Furthermore, we do not (yet) live in a police state, where every conversation with tutors or peers is recorded and our lives are put at risk by joining a political party. We are privileged to be able to protest against our university and be answered with words rather than tear gas and rubber bullets, to have a say in how money in our institution is directed, and even to be here in the first place.

We, the students of a freewheeling democracy, may not have much to do with war, but we were indirectly funding it. On Friday, the University Council agreed to end the University pension fund’s continued stake in BAE Systems and Rolls Royce. York currently has £997,342 worth of shareholdings in these companies, but this will no longer be the case in the future. This is excellent news for believers in civil liberties, human rights, proponents of free speech, and our own campaign team who have worked tirelessly for at least two years to see this achieved.

It is about time. A brief glance at BAE’s clients includes such charmers as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, best known for being the world’s worst place to be a woman. BAE also supply fighter planes to Israel, whose IDF were most recently responsible for reducing Gaza to rubble and killing 1,300 Palestinians in the process. The company were also recently accused of giving former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet a suspected £1 million. Pinochet liked to order his torturers to throw boiling water on his detainees, and inflicted electric shocks and beatings on people who were eventually “disappeared”.

Our University should, then, be proud of its reputation as a cornerstone of intellectual freedom with a newly fortified ethical backbone. This policy has been delayed for far too long, but with 2000 signatures it could not be ignored any longer. The speed of implementation should be watched by York’s students, and the companies who will make up the replacement investments vigorously assessed.

Our students may have achieved a rigorous ethical framework, so what about our academics? The work of the Applied Centre of Human Rights and Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit, the latter of which will be ironically aiding in the rebuilding of Gaza, represent a set of scholars who uphold York’s commitment to social equality. We also have Dr Simon Parker, targeted by a neo-fascist website for joining a demonstration, and Professor Derek Attridge, Dr Anna Bernard, Mr Geoffrey Wall (English), and Professors Allison Drew and David Howell (Politics), who all signed an open letter to the Guardian calling for an end to violence in Gaza in January.

Baroness Haleh Afshar, also of the Politics department, is well known for her defence of human rights and work in the Department of Women’s Studies.
These academics are part of the solution to what has been addr -essed on Friday, but they are indirectly implicated in a separate but releated problem. The University of York’s pension fund may well be corrected in the future, but it does not apply to anyone on what is known as Pay Grade 6 – academics. Their pensions come from a separate, centrally awarded body called the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS). Guess who invested £164.4 million in BAE Systems last year? It is a joke, but not a very funny one.

The issue of the USS is a new fight, and one that students and academics should be undertaking together. We can congratulate ourselves on ridding the University of York of BAE Systems, but the casebook is by no means closed.

A university is not its lecturers or its students; it is the effective relationship between the two. The French novelist Albert Camus said, “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners”. Only when we take this relationship between thinking people beyond the seminar room and the lecture hall, and into a progressive, collaborative way of thinking will we be able to tell ourselves: we are not on the side of the executioners.

Perhaps most disconcertingly after three years of criticising both the University and YUSU on an almost daily basis, a small but definitive sense of pride had begun to develop in some dark corner of my brain. I had even started defending York when my friends from home reacted with shock on seeing it at the top ten universities every year. York, the hapless, underrated but eccentrically brilliant place we all attend, was… whisper it… going up in the world.

This is why I am seething that a combination of bad timing, economic downturn, and financial mismanagement on both sides is preventing the full potential of the Heslington East development from being realised. The reality may be either that places for new students will have to be filled from overseas or postgraduate applicants, or the new colleges and classrooms of Hes East will lie empty.
John Denham, Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills told the Vice-Chancellor in a letter that the reason for the change of policy was that “the number of students receiving full or partial grants was exceeding projections”. One would have thought that if Gordon Brown was serious about his target of 50% of young people in higher education then the Government might have anticipated that more people from middle and lower income backgrounds would apply for loans. More joined-up thinking from New Labour, the party who increased our tuition fees and are doing nothing to help new graduates with unemployment and debt.

The new campus may well now become one of those expensive Christmas presents you felt constantly guilty about for never using. However, unlike an ice-cream machine or set of golf clubs, Hes East has the potential to lift the profile of the University to unforeseen levels. This would allow us to take on the big hitters of Oxbridge and the London Universities not just in research and academia, at which we already frequently outclass them, but in the arenas of overall student satisfaction and facilities. York frequently loses out in University rankings because our spending to student ratio and careers prospects scores are comparatively low. Hes East would tip this imbalance to our favour, allowing the flourishing Law and Theatre, Film, and Television (TFTV) departments to make use of a dedicated space, and of specialist equipment in the latter case. Furthermore, the new swimming pool and student venue which have been much vaunted ever since the embryonic planning stage will also contribute to the kind of student experience that our peers at other universities currently take for granted.

David Garner expresses this in typical blasé marketing jargon: “In the context of the Heslington East expansion, the undergraduate home market is only part of the picture”. The loser here is the British student who needs financial assistance, or exactly the kind of person the Government claims to be encouraging to attend university. This change will mean the applicants with the money, rather than the raw talent to come to York, and the “home market” may simply look elsewhere.

Once again, young people have been let down by Labour. The ones who will bear the brunt of this policy mismanagement will be the teenagers who have strived for their A-levels at poor quality state schools, for the promise of something better for their efforts. York deserves better than a Government whose legacy of broken promises may lose them the graduate vote.

The concept of childcare is alien to my day-to-day plans, but for many academics, students, and staff, the scramble for a campus nursery place is one fought over many months, involving waiting lists of incredible length, and fortitude in the face of rejection. 

Certainly, when I see kids running down the pathways of campus on Sundays, especially the ones in flashy Fisher-Price cars, I can only give them credit for shrieking, laughing, chasing ducks, and appearing so overwhelmingly happy running about our much-maligned concrete wasteland. 

Few students are probably even aware that in order to secure a place for a sixth month old baby at the innocuous looking building behind the health centre, it is advisable to put down your child’s name before they are even born. The care and facilities at the campus nursery are purported to be excellent, hence an oversubscribed service that has led to three times as many applications to places available. For students and staff who are not able to plan in advance, the waiting list is not an option, so they are forced to seek nurseries farther afield.

The current options on the table to resolve this are not workable. If the nursery were to limit its services, as has been suggested, it would become more of a crèche. Technically, it could squeeze in more children, but health and safety guidelines mean that this loss in quality of care may not be allowed on the current site anyway.

