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(Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty)
Oxford colleges are suffocating places, stuffed to the gunnels with competitive and perfectionistic types, precocious in some ways and very immature in others. Everybody knows everybody else, adolescent hysteria and gossip can travel fast, and an atmosphere dominated by a few loud personalities can feel extremely claustrophobic. In this respect, smaller colleges are probably the worst.
I learnt this lesson the hard way. Early on during my time at Oxford, after an alcohol-fuelled encounter during Freshers Week, I descended gingerly into the quad the next morning. On a noticeboard at the college entrance where people would usually read official missives about exams or prizes, some third year had stuck up a bit of A4 gloatingly informing fellow students, tutors, and passing tourists of my liaison. Beneath such a weirdly personal prank, darker emotions were presumably lurking, but 19-year-old me was incapable of analysis, conscious only of burning shame.
I remembered this feeling reading about the death of the 20-year-old Oxford student Alexander Rogers, who killed himself within a week of being shamed by university friends. According to the coroner, he too had become the subject of rumours after a post-pub tryst. While no formal allegation was registered, the woman involved told mutuals afterwards that it had left her feeling “uncomfortable”. An ex-boyfriend of hers was then involved in a physical confrontation with Rogers, while others told him he had “messed up” and they would be distancing themselves accordingly. Shortly afterwards, the third-year material sciences student wrote a goodbye note describing an “unintentional but unforgiveable” act.
It’s usually an oversimplification to assume a suicide is caused by a single precipitating event. Still, the coroner in this case at least seemed to think that the social punishment exacted immediately beforehand played a substantial role. He cited an independent review commissioned by Corpus Christi — the college attended by Rogers — describing a “normalised” culture in which “students could rush to judgment without knowledge of all the facts, could shun those accused, and a ‘pile-on’ might occur where a group would form a negative view about another individual”. According to the report, “this culture was not limited to Oxford University — it is an issue for the higher education sector as a whole.”
When I was an undergraduate, it was the Nineties, and the balance of social power was still mostly in males’ favour, especially if they came from public schools. The kings of the castle were the “rugger buggers”: braying beer monsters who would get their kit off in the bar or race naked around the quad at a moment’s notice — only apparently to impress each other — and who tended to treat members of the opposite sex like confusing and slightly distasteful alien species. There was lots of open mockery and cruel nicknames for certain collectively designated stooges. Those who didn’t positively join in tended to watch with the flat indifference of late youth, strategically incurious about whatever the victims must be feeling inside.
And then there was the Junior Common Room (JCR) meeting every Sunday, to which most Freshers in my day would dutifully troop. A venerable college tradition had it that each week a comic speech would be given by a second year — almost always male — roasting flamboyant college characters old and new in the crudest of terms, and detailing any intrigue that had taken place over the past seven days. There were only a handful of women in my intake, and female vocal tics, surnames, fashion choices, and doomed attempts to find boyfriends were the butt of many jokes. I would laugh as hard as anyone there and ignore the mortified faces beside me, glad that this time it wasn’t me.
