Many years ago I took a year off from my studies at Oxford, at my own request, for medical reasons. My college told me that I would not be allowed to live in Oxford during the time when my studies were suspended. When I returned to Oxford after my year off, I discovered that two other students had deferred their finals for a year, as I did, but were living in Oxford with the knowledge and consent of the College. One was taking a year off, as I had done, and the other was repeating his second year. (The first one was living in college-owned accommdation, and even attended the dinner for College Scholars,then called the Holmes Dinner, although the College Statutes indicated that a Scholar who was out of residence could not hold his Scholarship during the period of his absence.) I applied to the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) for funding to sue the college in the European Court of Human Rights, but my solicitors were told that the NCCL were unable to provide this as other cases had higher priority. However, the NCCL did provide a legal opinion. Although I could not afford to take the matter any further, I left a copy of the NCCL legal opinion with OUSU (the Oxford University Student Union) back in 1989 for the benefit of future generations.
On 28th April 2013 I was advised by a member of the then-current JCR Committee at my old college that the current situation is that intermitting students are no longer required to live away from Oxford, and, moreover, in many cases where the intermission is for non-disciplinary reasons, the student may be allowed to retain access to academic facilities. I was subsequently advised by the Oxford University Suspended Students’ Campaign (in an email of 26th January 2019) that Oxford students were no longer encountering this problem
In 2011 I read on the Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) website that Cambridge operated an analogous policy to the one that I had complained about at Oxford, and on 13th November 2011 I sent the then-current CUSU Education Officer a scan of the 1989 NCCL Legal Opinion which I had left with OUSU as my parting gift to Oxford, and received a grateful acknowledgement from him.
A Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) Council Motion of 21/11/2011 (11 Ordinary Motions a. "Degrading is Degrading" Campaign) indicated that many students at Cambridge who defer their course of studies were not allowed to live in Cambridge while doing so, and that this stipulation was of concern.
There is now a CUSU Guide to Undergraduate Intermission at https://www.disabled.cusu.cam.ac.uk/intermission, page 9 of which emphasizes the difference between not being allowed to enter college grounds and not being allowed to enter or reside in the city of Cambridge. The page states that banning a student from entering Cambridge is not legally enforceable, and I surmise that this comment was influenced by the legal opinion which I sent to CUSU in 2011.
Page 15 of the CUSU Guide indicates that some staff members are still telling students that they may not visit Cambridge during their period of intermission. This page repeat the statement that such a condition is not legally enforceable, and that although a college may ban a student from using college facilities or entering the college, they cannot exclude them from the city centre.
When I asked my solicitors to contact the NCCL, I was considering a challenge under Human Rights law. However, since then I have become aware of the case at http://www8.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/vic/VSC/2010/377.html which suggests that Habeas Corpus may apply not not merely to people who are incarcerated but also to those who have their freedom of movement curtailed.
There was an article in the Sunday Times newspaper in 2015 about the issue of students who suspend their course of studies at Oxford University. I was prompted by this to post a query on the C18-L (eighteenth-century) internet mailing list about when and why the practice of telling students who were deferring their course of studies for medical as opposed to disciplinary reasons that they would not be allowed to live in Oxford during the time of the deferment of their studies (and the analogous practice at Cambridge) first arose. (A difficulty in finding out when the policy originated, and the reason why I could not straightforwardly do a Google books search for rustication, is that the meaning of the word "rustication" has changed over the years. I understood it to refer to exclusion from Oxford for a period of time for disciplinary reasons, whereas now the term is used to denote suspending one’s course of studies at Oxford either for disciplinary or non-disiplinary reasons, with no stipulation being made about where the student lives.) I received an off-list reply dated 27th May 2015 suggesting that it might even date from as far back as the Middle Ages. Whether or not this was the case, the question of how to deal with the Cambridge practice was still baffling CUSU in 2011. Although I have no positive knowledge about those who attended that CUSU Council Meeting in 2011, it is not unreasonable to assume that many of those present would have been under the age of 22, and thus would not even have been born in 1989 when I handed the legal opinion to OUSU.
Finally, although I have no legal training, many people over the years have told me that I should have been a lawyer. I wonder if the authorities at my old Oxford college would agree?
There is an ironic and amusing postcript to this. Some years later I passed my end ofyear PhD assessment at Queen Mary College, London, at a sufficiently good level to be offered a research place at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford, subject to my also being offered a college place. Unfortunately, no college place was forthcoming. The Oxford Mathematical Institute then suggested that I physically move to Oxford while remaining technically registered for a London PhD. Ironically, this ultimately led to my living in Oxford without being a resident member of the university, which was something I had not been permitted to do while I was deferring my undergraduate course of studies. I ended up getting paid at the "London" rate of grant while living in Oxford as a London-registered PhD student, even though I had previously been told that I would only be paid at the "provincial" rate of grant. Ironically, since I have been regularly publicising this final decision of the funding agency over the years, I may well have been instrumental in encouraging many other people to live in Oxford while being PhD students registered elsewhere, i.e. without being resident members of Oxford University.
The story of how I won an Open Scholarship in Mathematics to Oxford after my school refused to support my application is at : oxbridgepolicy.neocities.org/OxfordOpenScholarship
More details about my suggestion that Oxbridge students should consider registering for a London PhD while continuing to live in Oxford can be found here : oxbridgepolicy.neocities.org/PhDFunding.html
My ideas for Oxbridge Access can be found here : oxbridgepolicy.neocities.org/OxbridgeAccess.html