Oxford is a place of learning, not a crucible for vigilantism

The sheperds' dial, Corpus Christi
The sheperds’ dial, Corpus Christi

Professor Helen Moore, the President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, proclaims on her college website that “Corpus is a close-knit yet outward-looking community where talented people from all backgrounds are encouraged to flourish”. It seems strange, then, that such a cosy community should also be a crucible for vigilantism, which in January reportedly drove Alexander Rogers, a 20-year-old student, to suicide.

The inquest into Mr Rogers’s death, conducted by the coroner for Oxfordshire, Nicholas Graham, recently found that a sexual encounter took place between Mr Rogers and a female student after she invited him to her room late one evening and asked him to stay the night. The morning after, the inquest also found, she felt uncomfortable about it.

She did not, according to the coroner, intend to make a complaint, but she shared her feelings with college friends. They quickly decided among themselves that Mr Rogers had done wrong. They did not think it appropriate to speak to the college authorities about it, nor to the police, and it was heard that retribution began immediately.

Rumours were circulated and Mr Rogers’s peers began to shun him. Two days later he attended a college party, where, as the coroner also noted, he was physically assaulted by another student.

The next afternoon, as the coroner observed, two of Mr Rogers’s friends visited his room, told him that he had “messed up” and that they would no longer be spending time with him, with the implication that his other friends would be doing the same. When they left he was “distraught”. They never saw him again.

The next morning Mr Rogers wrote two letters: the first to his family, which should of course remain private; the second to friends at Corpus (including the two who had visited him the day before) telling them that he loved them and that he wanted them to be happy. He died a few hours later.

Corpus has tried, on an institutional level, to handle the aftermath of Mr Rogers’s death sensitively; but none of that will be able to bring him back. The coroner also recorded that a report commissioned by the college from Dr Dominique Thompson, a young people’s mental-health expert, identified a culture at Corpus in which there was a “rush to judgement without knowledge of all the facts… and “pile-on” might occur where a group would form a negative view about another individual”.

The coroner accepted that had Corpus “known about the nature and extent of the culture that has arisen they would have taken formal steps to address it”, but Corpus is a tiny college, with no more than 300 undergraduates. How could its President have been unaware of the prevailing culture of the institution over which she presides?

Pastoral care of students is not a trifling matter and it must be properly overseen. Experienced and proactive senior welfare officers will know their students and be trusted by them; they will make it their business to be visible and to know what is going on around them. In an effective system students will know senior members of the college well enough to speak to them in an emergency, rather than have to rely on a list of people on a website telling students that they are “there”.

They will also know how to manage, and indeed supervise, the Junior Common Room welfare officers. As a former student of mine observed earlier this week, junior welfare officers frequently create more problems than they solve. The idea that undergraduates should be given formal care of the wellbeing of their peers shifts the onus of responsibility very dangerously indeed, particularly if there is no obvious governance over their activities, or appropriate training provided.

The reporting around the inquest powerfully indicates that in the lead-up to Mr Rogers’s death several policies were infringed. Corpus now has a chance to implement real and lasting change, as long as it does not take the traditional Oxford route of saying “this must never happen again” and then doing nothing at all while waiting for the relevant cohort to graduate.

It requires sincere and experienced leadership to effect governance changes which are long overdue; the Oxford colleges, to say nothing of the entire university sector, have a duty to keep their students safe – including, when necessary, from each other. It is high time that duty was fulfilled.