Marking the government's homework

All the universities have or will submit critiques of the government's plans to dismantle the higher education sector: The Dark Place has already done so, and it was pretty good. Oxford and Cambridge Universities released their own submissions today, and it's not nice, particularly as virtually every government minister is a graduate of one of these institutions (which doesn't say much for the quality of education there). If I were the Tory Party's parents, I'd be phoning a private tutor and taking away the Playstation:

Cambridge’s council warns that ministers risk damaging the global reputation of Britain’s universities and says it is “dismayed” that the White Paper has no “overall vision and strategy” for the sector. It warns that higher education “should not be reduced to a utilitarian equation of cost and personal financial benefit” and also says it is “regrettable” that the government’s approach to reform “has been a cause of alienation rather than one of inclusion”. 

Oxford’s submission… warns that the White Paper proposals “will bring turbulence to the higher education sector which will be felt for many years” and “demonstrate little thought about the links between research and teaching”. “Students are partners in shaping their learning, not consumers of a narrowly defined educational product,” it states. Oxford also raises concerns that “implementation of the model of ‘consumer choice’…will actually hamper attempts to widen access, hindering rather than enhancing social mobility”.

Meanwhile:

Minister David Willetts held at least 12 meetings with for-profit education firms before publishing his plans for university reform for England. Meetings with representatives from two firms accused of recruitment or public loan fraud in the US were among them. 

Amongst the dreaming spires

Over at Oxford, they're debating a motion of no confidence in David Willetts, the Universities Minister. I'm trying to organise the same thing here, as are concerned academics across the country.

But occasionally, our colleagues in the kind of élite institutions which prefer not to admit working-class, poor or ethnic minority students get it horrendously wrong. Here's an extract from a speech by Donald Fraser of Oxford University:

He calls for a return to higher education before 1992, and the creation of the new universities, and refers sceptically to a new university in the Midlands that offers courses in "cake decoration, wines and spirits appreciation" - adding, to laughter from the dons, that he knows students who already do this in their spare time. He says there are too many universities and calls for a cull.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there isn't a single degree-awarding institution offering degrees in these subjects, here in the Midlands or anywhere else: this is a fantasy straight out of the Daily Mail.

If I'm wrong, do let me know. Did you graduate with a First in Cake Decorating?

Caps off to the Oxford Dons though: no confidence in Willetts by 283-5.

Black? Get back.

No doubt Oxford and Cambridge (and some of my readers) will provide complex arguments about why this isn't so bad as it appears, but I'm shocked.

more than 20 Oxbridge colleges made no offers to black candidates for undergraduate courses last year and one Oxford college has not admitted a single black student in five years.

The university's admissions data confirms that only one black Briton of Caribbean descent was accepted for undergraduate study at Oxford last year.

Let's just reflect on that for a minute. Are we really going to accept that across all classes and educational backgrounds, there was only one British-Caribbean student worthy of a place at Oxford?

Figures revealed in requests made under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act by the Labour MP David Lammy also show that Oxford's social profile is 89% upper- and middle-class, while 87.6% of the Cambridge student body is drawn from the top three socioeconomic groups. The average for British universities is 64.5%, according to the admissions body Ucas.

The FoI data also shows that of more than 1,500 academic and lab staff at Cambridge, none are black. Thirty-four are of British Asian origin.

One Oxford college, Merton, has admitted no black students in five years – and just three in the last decade. Eleven Oxford colleges and 10 Cambridge colleges made no offers to black students for the academic year beginning autumn 2009.

No one from Knowsley, Sandwell and Merthyr Tydfil has got to Cambridge in seven years. In the last five years, pupils from Richmond upon Thames have received almost the same number of offers from Oxford as the whole of Scotland. 

