Tuition fees at Oxford University are likely to more than treble as early as next year, academics at the 900-year-old institution have warned.

Lecturers have told the Guardian they expect students to be charged £10,000 a year “as soon as the government allows it” – which some believe will be shortly after a general election next year.

Full-time undergraduates starting at Oxford this year will pay £3,225 a year – the maximum universities are allowed to charge.

The university will struggle to compete with the US Ivy League institutions unless government funds increase or Oxford raises its fees, the academics warn. But chances of a growth in public subsidies are remote, they admit.

The government has asked English universities to make £180m in “efficiency savings”. Government funding is thought to have covered 75% of universities’ income 30 years ago, but accounts for less than 40% of their income now.

Oxford’s famed one-to-one tutorials between academics and students are expensive for the university to maintain.

A fee increase is therefore unavoidable, the lecturers argue, and it could happen as soon as “Cameron’s first term of office”, according to one.

Their comments come after Oxford’s unpopular outgoing vice-chancellor, John Hood, said over the weekend that it was “inevitable” that Oxford and Cambridge would charge more in future to compete with the best institutions in the world.

But Hood said this would be “gradual” and could be “decades off”. A government review of university fees starts this year and is expected to end after a general election.

Iain McLean, a politics professor at Nuffield College, Oxford, expects the university to raise fees to £10,000 a year “as soon as the government allows it – most likely to be early in Cameron’s first term”.

He said £10,000 was roughly what it cost to educate an average student at Oxford per year.

Christopher Lewis, dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, argues that the cap should come off tuition fees.

Lewis said: “By whatever means, fees will have to rise. Many of our alumni say that they would give us greater financial support were we to ‘go independent’, by which I assume that they mean, charge the fees which Oxford considers reasonable. Our alumni are already very supportive, but I reckon that they would be even more so if they saw us as independent.”

David Palfreyman, fellow and bursar of New College, Oxford, said raising the fees was “almost inevitable”.

He anticipates that fees will rise after the next general election to “£7,500 at least”. If they do not, and the government does not increase its subsidies, “some subjects would take a hell of a clobbering”, he said.

Robin Briggs, a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, said a hike to £5,000 would be “fairly modest” and “possible”.

But the academics and the vice-chancellor believe higher fees can be introduced only if the university provides “better bursaries” so that bright, poor students can take up places.

Hood, a New Zealander who is leaving Oxford in September after five years, would not state by how much he would like to see fees rise.

He wants the university to convince more of its wealthy alumni to donate money so that Oxford has more freedom from government.

He said: “If Oxford is successful over the ensuing decades in its endownment-raising, we could see it taking less government money for teaching. But that would be decades away.”

But academics say this is a difficult way to raise funds. Briggs said: “It remains very hard to see how Oxford could raise enough to replace the current levels [from the government]. The UK does not have the tax breaks or the philanthropic tradition of the US, while we are forbidden to give any sort of preference in entrance selection to the children of donors, as the Ivy League used to do.”

The Institute for Philanthropy says 1.7% – 108,000 out of 6.2 million – of UK graduates donate to their universities, compared to 22% of alumni of US public universities. Oxford says 14% of its alumni donate, but in the US Ivy League universities, more than half do.

Earlier this year, a report by Universities UK, the umbrella group for vice-chancellors, argued that raising tuition fees from £3,000 to £5,000 a year would not deter students from university.

But the report warned that students from low-income families would be discouraged if fees rose to £7,000, particularly if they had to take out private loans as well as government student loans.

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Poetry scandal! Scarlet woman Padel versus sex-pest Nobel man! Disgraced professor resigns! Oh, calm down chaps. Unpick what actually happened over the Oxford poetry professorship, and only then decide who is the most disgusting. In brief: Derek Walcott left the contest in dudgeon after a (still anonymous) mailshot and a minxy article digging up sexual harassment accusations more than two decades ago. It was all on Wikipedia anyway. Ruth Padel, the other strong contender, denies being behind this.

But last Saturday an arts-gossip journalist dug out an e-mail in which (at the end, in a couple of lines) she passed on the concern expressed by some female student who frets about these things. This was, she admits, stupid. But not a capital offence. We all chat helpfully on e-mail. Some are naive enough to think that arts journalists are interested mainly in art.

The said hack — so committed to covering the poetry professorship that somehow he bothered to look back in his computer’s e-mail inbox only after Padel’s election victory, so as to maximise humiliation — rang round her known supporters. I got a call, asked for the text of the e-mail, decided that it was imprudent but not malicious and pointed out that it proves nothing about the wider campaign, which Padel said she was horrified by. I mildly told the reporter that I still thought she was a good choice, and thought no more of it.

