliott House, on the nearly 50-year-old Norham St Edmund site. The buildings, which back onto University Parks, are powered at least in part by solar panels and are heated by air-source heat pumps.
The rooms include heated towel racks, big double beds, and dimmable lights. Despite the luxury, the College kept the nightly rate in line with the rest of its Norham housing. The College told Cherwell that it “recognises the need to keep rents as low as possible” and that its accommodation costs are “below the median of all Oxford colleges”. By that standard, tenants are expected to pay around £30 a night.
Rooms on the site will be reserved for Teddy Hall returning undergraduates. They will not be available to postgraduates and, by extension, not be offered through the Oxford University Collegiate Accommodation System, now in its second year of opening college rooms to students from other colleges. The accommodation will allow Teddy Hall to accommodate all undergraduates for their whole degree.
The development’s outdoor spaces are boasted as climate-resilient and biodiverse, with landscaped gardens and lawns. For budding geographers and biologists, the most intriguing feature may be an ecology pond.
Chancellor William Hague said in a press release: “Norham St Edmund is a world-leading blueprint for future student accommodation projects and sustainable building design, both in Oxford and beyond. I look forward to seeing it serve a thriving college community for generations to come.
Human rights experts called for stronger legal protections against the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) at an Oxford AI and Human Rights Summit, with speakers arguing that human rights standards must be embedded into AI governance and technology.
The summit was hosted at the newly redeveloped Rhodes House in Oxford and organised by the Institute for Ethics in AI. It built upon Professor Yuval Shany’s consultation on a white paper, published in 2025, on the need for and feasibility of an international AI Bill of Human Rights, which proposes ways to adapt existing human rights standards so as to better address some of the unique challenges posed by AI systems and their uses.
An opening video address from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk outlined how AI policy can keep pace with a fast-developing technology. He said that “great power demands responsibility on the same scale, and when the two don’t match, we have a problem”. Corporate control, he explained, means that AI policy stretches beyond existing national borders. He continued to praise this summit for bringing together leaders and representatives at the forefront of the discussion.
Speakers called on the UK government to establish legislation, recalling Labour’s manifesto commitment to an AI Bill of Human Rights. The panellists broadly agreed on the importance of human rights, but appeared less aligned on what enforcement should look like in practice.
In an exclusive interview, Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, told Cherwell that political short-termism Continued on pg. 2 risks undermining efforts to address the long-term consequences of AI. “We are infected across our societies with shorttermist responses to the great issue of our societies and politics,” he said, adding that electoral cycles make it difficult for politicians “to think beyond the next election”.
O’Flaherty also noted that younger generations no longer take the international human rights system for granted. “There is no longer an assumption that the human rights system is safe, that it will survive,” he told Cherwell. He argued that political leaders increasingly treat human rights selectively, saying: “Increasingly, leaders are treating human rights, if they are respected at all, as an a la carte buffet. We take those rights because they serve our goal. We’ll ignore others because they get in the way.
The summit also heard concerns about the effects of AI-generated misinformation on communities that may have limited access to, or awareness of, the technology itself. An audience question asked human rights experts to consider the impacts of AI on populations, such as those in India, who might be unaware of its existence. The focus on the impact of AI on populations in developing countries more vulnerable to the power of big tech was a key theme of the summit.
Eileen Carter from the South African Human Rights Commission warned that underrepresentation of African languages in large language models could exacerbate existing inequalities. She also raised concerns about the effects of misinformation and deepfakes on elections, referring to more than 360 deaths associated with unrest and the amplification of narratives.
The third panel, which offered a civil society perspective on promoting human rights in AI systems, offered some hope. Across all speakers, the potential for AI to transform the beliefs that underpin human rights, including the rights to water, education, and an interpreter, was debated. When asked about AI’s potential to unravel and alter the definition of human rights, such as what is included in the ‘right to education’ O’Flaherty told Cherwell: “The damage that can be done by AI has hit more dramatically and more visibly than perhaps any other sector within education through the phenomenon of cognitive loss, of cognitive transfer. We’re only beginning to realise the extent to which we have allowed education to be fundamentally undermined for an entire generation.
“It’s time to seize that now and engage it. I’m not sure that the classic understanding of the human right to education is particularly well-framed for this extraordinary development.”
In a discussion on different countries’ regulatory approach to AI, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, professor at Brown University and former AI advisor to US President Joe Biden, argued that AI systems should not be treated as inevitable developments beyond human control. “We continue, I think, to talk about AI as a thing that emerged out of nowhere that we just have to deal with,” he said. “We forget that these aren’t coming from an alien planet and they were built by entities that choose to build them in a certain way.” He called for pressure on technology companies to make different choices about how AI systems are developed.
