David Lammy’s article in the Guardian today, revealing that 21 Oxbridge Colleges failed to admit any black students this year (and that Merton hasn’t done so for five), is a much needed wake up call for this university. Lammy’s article was inflammatory, and deliberately so. He made far too much melodrama over the efforts he went to in obtaining readily available information, and did more than a little bit of statistical fiddling. Much of his point was anti-elitist, and that much of it was wrong, but the rest was what we needed to hear.
Lammy was misguided in so far as he blamed the university for actively doing something wrong. I don’t believe for a moment that Oxford is racist – that tutors decide not to admit applicants on their basis of their skin colour. In this sense, the university is off the hook.
What is unforgiveable though, is that we see the wrong outside our walls and do nothing about it. It is not our fault that the state education system fails the black students that go into it. Oxford University is not to blame for the fact that over 60% of black Oxbridge applicants turned out not to get three As at A-level. Nor is it to blame for the likely cause of their failure at interview – a lack of intellectual confidence and experience in thinking about new academic problems.
But we are to blame for doing nothing to correct this. The University’s access operation is woefully inadequate, and often even perverse. How anybody can justify spending more access funds on Manchester Grammar School than any of the hundreds of schools desperately in need of academic inspiration is beyond me, and is something the University seriously has to answer for. That a single penny is spent at Eton is bad, that far more is spent running lectures series is absurd.
The University has and will argue that its job is not to fix the education system, just to admit fairly and offer help to those who have less at their school. This approach of “it’s not my problem” is an embarrassingly selfish one from people who have been so lucky in life. There’s no use just running events for students whose teachers have pushed them to apply to Oxford when talent is falling through our schools like a leaky sieve. Poorer students don’t come here because they take the wrong A-levels, because they don’t have the confidence to believe they’ll get in, and because they don’t even realise how to apply. This happens because Oxford likes to stay put, let students come to it, and shrug its shoulders at the massive educational unfairnesses just beyond the College gates.
Like Lammy says, Harvard sends a letter to every high-achieving minority student in the US, and Yale employs access officers in each of the 50 states. Oxford targets its access at public schools. We might not be racist, but we are doing absolutely nothing to change a system of entrenched educational disadvantage. To sit back and watch the education system fail droves of pupils is not acceptable, and if it takes a melodramatic Guardian article accusing us of racism to change, then so be it.