But by morning it transpired that the same call to more eminent rent-a-quotes had a quite different result. Lord Bragg said she was “disgraceful” and should resign; Sir Jeremy Isaacs echoed this, expressing how “upset” he was. Neither man, I happen to know, rang the poet to ask for her side of it before putting on the black cap.

Which I suppose goes to show that the arts world — at least its parasitic and pompous TV arm — is baby-frightened of the Sunday press, and that nobody should ever make the mistake of relying on the loyalty, calm judgment or even common courtesy of clapped-out old media grandees who have spent too long thinking that they own the arts. A.C. Grayling, who also rushed to condemn, did at least contact her; Professor John Carey, by far the most genuinely distinguished of the lot, just gently said that a re-run of the election would only hurt Padel and that she should not be thus “insulted”.

For the record, Ms Padel is not a buddy of mine — I hadn’t seen her for more than 15 minutes since a slight acquaintance in the Eighties — but I was enthused by her ideas for using the job to bring poetry to other university departments. Moreover, I don’t really care about professors hitting on their adult students; I come from a less prissy generation. We knew that when your learned mentor’s gasps of wonder at your brilliance turn to hot breath on the cheek you back off, make yourself clear and get on with your work. Or, in extremis, ask the Dean to have a word. Nor do I see any reason for Derek Walcott to have resigned his candidacy, not if he actually wanted the job.

Later attempts yesterday to amplify the charges with fragments of e-mails have not, in any calm view, changed a thing: Padel’s actions remain a bêtise rather than a dark conspiracy. The furore merely betrays the “me-too” attitudes of gleeful, sanctimoniously prurient journalists who hate to be left out. Marginal bloodsuckers have meanwhile weighed in with sniggering references to how exciting it is to have a sexual frisson in the dull poetry world after enduring — as one put it — “Andrew Motion droning on” for years.

The whole episode stinks of hypocrisy, malice and media having fun with the lives of real artists. If any of Padel’s lemming critics has never tittled an injudicious tattle to a journalist over a glass of warm wine at Hay or Cheltenham, let him cast the first stone.

The bitter irony is that her real campaign was about bringing together the literary arts and the sciences. As Darwin’s great-great granddaughter she has a vision of ending the “two cultures” (geeks-versus-aesthetes) which dominated 20th-century academe. She held a vibrant session at St Peter’s College with students from all disciplines, and had promised to visit every college and offer sessions to science departments. That was the real idea. And the irony? Well, scientists and engineers are trained to examine new evidence, check it, weigh up probabilities, decide on how important flaws and irregularities really are, and only then draw conclusions.

But hell, that’s not the way the arts-media titterocracy operates. Too boring, darling.

Look, love, what’s the big deal?

The trouble with sexual harassment is that it’s so subjective, dependent on all kinds of factors, and what can be hilarious from one man’s mouth can be flesh-creeping an threatening from another’s. Derek Walcott withdrew from the initial race for Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry position after a dossier detailing two sexual harassment allegations against him was sent to around 100 Oxford academics.

The first allegation dated back to 1982, when a student at Harvard alleged that, while discussing her work with Walcott after class, he asked her to “imagine me making love to you. What would I do? . . . Would you make love with me if I asked you?” After rejecting his approaches, she was then given a C grade in his class. Walcott was reprimanded by Harvard. The other allegation, in the mid-1990s, was settled.

Back then, sexual harassment was a political red hot potato, of course. Women had woken up to the fact that they didn’t have to put up with s*** this anymore but they had nothing specific in law to protect them. At university in the Eighties I remember female students picketing newsagents that sold The Sun and kicking in the shins any male student seen buying it or looking at the Page 3 photograph.

Women had to have their wits about them then: before 2005 anyone wanting to report an act of sexual harassment had to make a claim of sex discrimination, meaning that you had to show you were treated in this manner purely because of your gender. Employment tribunals defined sexual harassment as unwanted contact of a sexual nature. When the new Employment Equality laws came into force in 2005, the Sex Discrimination Act was broadened to mean more than lewd comments and Carry On-style bottom-pinching but generally creating an “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”.