Dr Judith Buchanan, a senior lecturer in the English department, placed both of her children in the care of the nursery from the age of six months until they were old enough for school. She told me that “It offered a happy and stimulating environment for them both as babies and pre-schoolers, and we are grateful for the warmth and fun and well-managed structure it gave them in those crucial years”. However, she had applied for places for her children very early on in both pregnancies. Dr Buchanan was able to apply early enough to secure a place, and her children were therefore able to enjoy the benefits of a dedicated learning environment close at hand. 

Others are not so lucky, and have to rely on care (though-part subsidised) at other nurseries which may be expensive and further from campus. There is some comfort for parents in knowing that their very young children are just a short walk away, and the value of this security should not be underestimated. Moreover, the campus nursery is a place to meet parents in a similar situation, creating an atmosphere of community.

The solution to the problem of the current demand for childcare is very simple. Half a billion pounds is being spent on Heslington East. We must ensure that the small amount already set aside from this gigantic sum into a nursery results in proper childcare facilities, especially if the student and academic populations rise in line with the number of new departments and courses opening, thereby exacerbating an already overstretched facility.

Some unassigned corner of the vast plot of land could host finger painting sessions and Fisher Price car races for all the smallest members of the community of the University of York. The larger nursery, or even a joint venture with Heslington pre-primary schools would be better equipped to deal with the needs of children without sacrificing the parental comfort of close proximity to them. An added financial bonus would be that the university would not need to hand out childcare subsidies to various other nurseries nearby. 

So let the children roam free in the idyll of Heslington East. We must allow them all the resources they need to start school with as much exuberance as they are rolling around on the concrete slabs of Heslington West.

What is new, and acutely worse than what we have come to expect, is not the usual silent contempt for student opinion. What is happening now is that when it comes to giving money to companies whose business is making killing more efficient, the University has actually bettered (or further debased) itself. Investment in BAE Systems and Rolls Royce has actually increased by £350,000 over two years. We wonder if the academics in the new Centre for Applied Human Rights know that their pensions will be paid for in part by the oppression and conflict they attempt to curb every day of their working lives?

During this time period, universities like UCL, Durham, and SOAS have all ceased to keep shareholdings that their students consider to lack the humanitarian or environmental credentials needed to legitimise such a move. York, by contrast, is now 6th nationally for propping up the arms trade, even as our academics in the humanities strive to make us more ethically aware and more culturally sensitive. The long-fabled “ethical investment proposal” is still yet to appear in writing, let alone be considered by students.

Alternative companies could be profitable to the university without the need to forget social responsibility. There can be no excuse for financing the killing and maiming of our fellow men and women.

She has since ensured that relations between the SU office and Heslington Hall have remained relatively amicable, and when Tom Scott took over, most assumed that this closeness would remain for the sakeof the student body.

Langwith Bar was designated as entirely student financed and run, and no one from the Vice-Chancellor’s office objected when Matt Burton, Services and Finance Officer, applied for a 24 hour license for late night events, or so he thought.

The subsequent explosion has shown exactly why students and University executives will never understand each other: because they never listen to what the other side is saying. Relations are now at an historic low between YUSU and the University. One can only imagine the look of fright on the poor clerk’s face as Pro-Vice-Chancelllor Jane Grenville ran into the York City Council building on Friday, just two minutes before the final deadline for licence applications. Eyes bulging, veins protruding from her neck, a seething Grenville slapped down her objection, cursing Burton, screaming wildly for justice.

The issue at hand is about two different agendas rubbing up very uncomfortably against each other. No one likes chafing. The University wants to keep costs down, and passing on Langwith bar’s overheads to YUSU must have seemed like an excellent idea at the time. They could forget about the running of Langwith JCR, and carry on planning conferences with a little less interruption. The acquisition of Langwith was a coup for YUSU too, allowing them to offer prospective students a temporary Student Union before Heslington East provided the real thing.

The current situation shows the Union has rather more power to wield than they always remember. There will undoubtedly be red faces and much wringing of academic hands this week, as the University work out how exactly Burton made them look like incompetent amateurs in front of the couple of thousand new students who may not have been aware of this unfortunate fact until just now.

The outcome to this debacle can be predicted with a fair amount of confidence. It is expected that YUSU will see the loss of a 24 hour licence as preferable to the loss of Langwith as a student bar altogether. I envisage that Burton and Scott will give in to her ultimatum, the insomniac alcoholics among us will remain thirsty, and tensions will cool slightly, from boil to simmer, in the metaphorical pot of University-student relations.

Do not be fooled by a period of calm, however. There are and will always be officers who take more initiative than expected, people in power who aren’t paying attention to their inboxes, and journalists hanging around to ask all the awkward questions.

But then again , the minutes of YUSU meetings never really say anything worth reading, do they?

John Apea, a third year Sociology and Social Policy student, won the best screenplay award for Run, Baby, Run at the African Movie Academy Awards in May. He also played the starring role in the film.

Run, Baby, Run tells the story of a young student who inadvertently picks up a huge stash of cocaine in London. After selling on the cocaine, the original owners track him down, leading to a dash across Britain and Africa, ending in Ghana, where the cocaine originated.

The film received a total of four awards at the ceremony held in Nigeria. Apea said of the ceremony: “As I looked into the crowd, I could see the jury members clapping and we actually had a standing ovation. The atmosphere was impeccable, extremely glamourous and well co-ordinated.”

For Ghanian Apea, the award came as a surprise: “The look on peoples’ faces showed that they were in shock that a film from Ghana, which is considered backward in filmmaking, had won four awards.”

The film explores a regional drug industry that is out of control. About 300 tons of cocaine, with a street value of £30 bn, is now trafficked through West Africa to Europe each year, according to Interpol estimates.

The topic of abortion is always described as “emotive”, but in this case it seems that the majority of MPs voted for scientific reasons and fact rather than with any subjective emotional or religious instincts. Similarly, our own student union is broadly pro-choice, and the stem cell research which currently goes on at the University would suggest that the academic arm of this institution is in agreement with the use of human cells for the progression of scientific understanding into disease.

Students are traditionally seen as diehard liberals, but the presence of activists from both sides of the debate on campus, prove that a core of committed individuals will always keep the issues around abortion or embryo research in discussion. Our student population, however, voted overwhelmingly for the Right to Choose Fund to remain when its existence was threatened by a motion proposed last summer.

