Father's Day at Pizza Express with Peter Sutcliffe.

Pizza Express is currently running a Father's Day promotion, the poster for which features a grainy black-and-white photo of a bearded middle-aged white man on a bench with three children. It has been pointed out to me that this man bears a striking resemblance to Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. This seems a curious choice of marketing strategy. Or has the credit crunch got really bad? 

I'll look for the picture.

Eminem goes West

The new Eminem album’s opening ‘skit’ is called ‘Dr. West’. I heard it and got really excited, because I thought it sounded like Jimmy McNulty. I assumed I was the first person ever to have noticed this, and I could break it to the world. Of course, it was Jimmy McNulty, or rather it was Dominic West, in his normal posh English voice, and his appearance has been well documented.

Has anybody else found that once you’ve heard him speaking English, McNulty’s ‘Baltimore’ accent sounds terrible forever? Like a detective Dick van Dyke (in Mary Poppins, not the program where he plays a detective). Oddly enough, Dick van Dyke was the same age in Mary Poppins, 39, that Dominic West is now. Moral = Dick van Dyke is very, very old.

More thoughts on the CUSU/Varsity issue

Cambridge University is doubly blessed in its pastoral care system. The collegiate format means that students can be close enough to their peers on a daily basis to maintain a high level of awareness and response. Across the University, college women’s reps and welfare reps do superb work in raising issues, supporting those in need and liaising with college and university officials. They form a wonderful part of the Cambridge support network. Furthermore, the individual supervision-based teaching system at this university offers not only academic benefits, but also constant contact with concerned professionals, not to mention DoS’s and pastoral Tutors. In all, Cambridge offers one of the finest student care networks in the world, and we should all be proud to honour and support this.

It is the more a pity that the actions and attitudes of a very small group of people at a superficially senior level within this network ought to be abusing their positions so horribly.

Like many of us, I really ought to be revising right now, but the smell of crap coming from the most recent CUSU agenda is so overwhelming that I’m moved to try and air it before I carry on. Of all the countless examples of student politicians speeding off towards a point about ‘welfare’, leaving facts and their own intellects flapping limply in the breeze behind them, this is one of the most odious and pernicious I’ve encountered in my time at Cambridge.

To clarify: in response to the first issue of Varsity this term, the CUSU Women’s Union, after consultation with the CUSU council, has drafted two letters, listed in the Appendices to the agenda of the second council meeting of this term. The first of these letters is being sent to Varsity. The sending of the second, destined for those companies who advertise in Varsity, has been blocked.

In the first of these letters, the Women’s Union criticise Varsity for printing a ‘pull-out “Varsity Tabloid” which mimicked tabloid news as well as drawing attention to the launch of the Tab, an independent tabloid-style Cambridge student paper’. The proposed bases for this censure are that Varsity has a responsibility to student welfare (it doesn’t), and that some women have expressed their dissatisfaction to CUSU about the issue. It asks for an apology from Varsity for these inclusions, and a promise that future editorial teams will take their responsibilities towards student welfare more seriously.

As if this patronising and ill-conceived nonsense wasn’t enough, in the second letter the Women’s Union address Varsity’s sponsors. Their advertisers. Those companies without whom Varsity, unlike TCS, could not exist. As in, CUSU assembles its weight (those outside the university are understandably less familiar with its hysterical haplessness) against an independent student-run organisation, who also happen to be the direct commercial competitors of their own newspaper. I don’t know the details, but I imagine this is illegal. Or if not illegal, certainly way beyond CUSU’s mandate, even if the factual basis was there.

But there are so many other problems with the letters (one of which is reprinted below) that I’m bewildered as to where to begin. Let’s start with the most serious accusation: that Varsity is somehow endorsing a system which is harmful to women. I notice that nowhere in either letter (and here I’m using both Appendices A and B from the agenda for the second CUSU meeting, Easter term 2009) does it mention any specific aspect of the tabloid pull-out which has caused offence. Instead there is a nebulous sense of disgruntlement circling the word ‘tabloid’.

