Alphen,
Netherlands. 20 October. This is a Friday blog blast. Having spent much of the week
undertaking a major edit of the forthcoming GLOBSEC report on NATO Adaptation,
and royally sick of Brexit (bloody hashtag or no) I want to write about
something closer to home - Oxford. Don’t
worry, next week I will write about the October Revolution and Luther, although
not in the same blog.
David Lamy
MP, one of the Labour Party’s more considered activists, has used freedom of
information legislation to ‘prove’ that Oxford and Cambridge do not let enough
people from modest backgrounds to aspire to dream at either. On the face of it the figures speak for
themselves, but only on the face of it.
Indeed, I am living proof of the efforts made by Oxford to recruit ‘oicks
from the sticks’.
My success
had little to do with my being a genius. Rather, I was a beneficiary of the
then then Labour Secretary of State for Education, Shirley Williams. At the time
she was issuing threats to Oxford and Cambridge that were very similar to those
of Mr Lamy and friends today. When I went up to University College, Oxford I
was one of the first pupils from a bog standard Comprehensive School. Comprehensive schools had only been created in
the early 70s by a Labour government which objected to the ‘streaming’ (segregation)
of children by ability. Before
comprehensive schools pupils were divided at the age of eleven into a relatively
small elite who went to so-called grammar schools, and the rest who were ‘binned’
in secondary modern schools doomed, as the Left would have it, to a life of
drudgery and servitude.
Aged eighteen
Oxford frightened the living daylights out of me. Nothing in my prior life had prepared me for
the social shock of ‘going up’, and the only thing lower than my teenage
self-confidence were my social skills.
Well, at least my self-confidence has improved over the years. Worse, because I was reading for an honours
degree in Modern History I was required to pass an examination in Latin (which
gives you some idea about Oxford’s view of modernity) some eight weeks after
arriving in College. Given that the
nearest thing I had to an education in Latin was the occasional visit to a
1970s Italian restaurant this proved somewhat of a challenge.
To say my
first year was not a success is an under-statement. Oxford at the time was more class-ridden than
the very class-ridden society it then served. I felt utterly intimidated by the
people, I hated the place and I felt utterly miserable. Indeed, I would have ‘jacked’ the whole thing
in were it not for the fact that I was a half-decent sportsman and spent much
of my time with US and other foreign Rhodes Scholars. I had a lot more in common with them than
many of the posh kids from ‘pubic’ schools who had spent their entire lives
preparing for just such an elevation. Still,
the College stuck with me, and I stuck with the College, and eventually I
gained my degree.
Fast forward
to today. University College, Oxford,
and its Master Sir Ivor Crewe, make sterling efforts to recruit the best and
the brightest from all backgrounds, and to ensure they are looked after whilst ‘up’. Indeed, I have seen such efforts bear fruit
as ‘College’ today is a very different place to the one I endured and
experienced. In my own modest way I support the College in this endeavour by supporting
in turn students from backgrounds not dissimilar to my own. In the 1970s I hated College, now I am proud
of it and its efforts to promote intelligent diversity, and the sense of family
it creates. Of course, more can and will
be done but not I hope at the cost of the excellence for which Oxford stands.
Like many
alumni I occasionally return to ‘Univ’. Now,
I am careful not to go back too often as I am a firm believer that one should
avoid imposing too much nostalgia on those present today. We all have our time
and then we move on. However, precisely because my return visits are few and
far between I am always pleasantly surprised by the extent to which Univ moves
with the times, and actively seeks so to do.
It would be
an absolute travesty to lower standards simply to meet class/race quotas, or
because Mr Lamy wants to make some class war point, or because much of the country’s
education system is crap. This is because Oxford and Cambridge are, and must
remain inherently competitive places. Any institution committed to excellence
must be. For all the efforts of Sir Ivor
and his team to make students feel comfortable those who were ‘sent up’ simply
to fill said quotas would be miserable. Indeed, for those unable to keep up
Oxford can be an unforgiving place.
Oxford and Cambridge must always recruit the best and the brightest...but how? What David
Lamy’s report really points to is the lamentable state of much of Britain’s state
education. This is something I witnessed
in some students during my brief time as a lecturer at King’s College,
London. What is needed is a school
system that identifies talent early and nurtures it. The problem in many
schools is that such 'selection' smacks too much of the elitism that people such as Mr Lamy
deride.
If Mr Lamy
succeeds Oxford and Cambridge would become like much of the rest of Britain –
bloody mediocre with an elite even more bloody mediocre than the one that is so
royally screwing up the country right now…several of whom were my
contemporaries!
Oxford and
Cambridge are good because they are good.
They should be kept that way.
Julian
Lindley-French