Anne-Marie Canning, YUSU President, said that the retention of the limit was “great”. She added that “people aren’t pro-abortion, they’re pro-choice, and for those students who get to 24 weeks and need an abortion there’s a reason for that.” The Women’s Officers, Sophie Harrison and Eilidh McIntosh, declared themselves to be “pleased” with the result of the bill.
Here on campus, motions to improve access to abortion, and the Right to Choose Fund are examples of the environment of tolerance and progress that characterises the student population, as well as UK politics.

The advantages of this are twofold. Firstly, we are at the forefront of technology, and the benefits our generation can hope to gain from this research are happening right here. Research at the YCR Cancer Research Unit is into human prostate carcinoma, which currently ranks second amongst male tumours in incidence and mortality. Research into Parkinson’s disease and spinal muscular atrophy are expected to be the main beneficiaries of the use of human-animal embryos, and should the researchers succeed, we will be the ones who will have the option of the right treatment to combat these diseases.

The £10,000 budget of the Right to Choose Fund is split into £1,000 for the procurement of an abortion should a woman decide that she needs an abortion as soon as possible, with the rest devoted to childcare for student parents. Canning says that “a couple of cases a year” arise in which the woman involved needs an abortion, and says that the childcare portion of the Fund is “very well used”.

These examples are characterized by their practical usage in improving the everyday lives of students and the general public alike. Despite what the right wing press and some religious traditionalists purport to be the truth, abortions are not taken lightly, and the tiny number (1.9%) that occur between 20-24 weeks are often, according to the charity Marie Stopes International, the women in the most desperate circumstances. These women include those on methadone as part of drug rehabilitation programmes, (methadone stops periods) whose lives are in danger if the foetus continues to develop, or victims of rape and abuse whose emotional state prevents them from seeking help earlier in the pregnancy.

The bill served as a reminder of the genuinely progressive country in which we live. We will benefit from its practical implications, and for that we should be glad.

We all know YouTube as the site where you can find videos of pandas sneezing, or of idiotic teenagers filming themselves falling off skateboard ramps.

However, a new generation of students and activists are harnessing the potential of YouTube not as mindless entertainment but as an immediate and effective medium for campaigning and raising awareness on student issues and societies.

Derwent College Chair Oliver Lester posted a 7 minute video on YouTube that showed the appalling lack of safety, hygiene and living space available in the kitchens of E and F blocks of his college.

It highlighted the impossibility for 16 students to cook on a Baby Belling microwave/hob together with the danger of overcrowded kitchens. The video featured appliances balanced precariously on shelves and underlined the expense the students involved incurred in constantly eating out, given that cooking was a practical nightmare. After posting the video and promoting it on Facebook, it became the 3rd highest rated link for people searching for “Derwent College” on Google.

Lester decided to take action after living in Derwent himself and seeing none of the facilities change, despite promises to the contrary, when he became a second year. He says he was attracted to YouTube after traditional methods failed to make a difference “writing letters just takes too long to achieve anything, whereas making a film means that it will be viewed by far more people.

“I made half an hour of film in the block, edited it and it was on YouTube by midnight. Within 3 or 4 days the persistent mould had been deep cleaned and there will be a complete renovation of cooking facilities over the summer.”

York students have not used YouTube solely to campaign on specific issues, but have also promoted their societies or personal candidacies in elections on the site.

James Townsend, President of the New Generation Society (NGS), uses YouTube as a way of putting across what his society stands for. He says: “YouTube puts politics into the mainstream. Young people might not choose to watch an hour long news bulletin, but they might stumble across something on YouTube which really inspires them. The mix between people falling over and musings on the future of the health service makes it all more accessible.” The NGS posts videos of speaker events to maximise exposure. When guests like Sir Crispin Tickell, the famous climatologist, come to speak to the society they are filmed with YouTube and Facebook in mind.

In recent YUSU and college chair elections, students have posted videos of themselves explaining their policies on camera as a way of interacting quickly and directly with a large group of potential voters. When Laura Payne campaigned for YUSU President, she posted a video on YouTube to highlight the issues she wanted to raise, and to encourage undecided students to pick her for the top post with a personal message.

Similarly, Joe Clarke, who went on to become Goodricke College Chair, posted a video of himself touring the college and proclaiming that if won the position then events would no longer take place in the “school disco” venue of Goodricke Hall.

What is clear is that this kind of campaign can be extremely effective in getting traditionally reluctant figures to listen to the concerns of students. Lester says: “I got emails from the University management at the top level, and they were angrier that they weren’t aware of the problems, other than with my video.”

The democratic nature of YouTube means that anyone with a camera and an internet connection can use it to campaign or promote, and it is this grassroots emphasis that makes the video-sharing site such an asset to activism. In contrast to most direct forms of action it actually yields results.

Jeff Jarvis, the MediaGuardian columnist, summarises the power of YouTube with the typical language of an activist and firebrand: “We are watching the seeds of a revolution sprout right before our very eyes”.

JO: Why do you think that the British government and governments around the world are so bad at realising the scale of climate change and doing something about it?

STC: In the last few years a great transition has taken place, and once you start to get these transitions they can become very quick, we’ve seen in the last 18 months, or maybe 2 years, that a great transition has taken place on the climate change issue. Now, other issues don’t come across but perhaps they will in the future. Once the scientific community begins to take a certain position, gradually it will permeate debate and then finally it ends up on the desks of politicians, and they have to make some very difficult decisions. So you see it’s not just miserable politicians who can’t do what they need to, the fact is they are all genuine points of difficulty. The problem is with current thinking, and when I deliver the lecture this evening I hope to address the background thinking involved.

JO: So you don’t think people like George Bush are actively impeding efforts to make a difference when it comes to climate change?

STC: I don’t think he understands what’s going on. You have to allow him honourable motives, however half-witted he may appear.

JO: In your speech summary you claim that we need to ‘abandon consumerism’. This is quite a big claim to make in a society that is now run by that ideology.

STC: Well it rather depends on what you mean by ‘consumerism’. When you place human consumption and human production ahead of everything such as is happening with the ‘credit crunch’ where you assume that society will crash if you stop consuming, then you need to think that we need a different kind of society. For that reason there is the issue of economists talking about the importance of growth continuing, but what they mean is putting production before welfare, whereas the first thing I would do is say that you’re going to have it the other way round, and have human welfare before just producing things. At the moment our society is geared towards just producing things rather than human welfare, and that is one of the problems that has arisen. It is also the reason why there is such a widening gap between rich and poor in our society.

JO: Do you think that’s the fault of globalisation?

