Bitching about the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the dominant positions held by their alumni in the nation's cultural, commercial and governmental institutions has a long historical pedigree. In the 17th century Oliver Cromwell tried in vain to found a rival institution at Durham to bring a bit more pluralism to the existing arrangements. He was largely defeated by a fierce backlash from the incumbents themselves and paradoxically by opposition from some of the very people who might have benefited from greater educational diversity to the long established English and Scottish universities. The Quaker George Fox had earlier revealed ""the Lord opened unto me "that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers of Christ" ". Yet the Quaker still denounced the Protector's modest plan on the grounds that it would cement the established religious orthodoxies to which he objected by increasing the numbers receiving a Puritan form of higher education. Poor old Cromwell; he was a simple soldier and his proposals lay fallow. Durham didn't get its royal charter until 1837, somewhat proving the enduring power of entrenched elites.
Scroll forward to 2022, and there is an updated version of this dissenting tradition in Simon Kuper's Chums - How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. The journalist is better known for his gently philosophical and occasionally whimsical contributions to the FT Weekend Magazine, but here he is in polemical mode, albeit politely expressed. Kuper makes two cases: one banal (and inaccurate) and the other preposterous. The first is the overweening influence Oxford and its graduates have among Britain's elites. He's not sure if this is a good thing. But this is not news at all, and his relative neglect of Cambridge seems odd, although some jubilant Oxford types will enjoy scoffing that the last Prime Minister educated at Cambridge was Stanley Baldwin. His second theory is that a small clique of undergraduates, which included the likes of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Daniel Hannan (two of whom were Kuper's Oxford contemporaries in the late 'eighties), came together to plot and execute Britain's departure from the EU while grabbing Number 10 in the process. It is hard to know what Kuper resents the most - the way their glib rhetorical proficiency, so usefully sharpened at the Oxford Union, disguised their intellectual shallowness and amateurism or that they managed to pull it off.
Either way, the idea that Brexit was a sort of conspiracy seems to deny the voting public any agency while conveniently ignoring the fact that the resultant putsch (if that is what it was) received endorsement in the referendum in 2016 and with votes from across the political spectrum. Nor does it give any credit to the discontents to which the EU and its antecedents gave rise long before Boris's little gang turned up to exploit them. So while Kuper has the good grace to admit that he himself is very much a beneficiary of the narrowly based elitism he affects to criticise, it seems pretty clear that his beef against Johnson & Co. was not that they were successful Oxford graduates, but rather the wrong type of successful Oxford graduates.
Chums looks set to join the lengthening canon of regret and bitter frustration penned by the losing side of the EU referendum debate. The book is an entertaining snapshot of Oxford University in the late nineteen eighties and is well supported by Kuper's insider knowledge. There are also some good vignettes, not least of Simon Stevens, who is also exposed as another congenital bluffer and who went on to do arguably far more damage than Boris and Co. ever did with his disastrous leadership of England's NHS before and during the Covid pandemic. Yet Kuper's case is further let down by the occasional flash of chippiness (he is swiftly damning of David Cameron's alleged lack of affinity with anyone not from Eton or his "class") and he falls way short of offering any solutions to the problems he detects. At least Johnson can be dealt with at the ballot box. As for the egregious impact of Oxford in the national life, Kuper merely suggests that the university should concentrate solely on research and post graduate teaching. It's either that or we'd better get used to its continuing disproportionate influence. Neither seems to be the sort of suggestion that you would expect from a brain trained at the very same university.
And that surely is the real problem, which is we seem to be in thrall to the idea that Oxbridge produces the cleverest people in the UK. Certainly the more prestigious newspapers and journals seem to think so because their feature writers never tire of reminding us if they were at one or other of the universities. It's almost as if they are trying to reassure us about their superiority when all they are really telling us is that their employer chose them because they went to Oxbridge.
If Oxbridge does produce the cleverest people, and their alumni do occupy the highest perches of our national institutions, it should be asked why our cultural establishment is paralysed by group think (which paradoxically is claimed to be "progressive"). Or why the Oxford smarts of the now ennobled Lord Stevens saw the trajectory of "Our NHS" go from top left to bottom right on the performance chart during his seven year watch. Or why our governance is in such a mess. Indeed, at the Home Office a sort of fronde seems to be in progress, with a succession of Oxbridge educated senior mandarins (Trinity Hall, Cantab and Merton, Oxon since you ask) trying to thwart a small woman of Asian descent (Keele) who has been elected.
