Ben Sullivan may be a hypocrite, but he’s right: Oxford has a toxic ‘lad’ culture

written for The Telegraph, 23 June 2014

Oh, Ben Sullivan. 21, and you’ve already got a Newsnight appearance under your belt. Not bad for an aspiring politician. And you’ve got a new cause: lad culture at our elite universities. Given the women who’ve been writing about this for the last five years – Caroline Criado-Perez, Ariel Levy, Rosamund Urwin – we are so, so grateful to welcome you aboard our bandwagon. With such a deft political knack for leaping on an already-streaming bullet-train of an issue, and as the traditionalist Right’s latest poster-boy for that epidemic of luckless white men so cruelly accused by shrieking feminists, perhaps selection to a safe seat can only be a few years away?

If that seems unfair, consider the reporting of much of this case, superbly dissected by Archie Bland here. It’s not just Sullivan who’s had his reputation trashed. The names of his accusers have been made widely available on the internet – with all kinds of personal slurs attached to them. As for Sullivan’s own emergence as the Jonah of Oxford’s sexual culture, until his arrest his reputation in national media was as a Union President censured for attempting to use Union funds to launch a personal lawsuit against a newspaper that had unveiled his membership of “banter squadron”, a drinking group. He later admitted that the allegations were true. In Oxford media, there’s not much evidence of a crusade against sexual culture in the poor parody he co-authored (here, in the same paper he later tried to sue) about the practice of “sharking” – so called because it requires senior male undergraduates to circle and identify vulnerable first year girls, then ply them with alcohol, usually offering advice on surviving university, before doing what back in the day used to be called “taking advantage”. Now, of course, it’s “sharking” – a term I heard most days during my time at Oxford – because it’s predatory, but also funny. Jokes!

Sullivan’s interview is a parody (complete with silly photos) not a celebration of sharking. But as is so often, what starts as a mockery of the dominant culture quickly becomes a desire to ape it.  Sullivan’s fictional shark likes to rate women as MLQ (“Medium to Low Quality Female”). But the toxic term seems to have stuck around. And the line between parody and straightforward imitation in this social circle seems to have grown pretty thin by the time Sullivan’s own friends used his yearbook entry to launch a jovial assault on his perceived masculinity, critiquing his failure to score, on a drunken crew date, more than “a licentious MLQ”. The rest of the yearbook entry is pretty unedifying reading, too. It’s a testament to how anxiously even our brightest and best young men still project their masculine insecurities on to their friends. But difficult and painful as it must be for young men to navigate a culture that expects so little of them, there’s little compassion in any of this online trail for the women reduced to pawns in a game of male egos. This was not what every young woman dreams of – work hard, get into Oxford, arrive to study Plato and Euripides: and be told in your first week that your real role in Oxford intellectual life is “MLQ”. But don’t worry, girls. Nowadays, the boys only mean it ironically.

But while Sullivan may be a hypocrite, he’s a useful one, if he makes us think about Oxford’s long heritage of laddish loutishness. Sullivan’s “Banter Squadron” jovially claimed to have been “founded in 1304 by a group of libertines with exceptional chat”, but these boys were more accurate than they may know: in 1355, 63 undergraduates and 30 Oxford “townie” plebs died in the Saint Scholastica Day Riots, set off when a bunch of students drunkenly insulted a publican and then rejected the mayor’s authority to punish them.

So we’ve had at least 700 years of entitled undergraduate yobbery at Oxford, but as of this year, only 40 years of co-educational living at the prestigious former all-male colleges. And it still feels like few of Oxford’s high-minded academics ever spared some dusty cerebellum to consider how this heritage might affect those still new young women. Because Oxford’s undergraduate social life still revolves around hard drinking, usually organised by sports teams or other packs of young men. The highest social honour for a young first-year girl at my college was to be invited on a “crew date”, a drinking session for a male sports team, at which a girl flattered into attending was plied with alcohol, and then ordered to dance or strip.

So why didn’t I find the same toxic sexual culture in elite American universities, when I moved from Oxford to Yale? In part, it’s because of the greater emphasis on humanist education in the Ivy League. The fundamental problem of Oxford’s “lad” culture is that many of our greatest minds are still yobs. And if you’re at Oxford, if you’re a brilliant mathematician but an uncultured baboon, it won’t affect your First, and therefore won’t worry your tutors.  At Yale, the requirement to study the basics of humanist culture mean that the mathematicians have at least heard of feminism (conversely, even the airiest English Literature students are likely to know the basics of scientific proof and evidence-based conclusions). Oxford creates specialists; Yale creates citizens.

But alongside Oxford’s atomisation of undergraduate experience lies the same old problem of 1355: undergraduates and fellows live in two parallel Oxfords. For far too many Oxford academics I know, undergraduates seem simply beneath the notice of senior scholars. And amid this veneer of high-mindedness, talking frankly to one’s tutors about one’s social life feels like an admission of guilt. I did once complain to a tutor about something that happened to me at an undergraduate “bop”, the party held every Saturday night at my college bar. I’d always hoped to impress her with my own academic asceticism, so I’d agonised over whether to even to admit to leaving the library. With a sinking disappointment I saw her turn to me, raise her eyebrows, and say: “Don’t they have costumes like ‘Saints and Sinners’? That doesn’t sound like you, Kate.”  How to explain that the “bop” was the centre of college life, that I’d spent the last six weeks feeling like a social pariah for always giving it a miss? How to explain that “making myself vulnerable” and “making friends in college” seemed to go hand in hand?

As we trudged into the great halls, and watched the Fellows at High Table, undergraduates at Oxbridge have sometimes felt like an afterthought. Who were we to complain, whether about sexual harassment or anything else? To be fair, this does appear to be changing. So perhaps the answer is an unexpected one: with higher tuition fees come more attention to students’ needs. I doubt the Student Union, so outspoken on Mr Sullivan’s case, will adopt this cause. But if you want Yale’s sexual politics, you need Yale’s economics. For Oxford to care about its female undergraduates, we have to remind it we pay half the bill.