STC: It’s not the fault, globalisation is one of the symptoms of what’s going on at the moment, plus globalisation is a product of technology, of being able to communicate in a way which wasn’t possible for a previous generation. It also means that when something happens in one part of the world it can affect other parts rather more quickly than would otherwise be the case, and people feel very uneasy about that, but it isn’t linked directly to consumerism.

JO: Thinking more about solutions, what about concepts like Biosynthesis, where bacteria can be trained to “mop up” carbon dioxide particles in the atmosphere. Is this the kind of solution we should be looking at?

STC: Well, that’s one of the many solutions we are looking at, and are being canvassed at the moment, mopping up carbon dioxide, that’s one of the things, also dropping iron filings in the ocean, one of a whole lot of options for drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. I think nearly all of them are very untested and at the very beginning. Indeed, I am one of the judges of the Richard Branson Prize, did you know he has created a prize of $25 million for someone who can find a commercially viable way of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? They’d had almost 4000 entries around a year ago, there is an enormous amount of possibility there. Of course the easiest way of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to put less into it, as you know it does eventually dissolve, even if it does take a long time to do so. But you need something to control and reduce the amount in the atmosphere.

JO: For our readership on a more practical level, people hear phrases like ‘carbon footprint’ but they don’t always know what they mean, what simple solutions can the average student integrate into their daily life?

STC: A mixture of top down solutions and bottom down solutions. Top down solutions are governments using what I call “the fiscal instruments” to tax some things and reward others, and they set an example. Bottom up solutions mean that you don’t waste, that your house is properly insulated etcetera etcetera, but the most important one is what I was talking about a moment ago, where you start thinking in different terms. You don’t regard production and consumption as the top priorities in human society, you realise that human welfare and employment and longer term balance in any society. The Chinese have a word for it. It is no something that we have in our society, which is based on rather crude notions of growth, of economic growth.

JO: Talking about China, the issue of overpopulation is particularly contentious because people don’t want to be told how many children to have, but do you feel that the Chinese policy of one child per family is something that we will need to start pushing in our own society or is that going too far?

STC: Every society has its own way of managing its social problems, the Chinese had a huge social problem in the multiplication of their numbers, in the time of Mao Tse-Tung there were around 300-400 million people, there are now 1.3 billion and rising, so they realised there was going to be a tremendous problem in relation to resources, and then as you know they have hideous problems with pollution, so they implemented the one child one family policy which is appropriate for Chinese society but is not the kind of thing that could happen here because our society works rather differently. But if you say “should we reduce our numbers?” I would say well, yes we should, and one of the things I will say in the lecture is that we should aim for a much smaller population.

When measuring fertility, I think the base figure is 2, so if you are 2.1 you are keeping the levels of the population where they now are, so if you take some parts of Africa where they are at 5.7, you can see they are going very hard in the wrong direction, and there is a high infant mortality rate and so on. In this country we are at 1.7, but our population is increasing as a result of immigration, so in our case I think people have got the message. If you go to some parts of the world in Africa where population is still increasing drastically, it has to be explained, and I think it is being explained, population levels are coming down. When I went to Mexico the first time I think it was about 5, now it’s down to about 2.3.

Different parts of the world it has come down quite drastically. Of course it goes hand in hand with the emancipation of women. Where women have control over their own bodies, they want to be people rather than baby making machines, and then everything changes. You’ve got four factors effectively, one is the role of women, where women have the same status as men population rates nearly always fall, and secondly you’ve got care in old age, if you’ve got no one surviving into old age then this isn’t necessary, and then you’ve got the preference for boys, which changes things although that will correct itself, in China soon women are going to be so highly prized because there is less of them. So there are a whole lot of factors of this sort which affect population increase.

When I go to speak this evening I shall say that it is extremely hard to see straight lines going in any direction. If you jump forward a hundred years and look back, there will probably be a much higher rate of fertility, whereas in the interim we have to cope with running a society where relatively older people survive for much longer. Having multiplied at an incredible rate since the industrial revolution we are now facing the consequences, and I think population issues are extremely important, but that hasn’t made its way back to the top of the political agenda.

People are worried about it. The Pope, the Pope doesn’t like it, he wants people to have babies all the time. Catholic priests are more moderate in their enthusiasm. Population was a big issue about 30 years ago, now it’s not, but I suspect it will come back because it has to be discussed as one of the big environmental problems of our time, it’s one animal species out of control, and the awful thing is that if we don’t control it then Mother Nature will do it for us.

As a taster of what he believes the future holds, he casually mentioned at the beginning of our interview that “the current president of the Royal Society gives our civilization only a 50% chance of survival.” Prior to his speech, Sir Crispin’s thoughts seemed to centre more around the looming hazards than the diminishing prospects in our society.

From this cheery introduction Sir Crispin proceeded to talk about issues like climate change, consumerism, overpopulation and what should be done to limit their disastrous effects.

“When you place human consumption and human production ahead of everything such as is happening with the ‘credit crunch’, and where you assume that society will crash if you stop consuming, then you need to think that we need a different kind of society.”

As the pioneer of research into these areas, Sir Crispin was attempting to galvanise opinion on the topic as far back as 1977 with his book Climate Change and World Affairs. He claims that the root problem of tackling environmental issues lies not with politicians, but rather with “the background thinking” involved.

“At the moment our society is geared towards just producing things rather than human welfare, and that is one of the problems that has arisen. It is also the reason why there is such a widening gap between rich and poor.”

Similarly, when asked about practical solutions students can incorporate into their daily lives, he is unrepentant: “You can try not to waste, make sure your home is properly insulated and so on, but really you have to prioritise human welfare and employment and longer term balance.”

On the issue of overpopulation, Sir Crispin says that a smaller, more manageable society is the only way forward. Would this mean a society along Chinese lines of one child per family? “Every society has its own way of managing its social problems… there was going to be a tremendous problem in relation to resources, and then as you know they have hideous problems with pollution, so they implemented the one child one family policy which is appropriate for Chinese society but is not the kind of thing that could happen here.”

Sir Crispin also has a very dry wit, useful when your point of view is often the one people do not want to hear. Questioned on whether George Bush is actively impeding efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions, he replies, without missing a beat: “I don’t think he understands what’s going on. You have to allow him honourable motives, however half-witted he may appear.”

Furthermore, he believes the Pope “seems to want people to have babies” and this is “unhelpful”. Sir Crispin offers a coldly pragmatic approach, but it is one formed over a lifetime of research and a deep understanding as a scientist. We would do well to heed him and take a similarly hard look at our own consumer-driven lives. Maybe we can raise those unimpressive odds on our future as a species.

