You are reading this, so you must be one of the few people who actually cares (a friend of mine once put it aptly: “I think the term ‘political apathy’ is too passive–most people actively do not give a fuck”). Still, this university experience is packaged into intense eight week bursts, which presents two main problems: (1) you have at least one essay or problem sheet to do a week, so you do not have time to fight the system and stay sane, and (2) the system only has to tolerate you for those eight weeks–once you are gone for “vac”, so is your activism. This is BASH ONE!

 

So you carve out the time, sacrificing whatever sembklance of balance you had because this is bigger than an essay, bigger than a problem sheet. That leaves you with five weeks, at best. That’s okay, right? We can achieve something, right?

 

BASH TWO! There are over 30 colleges in this university, meaning that even if you manage to build support within your own (which, if you’re at Balliol, Magdalen, Christ Church, or any college colonised by St Paul’s, Westminster, Tonbridge, or another school that mysteriously secures 30 places a year, is probably impossible), you still have to find a way to mobilise a unified movement across the entire city. Not that building support within college is easy. Want to put up a poster? Unlikely. ​​Each college has its arcane set of rules, and you are stuck until you can somehow intuit what those rules are.

 

Meanwhile, international students have likely been excluded from activism from the outset—yet another structural barrier. UK student visas come with strict conditions, including prohibitions against participation in activities deemed disruptive to public order. While home students might face disciplinary action at worst, international students risk their legal status, their education, their futures. The Home Office doesn’t play around, and no one wants to mess with their visa over a sit-in.

 

[Author’s note: you have bashed your head twice and you have yet to actually do anything, or even attempt to. Try not to get a concussion.]

 

If you are anything like me, your journey begins in Trinity term of last year, when the university erupted with activism that seemed new, exciting, promising. You want to contribute, you attend a meeting about how to get involved—“pass a motion of support through your JCR” sounds easy enough. Except it isn’t. First, you must draft the motion itself, an archaic, corporate-sounding document that would be incomprehensible to anyone outside Oxford. Then, you must present yourself as the face of the cause—stand at the front of the general meeting and prepare for a fight to the death. And in the process, you will become incredibly aware of why stereotypes about this university persist—maybe if it takes this much effort to convince your peers that genocide, forced deportations, violent borders, and university profiteering from apartheid are issues worth addressing, then everyone really is too rich and posh and white.

 

BASH THREE! Against all odds, you will pass your motion. You will, in fact, pass three in the next few months, but please do not take this as an indication that the process is easy—it is merely that you manage each time: force your friends to vote, force moderates to vote, fight, fight, fight and win, but come out scathed, bruised, battered. Then comes the meeting with the head of your college. She will say to you outwardly that she can understand why the South African apartheid was wrong, but this is different. The university does not have a duty to act here, this is complex, this is not black and white, and this is “not nearly the same”.

 

BASH FOUR! You pass another motion, this time on divestment. Your next meeting is with the college bursar—you are hopeful, you have a near-unanimously passed JCR motion. You walk in only to be met with awkward silences and barely concealed disdain. She does not want a conversation. She wants to speak to you condescendingly for half an hour, attempting to intimidate you with ‘Economics Jargon 101’, trying to make public and private equity sound more complicated than it is. She wants to ask you if you know what Butler-Sloss is (you’re a law student, of course you know Butler-Sloss, you doubt that she has read it in as much detail as you have), just to tell you she doesn’t believe what you are saying is a real issue. She leaves you with the zinger: “the investment committee likes facts, I like facts”, as though you, sitting in the top university in the world, have come to her office to present your delusions and hallucinations.

