Work · CUJS
Cambridge University Jewish Society
Two years as the person journalists called and university officials had to deal with.
The context
I took over a 400-member society at the point it stopped being a student society and started being a story. For most of two years the campus around us was arguing about us in public, and the argument kept arriving as security decisions, university statements and reporters on deadline.
What the job actually was
- Security liaison with the police, and the judgement calls about which events went ahead
- Negotiating with colleges and the university — usually about something that had already happened
- Briefing national press on deadline, on the record, without making things worse
- Keeping the ordinary business of a society running: welfare, Friday nights, freshers, committee
What came of it
We put on the first Passover on campus in seventeen years.1 Engagement went up roughly 30% across the crisis period — not despite it, but because people wanted somewhere to be. I did more than ten media appearances and kept the community’s trust through all of them, which mattered more than any single one of them landing well.
What I learned
Crisis leadership is mostly clarity and cadence. People tolerate bad news and uncertainty; they don’t tolerate silence. Saying what you know, when you said you would, buys more goodwill than any individual decision.
And negotiation only works when every party can see a route that respects their constraints. The university wasn’t going to act against its own position, and my job wasn’t to make it — it was to find the version of what we needed that it could say yes to.