I’d love to be enlightened. Was it the ‘Camsay Street’ photo-diary, in which an undergraduate provocatively displayed her cleavage? Or perhaps it was distinguished Times columnist Caitlin Moran, posed attractively in a green silk dress? Or maybe the ‘Bedroom blues’ sexual advice column, in which a woman poses seductively with a pen. It could be all of these things – they all present women who have chosen to be photographed in attractive - dare I say it, sexually attractive poses. The same could be said of the fashion sections in both Varsity and TCS most weeks.

As I say, I couldn’t be sure, but I’m led to believe that, shockingly, it was the ‘Page 3 girl’ that caused a large part of the righteous agitation amongst the women’s officers. The photograph is of Rachel Pickles, a student from Homerton who not only volunteered enthusiastically for the role but was also delighted with the photos. I’m given to understand that she was under duress about no aspect of this, right down to the colour of her underwear. Quite right too. After all, she is an empowered, attractive, intelligent modern woman.

Were I a female student at Cambridge, I would feel scandalized that CUSU’s Women’s Union had directed its attention like this. I certainly know that some of my female friends do, and if that sounds vague it is no more so than the unspecific ‘complaints’ CUSU received to prompt this madness. This is even truer than normal in this term, when female students, perhaps more so than their less-conscientious male counterparts, are vulnerable to the stress of examinations, and the subsidiary effects of this. These are Welfare Issues.

Not a newspaper publishing a picture of a student in her pants. It is yet another demonstration of CUSU’s irrelevance in matters like this. Its members, rendered practically toothless by the effectiveness of the collegiate pastoral system, resort to grandiose gestures to justify themselves to each other. Usually these are just banal, but in this instance they are dangerous.

Where do these guys get off? Do they also object to the recent fashion show, in which female students walked the catwalk in lingerie to raise money for Amnesty? Do fashion shows not have a duty to consider the welfare of students? Or garden parties? Do drinking societies not have a duty to consider the welfare of students? I must confess at this point that I selected my own byline photo for the Tabloid issue, and in the full awareness that it makes me look about two stones lighter than reality. Am I being objectified? Is that connected to the culture of grown men preying on young boys in the Middle East? Or male homosexual rape?

Or alternatively, perhaps they feel that by moving away from the broadsheet elitism of the normal Varsity, and towards the more accessible style of Britain’s best-selling newspapers, Varsity is veering dangerously close to displaying a sense of humour and self-awareness that might elevate them from CUSU’s seeming mandate of constant, leadenly hubristic hypocrisy.

The letters point out that two female members of the editorial team objected to the publication of the tabloid edition. So what? That’s the whole point of having editors. They select what goes in. On any article, in any issue, there are members of the team who might not want it published, for a wide range of reasons. This is not CUSU’s problem. Never has been, never will be. The editors of the issue in question are responsible and careful, and care a great deal about both Cambridge and the newspaper. How often does a real tabloid offer a reasoned justification for exercising its freedom of expression in the editorial column?

The letters go on to implicate Varsity in racism and xenophobia by printing the tabloid pull-out, an underhand gesture that is as cheap as it is loathsome.

Varsity is not, as the letters report, a ‘Cambridge Student Newspaper’, but rather the ‘Independent Cambridge Student Newspaper’. Big difference. It is not tied to the university. It sells adverts, and pays for itself. Unlike TCS, it does not depend on CUSU’s overbearing presence to ensure advertising revenue and smother its quality. It subscribes to the independent Press Complaints Commission, a self-regulating body of serious, grown-up newspapers, who know more about these things than the coterie of infantile student activists apparently comprising the CUSU council.

That CUSU would write a letter about this, abusing its position as representing Cambridge students as a body, is bad enough. But that it would even think about writing to Varsity’s advertisers, in a bizarre conflation of women’s lib with commercial sabotage, is abhorrent, probably illegal and, within the structure of a university hinged on freedom of expression, morally dangerous. CUSU’s power should never, under any circumstances, be used to directly threaten Varsity. If Varsity breaks the law, it is a matter for the law. If Varsity breaches the PCC’s code of conduct, then that is a matter for the PCC. If Varsity is unpopular, its readership is quite free to stop responding to its advertisements.