>>>Read the interview in full here

Instead, the news this week is the controversy between a landlady, and the six students who were living in her property on half rent while building work was completed. Needless to say, when the rent returned to its normal rate the project was not completed, the students felt they were being ripped off, and the landlady felt her generosity had been exploited.

I don’t want to explore the minutiae of the ongoing court proceedings, but this example is typical of the lack of awareness and communication that ensure we get a raw deal wherever we choose to lay our silly little heads. In the case outlined above, the University actually took the side of the landlady, leaving the students to defend themselves without any extra financial or legal aid. There is some confusion as to why this is the case, but the proceedings, it seems, could have been avoided entirely. If we just paid a little more attention to what we are signing up for, and had some basic understanding of our legal rights as private tenants we could avoid the messy aftermath of our own stupidity.

It is an oft-forgotten fact that because students never ask for anything in writing, they can never prove anything they have agreed with the proprietors. Furthermore, they will happily sleepwalk into contracts with the larger letting agencies, such as Sinclair Properties (not the company used in the current controversy). Sinclair students find themselves agreeing to the kind of stop-and-search which the police require a warrant for, but that the aforementioned letting agency euphemistically term an “inspection”. The University’s legal team, which offer to check over every student’s contract, has been known to unofficially warn against Sinclair. Nevertheless few students take advantage of this service, let alone are aware of Sinclair’s reputation.

Many people are so clueless that they end up paying for things they couldn’t possibly avoid causing. Witness the friend who was left with a severely defunct old vacuum cleaner. The agent acting on behalf of the landlord promptly charged all the students living in the house £50 apiece for, surprise, surprise, a thick layer of dust all over the carpets and skirting boards.

Though in addition to the exploitative nature of some owners of student property, we don’t help ourselves by being some of the most filthy creatures ever to crawl the earth. How can we expect landlords to treat us like decent human beings when we act like half-evolved primates?

Of course, the situation is certainly not alleviated by the fact that Sinclair advertise pops up on the YUSU website, despite their dubious record on student welfare. But regardless of this, we need to be far more aware of our legal rights. Perhaps the students from the latest legal case should have gone to their Academic and Welfare Officer? Hold that thought.

The Rotters’ Club follows the lives of three teenagers as they battle their hormones and prog rock fetishes against the backdrop of the strikes, IRA bombs and political unrest of the 1970s. This relatively solid premise is not, however, well reflected in the somewhat flimsy prose that Jonathan Coe employs.

The descriptions of the 1970s are (I’m told) incredibly realistic. It is difficult to believe that Britain was once subject to routine power cuts and that the manufacturing industry was brought to its knees by socialists and trade unions. It all sounds very exciting, and for a generation who was born into the greed and anxiety of the late 1980s, impossibly idealistic.

His tendency towards sentimentality and cliché mar the well-developed sense of humour for which he is well known. As a result, while Ben Trotter’s overblown descriptions of his love for Cicely, or the description of his terror at forgetting his swimming trunks and being forced to swim naked in front of his classmates are great vignettes within the novel, Coe’s treatment of some of the themes is jarringly heavy-handed.

Ever since The Trial catapulted Alex Wright into campus legend last term, there have been whisperings as to how he would follow up such an original production. He answers his critics with Metamorphosis, another stage adaptation of Kafka, this time of a short story rather than a novel.

Once again, we are told not to bring large bags, and to wear comfortable shoes. Again, we are led in one by one into the Drama Barn. However, here the similarities end, and a quick look at the cast would suggest that Alex Wright is now very much part of the DramaSoc establishment, as opposed to existing primarily on the experimental fringe. DramaSoc Chair Jamie Wilkes plays the starring role of Gregor Samsa, the honest worker who turns into a beetle one night, and the obscene but hilarious Dom Allen continues his run of playing the slightly deranged older man (see Stone Cold Dead Serious and Tartuffe for examples) as Gregor’s father.

Anyone who has read Metamorphosis will tell you that it is one of the most unremittingly bleak pieces of fiction ever written. Imagine my surprise, then, to find that Wright’s production was the catalyst for random bouts of hysterical laughter. The first half hour, before Gregor transforms, was full of cartoonish grotesques feeding people crisps, pouring them coffee, caressing their faces, and in my case, stealing their shoes. The ability to inject humour into this darkest of stories was something that few would have considered, or dared, to try.

The greatest strength of the production was the impeccably choreographed sections of physical theatre. The use of scaffolding to support Wilkes as a beetle and the four chorus/grotesque characters was an inspired choice. The amount of time invested in rehearsal was palpable from the strength of the fight scene between Gregor and his father, which flung the two characters around the stage but never threatened to spill over into the audience sitting cross-legged and open mouthed beside the action.

It is difficult to pick out a particular actor or actress who transcended the talents of all the others, but this is in part due to Wright’s very democratic spreading of roles and acting, whereby the cast is onstage constantly and is in character and interacting with the audience at all times. This can be somewhat overwhelming, as the set was also sprawled around the barn so that absolute attention was required of the viewer of this savage spectacle. However, when pressed I would say that Alex Forysth’s melancholic outbursts: “We didn’t dance like this in prison!” seemed to generate the most laughter, and of the major characters, Jamie Wilkes, purely for his unbending characterisation of the role of Gregor and the physicality of the beetle, were of particular note.

Wright has set the bar far higher than was ever expected of those who directed or acted in the barn, and with Tapestry, The Trial and now Metamorphosis to his name, the sometimes staid and stubbornly pseudointellectual old guard of DramaSoc should be well aware by now that they have been left to gather dust with the rest of the out of date props in the cupboard.

If you were to read the University’s Annual Financial report, an exercise that is quite an enlightening experience, as mind-numbing as it sounds, you would discover something rather amazing. If the figures alone were anything to go by, any York student would think they were attending an institution so awash with cash as to put the vulgar little nouveaux riches colleges of Oxbridge to shame.

Snippets read “there has been a 12% rise in the University’s total income over the past 12 months” and “operating cashflow was the highest it has ever been” or even “the increased consolidated income of £187 million is almost £20 million more than the previous year”. These would suggest that we walk along pathways of gold, sipping Dom Perignon from champagne fountains in Vanbrugh as we chat to each other on complimentary BlackBerries about the difficulty of employing good staff these days.

Instead, it is nigh on impossible to walk around campus at the moment, with bridge closures and swamp-like conditions on the routes which are open, and if you avoid the physical pitfalls there is always the constant money grabbing by the University for, books, gym membership, course packs and fees. Reports that YUSU officers have begun assaulting students to steal their phones and wallets remain unconfirmed.