The 'élite' universities are the training grounds for power: your chance of success in any field, but especially politics and government, is immensely boosted by attending these places, with their élite social networks. Denying access to the poor, regional and minority ethnic applicant reinforces the closed nature of the ruling class. Obviously, I'd rather make all universities as good and respected, but in the meantime, we need to smash down the doors. These minority applicants aren't asking for relaxed entrance requirements: they're the best. Take exam results out of the equation and we're left with a very crude and unpleasant explanation for why they're rejected. 

Toodle-pip, old beans

Right, that's it. I'm off to do some more ironing because that's the kind of glamorous life I lead when not teaching. Tomorrow I'm off to Oxford to look intellectual, though I've drawn the line at goatee, teddy bear, bowtie and tweeds. I like tweed though.

Iran is still in ferment. I can't help thinking that overt support from other governments for Moussavi is a terrible idea. If Ahmedinejad retains power, he'll be angry as well as nuked-up. If Moussavi wins, he'll have to prove he's not pro-American if he's to have any chance of governing successfully (this is the Kennedy/Clinton/Blair/Brown strategy: be more rightwing than rightwing parties so that they can't accuse you of being weak on communism/defence/paedos or whatever.

See you on Friday.

An Elegy on the Death of a Promising Professorial Career

With apologies to E. J. Thribb, 17 1/2 lines.

So. Farewell then, Ruth Padel.

You were

Darwin's great-great-grandaughter

And also a poet

Like me.

But

You tried to cheat

your way in

to Oxford University

And now

you have had to resign after one week.

Is this

Poetic Justice?

Perhaps it is.

Such bloody awful poetry

Those of you who've ever been involved in student politics will know that the smaller the stakes, the bitterer the poison. So you won't be surprised (or perhaps interested) by the race for the Oxford Poetry Professor post - a non-job which involves giving a small number of lectures over a few years. But because Oxford and Cambridge are the jealously guarded property of the élite, the race attracts a good deal of backbiting, all stirred up by a press which loves tales of shenanigans in high places.

This year, the competition was between a Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and average poet Ruth Padel, who has been all over the papers this year because she wrote a lot of poems about her ancestor, Charles Darwin. I've used her book, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem for teaching purposes.

The race has been convulsed by 'friends' of Padel anonymously mailing out pages of a book which claims (convincingly) that Walcott sexually harrassed students 25 years ago. Walcott withdrew from the race, Padel won, and now it turns out that she mailed journalists saying things like 'I don't want you to pay any attention to the following claims made in this book which you might not have seen…'. Never mind the scansion - that's good shenanigans.

The depressing thing is that this pointless and sordid affair will fill entire chapters of various boring autobiographies, dutifully to be reviewed in the serious newspapers as though poetry and poets were central to our cultural lives. If only poetry were that important. I'm sure it's the hot gossip at this week's Hay Literary Festival, but nobody else will notice. I wish I were there though - my friend Aimee Lloyd goes for a week of intellectual replenishment every year, but instead I'm googling students' sentences and trawling through footnotes… not that there's anything wrong with marking! Oh well - Hay is a beautiful Welsh town with 80 bookshops, and the last thing I need is that kind of temptation.

(Post title is a Morrissey quote, by the way)

Sounds fair…

My first university was overwhelmingly white - but Bangor University is in North Wales, which has virtually no ethnic minorities other than English. Still there was a fairly substantial non-white cohort. My current employer, Wolverhampton Uni, must have one of the most diverse student populations in the country, both from British-born students and international ones - it's one of the institution's strengths, though I'm never quite sure how well the different groups mix.

In any case, we're much more welcoming than certain universities - these figures are so shocking that it can't simply be written off as a problem with school-level education of black children:

Across all years and subjects, Oxford's student population of 20,000 has around 380 students from a black background, including mixed race, of whom just 175 out of 11,900 are undergraduates.

Cambridge is no better. Perhaps it's partly explained by the greater poverty in minority groups: 40% of Cambridge and Oxford students went to private schools, despite only 7% of children attending such schools. Mmmm…egalitarian