            CUSU is a sad dinosaur, with relevance to the student body only when it roars at something stupid. And like the dinosaurs, it needs to die or be cut back. Cambridge University is stuffed full of institutions like this, filled with students who derive a false sense of superiority from being a part of said institution. Varsity is one of them, perhaps, but Varsity charges the students nothing, and occasionally, very occasionally, might inform or entertain a couple of them. CUSU does neither of these things. Whilst the student body needs representation at a university-wide level, the last thing it needs is the current set-up, where a council of over-excitable try-hards are allowed to throw serious and malicious accusations around at random. The letters in the most recent CUSU agenda damage CUSU, unfairly damage Varsity, patronise the majority of the female students of Cambridge and, worst of all, distract from the excellent work being done at a collegiate level by Welfare Reps, women’s Reps and the wider pastoral system. Those who wrote them should be ashamed. 

In a sea of rubbish, a rare serious point

The below is a letter drafted by CUSU to send to Varsity's 'sponsors', in response to the tabloid edition of Varsity earlier this term. Essentially it's a threat. I believe CUSU motioned, in the end, not to send the letter (though this is nowhere in the document), but have nonetheless posted it as an Appendix to their most recent council agenda for all to see. In keeping with the spirit of transparency sweeping the nation I'm reproducing it here. 

Anybody think this is a sensible use of students' money/time? Or a fair reflection of students' views? One might argue that as the students' union of Cambridge University, they had a more important duty to freedom of speech... 

I have put the most offensive part in bold myself. CUSU discussing using its power to threaten Varsity's commercial existence? They point out (in Appendix A, their similar letter addressed to Varsity itself) that they are not asking sponsors to withdraw their support, but rather to remind Varsity of their equal opportunities policies, and how they might relate to the tabloid section. Not very convincing. I understand that these officers have to do something with their free time, and usually it's hilariously trivial, but I'm rather fond of Varsity, as you might expect, and this is ridiculous.

For those of you interested, this is the link to the agenda:  

http://www.cusu.cam.ac.uk/union/council/0809/easter/2/

Appendix B:

We are writing you in regards to the Varsity Cambridge Student newspaper, which receives support from your organisation. The Week I Easter Term edition of Varsity featured a pull-out “Varsity Tabloid” which mimicked tabloid news as well as drawing attention to the launch of the Tab, an independent tabloid-style Cambridge student paper. The tabloid pullout featured a “page three girl” as well as various instances of negative portrayals of women.

The choice to publish the tabloid pullout was a serious error on the part of the Varsity newspaper editors. As a major student publication, the editorial team has a degree of responsibility to student welfare. Although a news publication should not strive to avoid controversy or stimulating debate, this needs to be weighed against the wellbeing of the student body. The large number of students – male and female – who have expressed shock, outrage and severe discomfort in reaction to elements of the pullout is a sign that Varsity has severely misjudged the welfare consequences of publishing the tabloid. We are disappointed that Varsity neglected to consider the wellbeing of its readers and the wider social impacts of reproducing harmful attitudes towards women.

We are also worried that Varsity was in fact aware of the harmful effects of the tabloid, but chose to publish it regardless. It is unacceptable that the strong objections of the two female members of the editorial team were ignored. The inclusion of the tabloid under weak claims of “satire” demonstrates a failure to recognise that satire includes exposing or denouncing folly, rather than simply reproducing it. The attitudes demonstrated by the tabloid pullout are banal and orthodox, mirroring the same reactionary attitudes towards women as tabloid publications which regularly exhibit racist and xenophobic tendencies. One can only conclude that the editors and writers confused ironic critique with intentional offense, which is inexcusable and disappointing in a student publication.

Supporting student publications and freedom of speech is obviously essential, yet editorial independence and lively debate do not have to come at the cost of student welfare. A publication that purports views which are disrespectful towards women, and which normalise such disrespect, is not acceptable journalism. We believe that the Varsity editorial team failed to adequately exercise the discretion necessary to strike this balance. We contacting you because as a supporter of Varsity, you have a role in ensuring that the publication is in line with your equal opportunities policy. We would like you to be aware of the harmful effect the publication has had on many students so that if you feel it is appropriate, you may communicate your organisation’s commitment to equal opportunities to the current and future editorial teams at Varsity.

We are asking Varsity to make a visible commitment to student welfare and against harmful attitudes towards women by publishing an apology in the next issue of Varsity. We hope that future editorial teams take their responsibility towards students more seriously, and exercise more rigorous judgment when making editorial decisions.

Sincerely,

The Women’s Union