So where is all this money going? Not to the Library, which has faced massive funding cuts, or to Your:Books, which is shutting down after. And certainly not to Nouse and Vision, whose courageous reportage is currently in jeopardy because of increased print costs which the union, and by implication the university, cannot cover. So although the campus and our education is supposedly “a priority”, according to the University, it seems that money is actually disappearing down two metaphorical black holes.

The first is Heslington East. The development, estimated to cost around £500 million, will double the size of the student population, give us a swimming pool, student union venue, and basically our dignity back. We will finally have the features of a campus which most other students across Britain take for granted. However, the second reason is altogether more mundane and predictable, and all the more depressing for it.

The restaurant where I work in York, which shall remain nameless, is one of the upmarket eateries on Fossgate. The average bill for two people usually comes to around £80. And who do I see traipsing in, week after week, and whipping out credit cards with ‘University of York’ embossed on them for meals of £500+ for parties, or the odd couple of hundred pounds here or there in groups of three or four? Thus far, I have served and chatted to members of the English, Philosophy, Law, Politics, Psychology, Physics and TV, Film & Theatre departments, some of them a handful of times each. The need for expense accounts to attract clients is understandable, but I only work two shifts a week, which means that I probably meet a fraction of the actual number of university staff who are spending our fees drinking yet another £25 bottle of wine to go with their venison in truffle juices.

Bloated expense accounts are why, to return to the financial report, “plans to manage resources more efficiently failed to reduce expenditure overall”. Perhaps a quick glance at their receipts would remind the departments who casually consume our money that the implications for students, and for York’s financial future, are far-reaching and a shameful mark on the record of this university.

JO: What were your general thoughts on the Queen’s Speech, especially with regards to education?

DW: I thought there was a problem, the problem with Gordon Brown’s premiership, which was that there wasn’t a coherent narrative. The question is, what is that man for, what is the point of Gordon Brown? He was about to call an election, and then he didn’t. Where was the vision? There was a hole in the middle which wasn’t plugged by the Queen’s speech. On specific proposals, we completely share the aspiration of improving prospects for teenagers, we do not have as good a staying on rate as some other countries, but we don’t think that forcing education or training up to the age of 18 is the way forward.

JO: What is the alternative?

DW: More and better apprenticeships, with Further Education colleges not so dependent on payment by the amount of paper qualifications delivered. We need an emphasis on the fundamentals of performance up to age 16, so that basic performance in literacy and numeracy allows them to get the qualifications needed in order to stay on.

JO: On Top up fees, you said: “we’re not calling for the cap to be lifted and we’re not calling for the cap to be lowered” What does this actually mean? It doesn’t seem to be saying anything.

DW: We’re accepting the framework of legislation set by this government. Top-up fees will run for 3 years, then in 2010 there will be a review. Big decisions don’t need to be taken now, but in 2010 we will ask what has happened to access for prospective students from poor backgrounds, and has money actually improved things for students? The future structure, I believe, is in evidence-based policy. Assembling evidence should start now with a review.

JO: Is the increasing commercialisation of education not creating a negative effect? While I’m glad we get things like feedback forms, surely the emphasis should be more on education in itself, not education as a product?

DW: Education cannot be reduced to an economic calculation. I agree that lifetime earnings should not be the only thing taken into account. But the fact that people are paying a fee for it does seem to have brought into universities an explicit contractual change. What are you getting as a student? Students are now consumers, and a good thing too.

JO: Why is that good? Education shouldn’t be a commodity, it’s a right, it’s not going to be if people are going to have to pay for it.

DW: If you’ve got the academic qualifications to benefit from going to university, and I don’t believe in artificial restrictions, then you should have that opportunity. However, the contractual arrangement makes students more savvy, and aware of what they’re getting in return. Students are entitled to information like employment statistics. What are the contact hours and employment statistics are things students are entitled to know.

JO: At York, we are days away from a referendum on the NUS. The reasons to leave the NUS seem to me to be purely financial, but would a lack of coherence with a national student body be a good thing?

DW: That is something for the students to decide. I spoke positively about student unions because the University administration shouldn’t take over. However, that decision is up to its members.

JO: Your own children didn’t go to state schools, for example your daughter went to Godolphin & Latymer (fee-paying) How do you have any faith in the state system if you don’t send your children to them? Is it because you don’t have any faith in the state system?

DW: It’s a reasonable decision individual parents take. There is a problem when people feel undermined if it conflicts with their political beliefs. There is no inconsistency between what I say and what I’ve done as a parent. I do believe in a high-quality state education system, but it’s up to the individual parent to make that decision.

JO: But if the parent cannot afford to send their child to a private school, as the majority of parents in this country cannot, how do you reconcile that with your ideas about choice?

DW: I certainly think one of the ways in which we need to reform education is to increase choice, and with smart policies I think it’s possible to have more choice within a publicly financed education system. My successor on the school side, Michael Gove, is looking into more choice within a more diverse school system.

JO: You mean school vouchers?

DW: It needn’t be a ‘school voucher’. That’s often individuals exiting the system. I think the big prize would be to make it easier for more schools to enter the maintained sector. Who knows, fewer parents might pay for their children’s education if this was the case.

JO: What about City Academies? You described them as ‘self-governing independent state schools’ but isn’t this a contradiction? Evidence in the media suggests that GCSE levels are not improving in these schools, surely you need evidence that they are actually helping disadvantaged children before you build anymore?

DW: First of all, that quote is from Tony Blair, it’s how he described them, I was happy to repeat that. On how they’re performing, there is a debate about this. These schools were some of the worst performing schools in the country. Basically Academies are about delivering a dramatic turnaround in areas where the education provision really wasn’t good enough.

JO: You voted against a bill which would have compelled faith schools to accept 25% of its pupils from other backgrounds. Do you not think that in some of the more radical madrasses, for example, the presence of different attitudes might breed a more tolerant attitude?

DW: This is a difficult and finely balanced decision. As a Conservative believer in a rich, diverse civil society I think faith schools are entitled to public funding, but the decision I made was a practical one. There are private Muslim schools out there where I am worried about the education which is on offer, but the big prize is bringing them into the maintained sector. If they are teaching the National Curriculum and their teachers are properly qualified I think it would be a good thing for the education of the children if they were part of the state sector for those reasons, but I think we risk losing them if we tell them they must accept 25% of their intake from other backgrounds. Bringing that kind of school into the maintained sector would be powerfully integrating.