But now we have the mechanisms in place to stop sexual harassment is the issue a bit, well, last century? We have a voice after all and the pendulum has swung so far the other way that teachers and lecturers are now afraid to sit on their own with a student in a room with the door closed lest they find themselves landed with a career-ruining harassment suit. Indeed we sometimes verge on the hysterical: in Boston a school wanted to prosecute a six-year-old boy found with “his hand inside the waistband of a girl’s pants, touching the skin on her back”, in violation of the school’s sexual harassment policy. According to the boy’s mother, however, her son did not even know what sexual meant. Happily, the district attorney’s office deemed the boy too young to be prosecuted.

We still hear harassment horror stories from the City, of course, but you’d think that, now employers are so super-sensitive about the minefield of harassment law, surely the number of complaints should have come down? Not so. One in five of calls to the Equal Opportunities helpline are regarding sexual harassment, with 40 per cent of complainants being male. And people are generally more litigious these days.

Rachel Dineley, group head of the diversity and discrimination unit at the law firm, Beachcroft LLP, says that while women are more confident about complaining, some feel it easier to keep quiet because of the consequences.

“What is still lacking is a confidential means whereby allegations can be addressed satisfactorily from the point of view of the complainant and alleged harasser,” she says. “It’s all too easy to assume that there is substance to the allegation, and it is important not to victimise either party in the pursuit of a resolution. There are instances where employers are the recipients of misconceived allegations of harassment, where the complainant may be overly sensitive or, if one is being sceptical, seeking to exploit the prospective damage to the employer’s reputation.

“Employers must find a way to facilitate a resolution in a low-key way so that relationships are restored.”

On student campuses lecturers are encouraged to declare any relationship with a student, especially a romantic one, to a superior, colleague or third party after consultation with the University and College Union.

“Any declaration must be treated in complete confidence and there should not be a requirement to give details of the nature of the involvement,” said a spokesman. “It should then be the duty of the appropriate authorities within the university to organise the staff member’s professional duties to avoid contact with the student concerned. While staff are strongly advised to disclose such relationships, failure to disclose should not, in itself, constitute grounds for disciplinary action.”

Universities are clearly on the case regarding sexual harassment with procedures plainly outlined, so is it too simplistic to describe Oxford University, as Jeanette Winterson did this week, following the Padel row, as a “sexist little dump”? While old-boy networks surely still flourish, there are umpteen high-flying female academics and many thousands of female students who do extremely well at Oxford and in other academic establishments. Winterson’s hyperbolic language debases a debate that has moved on.

Real sexual harassment is miserable for those who suffer it but establishments such as Oxford are nirvana compared to the sexism that exists in the real world outside academia.

In Russia, for example, sexual harassment is an “accepted” part of office life and according to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said that they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses and only two cases have been won since the collapse of the Soviet Union. A judge recently threw out another case brought by a female advertising executive. “If we had no sexual harassment,” ruled the judge, “we would have no children.”

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Oxford University is investigating after students allegedly held a party at which they were told to arrive dressed as Orthodox Jews carrying bags of money.

Students in the under-21 rugby squad are said to have attached pretend sidelocks to their heads at the “bring a fit Jew party”. Sidelocks are worn by Orthodox Jewish men.

The party, at a curry house on Wednesday, has been condemned by the Jewish community as “at best insensitive and ignorant: at worst blatantly antisemitic”.


The Oxford University Student Union is said to have convinced the team’s captain to change the post-match party’s theme to “bring a fit girl”.

But Aaron Katchen, Oxford University’s Jewish chaplain, said the original “theme” had gone ahead. He was contacted by four students who had witnessed it.

The Community Security Trust, which deals with antisemitic attacks together with the police on behalf of the Jewish community, said the party would make Jewish students feel “isolated and vulnerable”.

A spokesman for the Union of Jewish Students in the UK said: “The actions of a few students have caused real offence. We are appalled that in 2008 old myths and antisemitic stereotypes are still appearing among supposedly educated students.”

The captain of the under-21 team, Phil Boon, said he “didn’t see what the problem was”. He said Jewish girls had accepted invites to the party. “I can understand why it might have offended some people, but it would have been an awesome social.” Boon refused to comment further.

Oxford University has launched an investigation into the party. A spokesman from the university said: “The university is currently investigating a report about inappropriate behaviour by two or three students. We cannot comment on the case as we are yet to establish the facts. However, the university condemns unreservedly racial stereotyping.”

Dr Winston Pickett, director of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, said: “When blatant and malicious Jewish stereotypes surface in the public space –particularly in an academic setting – the shock is palpable.

“On the one hand they make us realise how embedded they are in the collective consciousness while at the same time they send a clear signal of how important it is to educate others as to their hurtful nature. Hopefully the university will use this opportunity to do just that.”

Source : [guardian.co.uk]

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