William Pimlott on change (and the lack of it) during his years at university

Does anything ever change at Oxford? And who would want it to? A lot has changed over my time as an undergraduate at Oxford, and a lot has happened to student clubbing.

The club I first knew as Junction, but that older students, the true cheap clubbing aficionados, would refer to with a glint in their eye as Kukui, has now become Warehouse.

At least Junction survives in its new storage-inspired manifestation. Babylove, Oxford’s finest one room club and bar/lounge area and its famous King Edward Street scene has completely vanished. Where before it was woowoos and a pole for dancing, it is now crumpets for £2 and a yoga space: they (Oriel) paved over paradise and put up a coffee shop.

It is not just Oxford’s clubs that have changed though. The £2 Bookshop is now the £3 Bookshop. Change, alarming disorientating, radical change, is everywhere.

And yet nostalgia is misplaced when it comes to Oxford University, for it often seems singularly unlikely to ever change, at least if the students get any say in the matter.

It has felt like every time the student body was asked to choose between tradition and change this year, tradition won with an ever greater stomping majority.

The question was not whether sub-fusc would be kept, but how crushingly it would win by, in the end a massive 75.8 per cent majority.

The Union was offered a candidate that would have gone a great way to restoring its credibility after allegations of racism (a post-debate cocktail having been advertised underneath an image of shackled black hands), only for her to lose by an unprecedentedly large number of votes.

And Vincent’s, the men’s sports club, voted not to let women in.

No need to worry about Oxford University changing when its student body seems so thoroughly committed to the old order.

Why are so many of Oxford’s students so traditional? Why are traditions from another age, traditions that students from other universities gladly rejected long ago, still so popular here? But it is not fair to tarnish the whole student body as traditionalist.

The very fact that these votes are being held, even if they do not go the desired way, show the presence of an important reforming movement.

Among many of the new activist groups the ‘Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford’ campaign is particularly important. The campaign aims “to decolonise the space, the curriculum, and the institutional memory at, and to fight intersectional oppression within, Oxford”, following activists’ work in South Africa where a statue glorifying Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town was brought down.

For the first time ever, this year students who won the prestigious Rhodes Scholarships refused to toast their colonialist patron at the 2013 class’s going down dinner, an important step in the right direction.

If tradition has won the day in elections this year, there is still reason, thanks to groups such as these, to hope for a better, fairer and more progressive Oxford.