Stop telling me I’m under-represented

Can the media stop treating me like a baby please? K Thx.

| UPDATED access bullingdon club

Dear Joseph Charlton,

I have a few problems with your article published on Independent Voices. The first is your attempt at a subversive juxtaposition, badly cutting and pasting the now-infamous shot of the Bullingdon Club onto an iconic London skyline. What a fresh and unique perception your handy work delivers.

The photoshop in question taken from The Independent

This heads what can only be described as a 750-word yawn about how the notorious skeleton in Oxford’s closet – the Bullingdon club – is making us all look bad. I really try not to get angry about these kinds of articles, because at their heart I feel like you’re rooting for me, the scrubby state-school kid, and trying to shame some of Oxford’s less tasteful traditions.

Your moronic title suggests that the Bullingdon club is a realistic snapshot of Oxford’s demographic. That’s just stupid – not everyone from Newcastle is one of those twits from Geordie Shore, are they?

But what divisive articles like yours fail to realise is that the attention you give to an incidental minority of students across the university, some dozen among an 11,000-strong campus, is perpetuating the problem.

Imaginative use of photoshop: How the Buller would look on the surface of Mars

About 100% of published pieces about our dreaming spires are damning. And it’s fucking boring.

You are alienating potential applicants by cultivating this atmosphere of mystery, bawdy tradition, and unchanging regime in a university that is progressive, if not a little glacially-paced in revolution.

Your cosy little stereotype

Your misuse of statistics undermine the hard and constant efforts of access groups across the university, and conjure up this image: a stuffy tutor, assessing candidates and remarking “By Jove! We went to the same school! I have to let him in.”

Isn’t this totally absurd? If writers like you made as much effort demonstrating how state-school students can achieve amazing things (and trust me, we can!) as you spend retreading the same ground stigmatizing the university, the problem might have some hope of being resolved.

The media needs to chill out on regurgitating Buller stories and suggesting that the club is a microcosm that accurately represents the demographic of the whole university.

And please learn how to use photoshop.

Sincerely,

Ellie Shaw

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