 

BASH FIVE! Suppose, somehow, your motion makes it through your JCR and through your bursar and it is sat in front of the investment committee—HURRAH! Progess! Not quite. Investment committee reports to the governing body, which reports to the executive committee, which reports to the master, who reports to the chair of colleges, who reports to the vice chancellor, who reports to the chancellor, who, of course, must consult God himself before any decisions are made around here. Maybe you are lucky, perhaps a student representative sits on one of these bodies at your college. If so, this is your JCR or MCR president, who sits there quietly, watches but is not really allowed to say anything. Note also what University officials will remind you at every feasible opportunity—this University is a registered charity (for whom or how exactly this is true is still entirely unclear to me, all I can guess is that it is some kind of tax loophole), meaning it absolutely, indubitably, and under all circumstances, come rain or shine, must remain neutral. Never mind that the supposed purpose of a university like this is to drive change. Nevermind the fact that universities have always been catalysts for revolutions. Nevermind that, silly girl. Back to square one.

 

BASH SIX! A few months later, you are sat in a JCR general meeting, your peers have just silently passed a motion making it so that “public statement” motions (i.e. the only forum for activism through the JCR) have to be sent in five days earlier than any other motion because it makes it “easier for everyone to contribute to statements” (translation: it gives posh rich white boys the option to dilute your activist statement with their toryism). Importantly though, your JCR president says he’s an “ally”, and he has the Instagram infographics on his story to prove it. You cannot say anything, you are exhausted, you are drained. Across the room, the football lads are waiting to pass their motion for funding to buy new kit so they may look shiny and polished when they harass women—they will not support you. So you stay quiet. The motion silently passes.

 

BASH SEVEN! You can no longer stand to try with colleges, you think maybe it is time to engage the wider city. You have set up a stall to pass out flyers. The security guard asks when you’ll be leaving in a tone that says you have inconvenienced him, in a tone that says you are the sixth stall he has seen this week and he knows no one cares, in a tone that attempts to warn you that everyone will ignore you, people will take your flyers and then walk 10 steps away from you and bin them. In a city where almost everyone is a (champagne) socialist—where people constantly feign disgust that Boris Johnson and Margaret Thatcher studied here, where people lament Keir Starmer’s betrayal of his principles—you are ignored all day. No one cares about immigrants. Pack up and go home (preferably before 3 pm because the security guard has places to be).

 

Bash, bash, bash, scream, cry, find that neither rage nor love nor empathy are enough to make it less frustrating when you hit another wall.

 

And so you find yourself, a year on, having achieved very little. If you’ve made it this far, it’s pretty safe to assume that you have some personal stakes in the matter—you are fighting generational trauma, you feel like you owe this struggle to your people, the cause in question is you, your friends, your parents, whatever. This is bigger than activism for the sake of pissing off your conservative, traditional father—this is personal. From there, it is pretty safe to assume that you are now exhausted, drained, burnt out. You have spent a year justifying the humanity of the people you love, your own humanity, you have spent a year begging people to care, trying to figure out how it is that you can teach people empathy when it was never a thing you had to learn and it is not a thing you are capable of unlearning.

 

There is no time to rest, no time to take a week off: the clock is ticking, if the end of term comes, your chance is over. There is a committee relying on you, real people are relying on you. So you give up, or become paralysed, or lost, confused, dazed. It does not have a real label, this feeling. To reference Toni Morrison, it “has no bottom and it has no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.” Sometimes I call it grief, but that may be misplaced. Disdain, despair, depression. All I know is that it is strong, it is relentless, sometimes stronger than the forces that make you want to help people in the first place.

 

What now? What is the end of this? I don’t have an answer yet—this is where I am. I have bashed my head against a wall enough times to step back, stare at it for a while, realise that I am not capable of walking through brick, so now I am sat at the foot of the wall. I won’t go yet, I cannot give up yet, neither can you—that is not what I mean to convey. Rather, sit at the bottom of the wall with me and stare at it. Learn its shape, its texture, its cracks. Stare at it long enough to understand it and analyse it, long enough to realise that it is the same as you and I: it is not unmovable, it is not unbreakable, it too is mutable, it must be. And when we have learned it—when we have traced every crack and measured every weakness—we will know it. Maybe it will not fall, maybe breaking it is beyond us. But maybe, just maybe, we can find a way around it.∎

 

Words by Lina Osman. Image courtesy of Lina Osman.