JO: So you want some schools to be more self-governing, but you want to bring others into the state sector?

DW: I want a much more open maintained sector. At the moment it consists by and large of local authority community schools. But there is not only this model. Academies, faith schools, historically Catholic and Protestant faith schools, but now, I hope, Muslim faith schools should all be a part of it. It makes the choice more real if more schools are under the maintained sector.

JO: Boris Johnson. Anthony Seldon, the Master of Wellington College, spoke at the university last week and raised an issue about him, in that does anyone really know Boris Johnson’s views, apart from being generally right wing? What are his views on gay people, his views on feminism? He doesn’t give us the full picture. Is he the right person to run one of the most diverse cities in the world if he doesn’t give us those views, possibly because they are unsavoury?

DW: I think we know Boris’s views on every subject under the sun! Boris is a modern, tolerant, civilised Briton who understands that Britain is incredibly diverse. Boris is a member of my Education team and is a fantastic guy to work with. I know Boris’s view of the world would be as a mayor with no problem with London’s diversity, he’d love it.

JO: You were Policy Co-ordinator from 2003-5 during the Michael Howard era. Do you see the same mistakes being made by David Cameron as by his predecessor, for example piping up about immigration again, solely because it hasn’t been talked about for a while?

DW: The Con party has had three landslide defeats. We have begun to register that this is the country trying to tell us something.

JO: What do you think that might be?

DW: They want a party that is comfortable with Britain today. We don’t think we can recreate some bygone age. I understand that, David Cameron understands that, Boris Johnson understands that. On the immigration point, when David Cameron talks about it, there is a completely different tone, it’s about population change in Britain and Trevor Phillips praised his speech for talking about immigration in a mature way, Immigration is a legitimate matter for public policy debate, but it’s very important that people know that you’re not talking about it in a way that is xenophobic or racist. The person who hasn’t managed this is Gordon Brown, with “British jobs for British workers”. He borrowed a BNP slogan and used it in a speech! I think David Cameron and us in the Shadow Cabinet know that it’s a legitimate issue, and I think Gordon Brown needs to learn that lesson.

JO: You said in an Independent interview that the modern Tory Party was about “trusting people”. Now what does that mean in terms of actual policy? It’s a nice idea, but did the Tory Party not trust people before?

DW: Well, it’s a slogan hallowed by history, “trust the people” goes back to the 19th century, I think what it means today because in a world where people are more consumerist in their attitude, where traditional ties are weakened, you can find out before you go to see a doctor, by googling your symptoms, come up with three ideas about how it could be treated, and in the modern world traditional top-down politics becomes difficult to sustain. We needs less regulation, interference, less ‘government knows best’.

JO: One example of that from a social point of view is that you voted against a bill which would have lowered the homosexual age of consent to 16. Would you not say that that was interfering with people’s opinions and desires for what they want to do?

DW: Inevitably, you need some framework of law for a whole series of moral questions. The nature of law will, of itself, constitute some social view about the age of an embryo which can or cannot be aborted. What is acceptable at some point is that the law does get involved in people’s sexual behaviour. What is acceptable language to use in public in front of your fellow citizens? When I say trust the people, that is choice and empowerment, but in a shared polity, within a community which has a moral framework. You cannot completely opt out of setting some kind of moral framework.
You can’t not decide on stem cell research, some think it’s legitimate scientific advance and some think it’s an offence to the integrity of the human being.

JO: But the modern Tory Party wouldn’t take that particular line on homosexuality?

DW: I recognise that the country is changing, attitudes are changing.

JO: So you’d vote differently now?

DW: I think that I probably would, yes. If you look at society, there has been a big change in attitudes towards gays in the last generation which has basically been a good thing.

JO: Finally, Grammar schools – What was wrong with what you did? Do you stand by what you said?

DW: What I said was that we have academically excellent schools, some of them are comprehensives, we have some academically excellent private schools. What concerned me then and still concerns me is that it is very hard for a child from a modest background to get to any of those types of schools. It is not that grammar schools are bad, they continue to achieve their historic mission, but society around them has changed and it is harder and harder for grammar schools to take children from a variety of backgrounds.

JO: Do you really think David Cameron really had a right to overrule you on that? He went to Eton.

DW: David Cameron has said all along there will not be a return to the 11-plus, and that remains the party’s view.

David Willetts – Shadow Education Secretary

David Willetts asks me if I’m going to interrogate him. I laugh to avoid the question, and hope this puts him at ease. Willetts is one of the few controversial figures still left in the Shadow Cabinet. He infamously broke ranks over grammar schools this year, suggesting that there should not be a freeze on building new selective state schools. It cost him his position but not his career; he is now the Secretary of State for Innovation, Higher Education and Skills.

We meet the day after the Queen’s Speech; “What is the point of that man?” Willets says acidly of Gordon Brown, “What is he for?” He holds Brown’s proposals for education in equal contempt. Our first topic is the proposed compulsory leaving age of 18. This is described as “forcing” pupils to stay on when they don’t have the will or the ability to do so. Willetts’ alternative would be more autonomy in education: “We need more and better apprenticeships. We need an emphasis on the fundamentals of performance up to age 16, so that basic performance in literacy and numeracy allows them to get the qualifications needed.”

To Willets, Blair’s legacy is a set of half-baked reforms that didn’t go far enough in terms of providing choice. Willetts also wants more autonomy for City Academies. He believes they are “delivering a dramatic turnaround”, but one wonders whether they fit more into the economic model for education he prefers, even if their actual progress is limited.

Willets is himself the product of a Birmingham grammar school, but his children go to fee-paying independents like Godolphin and Latymer in West London. Would he not have preferred to send his children into the state system which, partly at least, helped him to be where he is today? “It’s a reasonable decision… There is no inconsistency between what I say and what I’ve done as a parent. I do believe in a high-quality state education system, but it’s up to the individual parent to make that decision.” But for all his protestations about the democracy of widening choice, he does not deny that a turn to consumerism in education will make parents and pupils into “customers”, with all the implications for market inequality that this will inevitably bring.

As for university students, Willetts believes that top-up fees have made us “more savvy”. That is a massively euphemistic phrase to describe the result of the average £18,000 debt shackled to our ankles when we graduate. “Students are now consumers, and a good thing too,” he says. Standards of quality in education are important, and on this point Willetts is admittedly right: “Students are entitled to information like employment statistics. The contact hours and graduate-level job prospects are things students are entitled to know as part of the contractual agreement.”

Market forces in the state education system is Willetts’s openly acknowledged aim. What the country will have to decide is whether it wants an education system where choice of schools is dictated by wealth.

