Where’s the harm in Oxford students letting off a little steam?
Amid the university’s crackdown on ‘trashing’, Luke Mintz meets those still clinging to tradition
When, in the summers of the Seventies, a small group of Oxford students decided to celebrate the end of their exams by pouring champagne over their friends, they probably didn’t think their particular method of high jinks would catch on.
But almost half a century later, hundreds of Oxford students emerged from their final exams this week to be doused in alcohol, whipped cream and confetti as part of the end-of-term tradition now known as “trashing”.
Like many aspects of life at Britain’s ancient universities, graduates streaming out of 19thcentury exam halls in uniforms designed in 1636 – only to be sprayed with discount Lambrini by their friends afterwards – feels like a bizarre blend of old and new.
Today’s students may not know it yet (though how much can you really be aware of when whipped cream is being fired directly into your eyes?), but they could in fact be taking part in Oxford’s last-ever trashings.
The university, which has long resented the £25,000 it is forced to fork out each year in clean-up bills, is finally cracking down on the tradition, promising a £300 fine for any student caught in the act and even hinting at criminal prosecution.
Trashing, they have warned, is a form of “hooliganism” that annoys residents and worsens the city’s (already tense) town-gown relations.
Officials are also concerned that photos of trashing, splattered each year over social media and relayed in the national press, display the kind of elitism that discourages teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds from applying, making the university look like “one giant Bullingdon club”, as the senior proctor put it in an email to students this week.
With Oxford and Cambridge both under intense scrutiny over the diversity of the students they admit, it’s not hard to see why officials are concerned.
But some students have rushed to defend the tradition, which they view as a harmless way of letting off steam after the strain of exams and, with stress and anxiety at a record high among young people, these end-ofterm rituals have never been so necessary.
One student keen to save this messy sport is Harry Holmes, a second-year
‘The best thing about trashing is going out and reaffirming that bond with friends’
law student who has launched a campaign to make it environmentally friendly.
The problem with trashing, he thinks, is that it pollutes the city’s streets and rivers with rubbish. As long as students stick to biodegradables, he says, then what’s the harm?
“The best thing about trashing is that as students, particularly in the high-stress environment that Oxford produces, we can sometimes work ourselves so hard that it’s a lonely and worrying experience,” he explains.
“After completing something so stressful as your exams, going out and being greeted by your friends and just reaffirming that you have made lifelong friendships is a great example of the student bonds that universities often talk about in their prospectuses. It’s just a great show of spirit.”
It would be easy to think of trashing as one of those weird Oxbridge things that doesn’t register among ordinary folk, but it happens at other UK institutions, too, with Edinburgh University last year putting a stop to their students’ version of the ritual.
But is it really all that bad? With endless studies showing that Millennials are eschewing some of the racier ways their predecessors got up to no good – one in eight have not had sex by the age of 26, while more than a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds do not drink alcohol – surely they can be forgiven for throwing a bit of plonk over their friends once a year?
Holmes goes on to mention mental illness on campus, which is forcing a growing number of students to leave their courses. In 2014-15, a record number of 1,180 students cited their mental health as their reason for dropping out of university early, up some 210 per cent from 2009-10. Trashing, he thinks, helps to form those crucial bonds that make students feel at home when they’re away from it for the first time.
However, the university’s move appears to be working, according to some current students – trashing survives, but in a “toned down” way this year, with the eggs, tomato ketchup and rotten fish of old making scant appearances.
Oxbridge, however, has a knack for clinging onto its traditions – even when the forces of modernisation pull in the opposite direction.
The statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College was saved in 2016 when benefactors threatened to write the college out of their wills; that same year, Cambridge students voted to retain their “class lists”, where exam results are posted in public, despite calls for their abolition on the grounds on student welfare.
Trashing, then, may well still have a future. Particularly if the champagne gets replaced with an alcohol-free alternative.