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We must end our love affair with the tutorial system

Most people at this university are preoccupied with their own concerns and their own life goals. People can spend longer agonising over applications for nonsensical internships than they do speaking to their own grandparents. That Philosophy student poring over an Ethics book isn’t doing it to become a nicer person. Even when there are ‘big’ protests about some issue, the vast majority of the student rank and file is unaware (often wilfully so) of what is being done in their names. You need something big and personal to get students to the barricades.

Let’s scrap the tutorial system.

My modest proposal could mobilise anger here like nothing since tuition fees. A trawl of the student press will reveal that we have few sacred cows. Oxford is stuffed with absurd institutional practices, and whether it is high table at hall, our Vice-Chancellor’s ‘generous’ salary or the collegiate system itself. But everyone is terribly fond of the tutorial system. It makes us special, after all (along with the supervision system at Cambridge – our sinister doppelgänger). Let’s put this fiercely defended educational privilege up for review. It is ineffective and a waste of money. It makes us think we are special when we are not.

First, the money. Tutorials are expensive. The large college endowments which we enjoy here are used to cover most of the costs in a way not available to all but the elite institutions at the top of the Russell group. Extraordinarily, this system is then topped up with specially allocated public funds. In total, Oxford and Cambridge receive £6.9m of ‘special funding’ that is not available to other universities to support interviews and the tutorial system. If I were to write a list of things that the government should do with a couple of million pounds going spare, “enhancing the educational advantages of massively privileged institutions” would not be on it.

Tutorials are an essential part of the Oxford mystique. There is a happy vision of wisdom imparted by some wise old don in a very personal, tailored, and companionable sort of way. Here is one tutor’s description of a bad tutorial: “[if] they simply cobble together an essay before walking into the tutorial. What happens? The rather irritated tutor ends up taking the students through the basic material to achieve some sort of minimal understanding with no time for the more interesting material that digs deeper. The tutor talks too much, since the students have little to say apart from the odd clarifying question, so it’s not far off a lecture delivered in the most uneconomic way you can think of.” Sound familiar? That’s from Economics, a technical subject. In more humane subjects (and yes, Economics is very inhumane) I think the problem is when they go off-piste into wonderful tangents, which then leaves the student without any structured overview of the topic. Conversations are for experts, and undergraduates are certainly not that.

I am not saying that tutorials cannot be wonderful. I have had some excellent tutors and some enlightening conversations. But they are too often a way of teaching material that could be done in a class more cheaply and just as effectively (for the technical) or in a more structured way (for the introductory). And what the system makes up for in student-tutor ratios, it lacks in contact time. At the moment, Oxford humanities tutors are to their students as sailors are to their lovers: you hardly see them at all, but when you do it is fucking intense. I do not want to see the tutorial flushed down the toilet of history, but I do want the tutorial system scrapped as the default way of doing teaching here. Let’s teach with more seminars and have a couple of tutorials at the end of a term when we can argue back sensibly.

The existence of the tutorial system is also used to justify the frankly infamous ‘interview’, source of urban myth and a lot of damage to access from candidates intimidated out of applying. Oxford should be open to every bookish high schooler regardless of class, school background, and stage fright. We shouldn’t be recruiting performers, we should be recruiting nerds.

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