Questions of accountability also emerged during discussions about AI’s potential to improve access to justice. Research presented by Philippa Webb said that only 10% of people who have access to a lawyer can get one while there are thousands of bookings for an interpreter in a court covering 150 languages. However, this progress is not cemented as “general-purpose chatbots hallucinate 58% of the time on a legal task”. The use of AI in moderating legal proceedings raised fundamental questions about humanity and authority. Thompson Chengeta from Liverpool John Moores University said that “human rights is the last line of defence so when we say we want a human rights based governance… human rights is not an idea, it is an obligation. There is a gap that can only be recovered by a legally binding instrument”.
The event culminated in a panel offering an industry perspective. Co-host Dr Caroline Emmer De Albuquerque Green questioned representatives from Meta, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Michael Karimian, who works in digital diplomacy at Microsoft, discussed the role of private sectors in engaging with AI, defining corporate responsibility as something which “provides transparency and identified risks”.
All companies supported having formal programmes to ensure that they have an AI policy in place. Within their own companies, they suggested protective measures such as specialised training to ensure that policies, such as whistleblowing, are understood. Alexandria Walden from Google described how consultations with stakeholders could be used to identify when the product breached users’ boundaries. These assessments, according to OpenAI’s spokesperson, “feedback into tangible technical input” and “benchmark it”.
Fundamentally, understanding the rationale behind human rights is imperative, though lacking. Alexandria Walden from Google said: “Whether or not they understand human rights, they care enough to infuse it in their company… we might not always get it right, but it is something we care about.”
Where former panels discussed controls to ensure human rights are considered in the development and implementation of AI products, this panel focused on mitigation. A spokesperson from Google pointed out that technology is inevitably going to move faster, so multiple tools are needed. Companies, OpenAI’s representative noted, still encounter issues such as discrimination and free speech. Consequently, they regard this as an additional policy which companies have a structured model to deal with, but newer companies, and newer industries, haven’t learnt it yet.
In her concluding remarks, Green called for policy makers to “make the abstract actionable” at both governmental and corporate levels. She argued that, by framing the issues posed by AI as human rights issues, we gain a “foundation” for recognising AI’s many societal impacts.
Ugandan participants in a clinical safety study received an Oxford developed Ebola vaccine this week.
Researchers vaccinated the first participants on 6th October in Masaka, Uganda. The phase follows the launch of a first-in-human Phase I trial in the UK evaluating the same vaccine candidate.
They received the vaccine as part of an evaluation of the safety and efficacy of a ChAdOx-based Bundibugyo Ebola vaccine candidate developed by the Oxford Vaccine Group (OVG) and the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford.
Development for this vaccine began in May this year in response to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The research, led by OVG’s Professor Teresa Lambe and Professor Simon Drysdale, is funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). No licenced vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola virus currently exists.
In a statement to Cherwell, OVG said its involvement includes collaborating with the Ugandan research team to support “the study’s scientific design, clinical trial coordination, safety oversight, and evaluation of vaccine safety and immunogenicity”. The Phase I clinical trial addresses a rare strain of Ebola virus affecting communities in the DRC since May. The phase is a collaboration between the Medical Research Council/ Uganda Virus Research Institute and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
Dr Nicole Lurie, CEPI’s Executive Director for Emergency Preparedness and Response, told Cherwell: “It [the Bundibugyo outbreak] remains the fastest-growing and second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded – and we currently remain without a licensed vaccine or treatment.” The Bundibugyo Ebola epidemic in the DRC has surpassed 8,600 cases, with almost half of infections proving fatal.
The outbreak was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in May.
OVG told Cherwell: “For more than a decade, the University of Oxford has performed many clinical trials of candidate viral-vectored vaccines. Some of the most promising vaccines used a modified chimpanzee adenovirus, a harmless version of a common cold virus. The Oxford-AstraZeneca (ChAdOx1) COVID-19 vaccine was approved for emergency use in the UK in December 2020 and was estimated to have saved six million lives during 2021 alone, and over 3 billion doses were used worldwide.” The adenovirus vector vaccine technology trialled in this study was successfully used worldwide as part of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
More funding is necessary to ensure the development and approval of the Ebola vaccine. Lurie told Cherwell: “Without sufficient additional funding, we are at risk of not being able to develop these promising vaccine candidates… CEPI urgently needs US$128M now to keep our Bundibugyo emergency R&D response moving. Without it, we are putting the DRC, and the world, at tremendous risk.”
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