Read the full transcript of this interview: here

Bill Rammell – Minister for Higher Education

The Labour government has often been criticised for exercising unimaginative, target-driven leadership, and no other policy area reflects this notion as strongly as education. Statistics, both international and of their own invention, appear to be at the core of Labour’s motivation.

The most recent of these initiatives is to raise the compulsory schooling age to 17 in 2013, and again to 18 in 2015. During a recent visit to the University, Bill Rammell, Minister for Higher Education, refuted the simplicity of this notion, stating: “We’ve got to stop seeing this described as raising the school leaving age”.

This policy would be enforced by fines of up to £200 for any child caught truanting. There would be financial incentives in the form of an Educational Maintenance Allowance, which provides students with up to £30 a week for good attendance. However, so far this has only seen a 4% increase in the number of boys staying on in further education.

Labour are also implementing diplomas to serve as a viable alternative to A-levels. The impression is of an inward focus for our education system, but international prestige is actually more important. As Bill Rammell neatly asserted, “you look at the international evidence and those universities that are at the forefront of globalization of higher education, most advanced countries have got higher education participation rates than we’ve got”.

But a report this month outlined the “unrealistic” deadline for the creation of the diplomas, as well as its lack of authority, with A-levels and GCSEs remaining the choice qualifications. Two days prior, authorities had suggested that the academic standard of these traditional qualifications was decreasing.

Labour’s most publicised educational aim is to have 50% of all pupils attending higher education by 2010. The figures have been lodged at 43% for several years, and it ap­pears Labour will not bridge the 7% gap by its own deadline. When questioned on the matter Rammell said that “it is an incredibly competitive global environment. We’ve got to get many more people from different backgrounds going to university.” Many believe that a more important goal is to improve the education we already have access to.

Further discussion with Rammell shows Labour’s incentive to inflate education participation numbers, rather than improve the education itself. In September the government withdrew funding for second degree students, shutting the door to those who want to pursue a new career but have little personal funding. Rammell refused to apologise for the policy, claiming it was the “right one”, and that the 70% of people already in the workforce who don’t have degrees are a greater priority.

Like so many on the government benches Rammell’s belief in the positive influence of the market is clear. How far it will be taken forward remains to be seen.

The University of York is ranked among the world’s top 100 universities, according to a new set of rankings.

The University is ranked 74th in the QS – Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) rankings, a climb of 50 places from 124 since last year. The league ranks the leading 500 of the world’s 40,000 universities.

The University’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Brian Cantor said: “This independent evaluation is a reflection of the consistently high standard of our teaching and the quality of our research. York is one of the youngest universities in the top 100. To achieve this standing in just 44 years is remarkable.”

Speaking to Nouse, John O’Leary, founder of the World University Rankings and former editor of the THES, said: “York’s scores are strong across the board and their rise this year reflects a growing international reputation. York has done better that it has done recently in a number of years, especially the in the peer review indicator, meaning it has been reviewed well internationally.”

York shares its spot at 74 with Emory University in the United States. It is placed one position above St. Andrews University.

Harvard University maintained its position at the top of the league with an overall score of 100. The Universities of Cambridge and Oxford were tied for second place with a score of 97.6.

British universities were well represented in the table with 32 institutions featuring in the top 200. The top of the table continued to be dominated by American universities with 13 of the top 20 institutions in the United States.

The table was compiled using scores from six different indicators. York scored especially highly in the Employer Review category and the International Students category, scoring 91 and 83, respectively. The Employer Review is compiled by asking employers which universities’ graduates they seek out to employ, while the International Students category.

The table relies heavily on the results of a peer review survey carried out by the THES in partnership with Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), an education services company. 5,101 academics from around the globe are invited to take part in the survey and asked to list what they considered to be the world’s top 30 universities. New measures have been brought in this year in order to prevent academics voting for their own institutions, which often leads to skewed results.

O’Leary said that British universities in general have been helped from a change in methodology which meant no one score in a single category could overly impact a university’s total score. He said: “We apply z-scores to ensure that a really good score in one particular indicator does not carry too much weight, because a lot of the British universities, including York, tend to be strong across all indicators. They have benefitted from a method which means that everything is equally influential.”

­The table’s top 200 universities are in 28 countries, with only four from the developing world – two from Brazil, one from Mexico and South Africa’s University of Cape Town, which entered the top 200 for the first time.

A student at the University of York has won a role in a film after attending a virtual audition on the social networking site MySpace.

Phil Lester, a third year Language and Linguistics student, won the part in the film Faintheart after uploading an amateur video of himself at a mock job interview as the character of ‘Tim’, the role he later won.

He said: “I have always been interested in all aspects of the film industry, so I was hoping for a unique opportunity to see things from an insiders perspective. I had an hour to spare so I made a quick audition video and uploaded it onto the site. To be honest I didn’t think I had a chance but I wanted to give it a go anyway.”

Lester received the part a month after posting the video, having attending further auditions with the Casting Director, Gary Davy, in London. At this point in the selection process, the shortlist for the role had been reduced to just five hopefuls. Groundbreaking in its recruitment procedure, Faint­heart is described by producer Peter Carlton as “a fairly standard rom-com with a lovely Viking twist.”

The video diary that Lester has regularly updated on his MySpace profile, tracking his progress through the initial meeting with Davy through to the most recent posting after two days on set, has attracted something of a cult following Faintheart is being hailed as one of the first user-generated major motion pictures, with actors and crew all recruited over the internet. The film, by award-winning British director Vito Rocco, has a budget of £1m and has already begun shooting. Rocco was selected from 500,000 MySpace users.

Faintheart, starring British comedy actor Simon Pegg, tells the story of Richard, a sales assistant who takes part in medieval battle re-enactment on the weekends. After being thrown out by his wife he embarks on an epic quest to win her back.

The University is ranked 74th in the QS – Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) rankings, a climb of 50 places since last year. The league ranks the leading 500 of the world’s 40,000 Universities.

The University’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Brian Cantor said: “This independent evaluation is a reflection of the consistently high standard of our teaching and the quality of our research. York is one of the youngest universities in the top 100. To achieve this standing in just 44 years is remarkable.”

York shares its spot at 74 with Emory University in the United States. It is placed one position above St. Andrews University.

Harvard University maintained its position at the top of the league with the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford coming second and third, respectively. British universities were well represented in the table with 16 institutions featuring in the top 100. The top of the table continued to be dominated by American universities with 12 of the top 20 institutions in the United States.