In the academic year 2020/21 just short of 660,000 undergraduates enrolled at UK universities to take their first degree. Of that cohort, nearly 7,000 got places at Oxbridge - a mere 1% of the total. Most of these latter places were secured by offers conditional on achieving at least 3 A level passes at an A grade, or their equivalent. But for the year in question, well over two fifths of the cohort achieved a mixture of straight A's and A*'s. So how do you sort the wheat from the (high grade) chaff as Oxbridge claims to do in its search for students with "potential"? The truth is that entry is determined by a lottery in which the rigour of the written component has been diluted; by the (modestly) increased use of social profiling, and lastly by the "crucial" interview. Insiders say that the successful candidate is ultimately identified by whether or not the interviewer likes them rather than by their brilliance in being able to handle the mythically difficult Oxbridge interview questions. Of course Oxbridge likes to claim that the whole process is entirely objective and dis-interested, but the colleges didn't get to be as rich as so many of them are by recruiting only those with "potential". Well no system is perfect, and life isn't fair. But arguably too many people defend the status quo by pretending that they are.
One person trying to challenge all this is Professor Stephen Toope (Harvard), a mild mannered Canadian who is just about to step down as Vice Chancellor of Cambridge. In 2020 he got into a frightful mess by trying to introduce a code of conduct enjoining visitors to the university and its members to be "respectful" of any opinion they encounter. The proposal was self-evidently a defence of free speech; but the uproar was tremendous with critics saying that it was precisely the opposite and a surrender to "wokery". As a compromise, the word "tolerance" was substituted for "respect", feathers were smoothed and academic presumptions were preserved. But Toope would surely be right to claim the last laugh because what constitutes a view or opinion "worthy of respect" has been established in law. Opinions need not be either right or wrong, only that they contain a minimal level of cogency, seriousness and coherence. What a pity the indignant and laser sharp intellects in the common rooms hadn't thought of that one.
Toope seemed to be on firmer ground with his recent warning that those who receive a private education or go to a grammar school will get fewer places in the future. For example, Cambridge will show greater partiality for state educated students who qualified for free school meals. As Oxbridge currently recruits 27% of its student body from a privately educated cohort that represents just under 12% of school leavers going on to university, Toope's statement seems a nudge in the direction of fairness. But he has again attracted a lot of ire much of it completely illogical, and containing a high degree of subjective bias. The gist of the whinging by folk like Emma Duncan in the Times is that state school children with worse grades (because they spend too much time on their play-stations) will be favoured over hard working private school pupils (whose parents have scrimped and saved to get them there) with better ones. Some have claimed that the human rights of these advantaged children are thereby being breached, but there is no law which says that the budding intellect has a right to be recognised. Maybe these people should relax: no one is pushing for quotas, else less than 1% of the places would be reserved for Jewish people, because that's their proportion of the UK population. And how stupid would that be? But such is the Oxbridge hex, aspiring parents will go through all sorts of expensive contortions and specious reasoning to give their offspring a shot which already has only the tiniest chance of success.
Happily, market forces are gradually achieving some of Toope's objectives for him. Those well heeled parents with ambitions for their children are increasingly looking at the US Ivy league for their tertiary education. To them the drive for greater diversity at Oxbridge looks too much like social engineering designed to further reduce the chances of their offspring joining the elites. The huge expansion of the university system in Britain has also increased competition for brighter students, and demand for high quality teaching staff to attract them. Many Oxbridge academics are finding better career opportunities away from their alma maters in other UK institutions and overseas. They have greater academic freedom and there is less pressure to conform to an Oxbridge model with its increasingly faint and anachronistic Brideshead aesthetic.
Back in the 1650's the master of Gonville & Caius was the religious dissenter William Dell, who was surely on the nail for his times when he opined "a poor plain countryman by the spirit which he hath received is better able to judge of truth and error touching the things of God than the greatest philosopher". Toope has just dusted Dell off and given his utterance a spring-clean. And if he helps to break the absurd modern fetish about Oxbridge, he will be doing us all a favour.
