This was the first time I picked up a copy of Cherwell after coming to Oxford from the US and was surprised to read, ‘How did Britain get so thick?’ [published 07/05/10]; surprised, because of the exact parallel with the US. Quite frankly, I had not expected it. In the US much has been written and discussed about ‘the dumbing down of America,’ but things have not improved over the years. In fact, it is the other way round. Incidentally, I am not talking about the top students who are the backbone of American academia and continue to dominate, especially in sciences, garnering Nobel prizes. No. The truth of the matter is: here we are – the great superpower of the world – and yet our 15-year olds are coming nearly at the bottom of the list in international competitions in science and maths among 30 nations.

How about this quote: “The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself?” That was by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the US essayist and philosopher, way back in 1837; how true even after all these years. Susan Jacoby of the Washington Post, who started with this Emerson quote, went on to say, “Americans are in serious intellectual trouble, in danger of losing our hard-won appeal to a virulent mix of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.” Replace ‘Americans’ with ‘British’ and, judging by what Cherwell has to say, you seem to have the same situation.

What is the utmost priority now in the US is the colour green:it is money. In one generation, the number of undergraduates reading English at universities has gone down from 30% to less than 16%, whereas the percentage of students majoring in business has gone up from 14 to 22%. On top of this, instead of making the syllabus more rigorous, it is being diluted.

Granted, new courses are being introduced with fancy names, but this masks the reality of their lack of scholarship, really giving a bad name to a true ‘liberal education’. Even Ivy league professors are nervous if they have to give poor grades to students because by doing so they fear they will not have many students taking such courses in the next semester. Among the culprit universities: Princeton, Harvard, Cornell, U. Penn. No Ivy League is exempt. 

It is also laughable that while Princeton is now giving fewer ‘A’s, the other Ivys have not followed Princeton’s example. Having said that, I also know from personal experience that in some top universities getting an ‘A’ means the student deserves it.

When I was a student in Britain, where I lived for many years, I saw professors going after the graduates who got a First or even a 2:1 to join their research group. So I got a rude awakening when, out of sheer curiosity, I googled, ‘The Dumbing Down of Britain’. Sure enough, there were many articles. One, by Peter Strudwick, said: “The traditional attributes and educational customs, incorporating so many undeniably valuable qualities, are loathed by modernists, who regard them as relics of the old world with no place in the new educational agenda. The modernist perception is that the acquisition of knowledge is not an absolute value in itself at all, but something which is inherently useful only when placed in a social context.”

This was after an Encyclopaedia Britannica survey which found that 7 million Britons are “functionally illiterate”.

I know many will protest what I am writing but, honestly, I am just sad at the state of affairs here, in Britain, and could never imagine this was the present situation. My hope is that the new British Government will take all this into account and implement policies which will turn the situation around.

Until then, the truth remains that we are all becoming Americans; taking their ‘bad’ and leaving out their ‘good’.

I meet Hugh Pope for the first time when I am stuck in the lift leading to his sixth floor flat on Istanbul’s main drag, Istiklal Caddesi. I couldn’t read the sign that read in Turkish, ‘Danger: lift faulty’, and the lift stopped between the third and fourth floor. Through the chink of light between the floors I hear Pope say, ‘Ah yes. The lift doesn’t work. There is a sign…’

This isn’t an ideal start to an interview with a man for whom the ability to speak Turkish is an occupational prerequisite. Finally easing the lift doors open, we retreat to Pope’s local restaurant. First topic of conversation is the film ‘The Hurt Locker’. He wants to be clear that every scene in the film conveys a mesage that is entirely anti-Arab and neo-conservative.

Later Pope explains that if a degree in Arabic taught him anything, it was that he must never become an ‘Orientalist’. He was determined to discover ‘the real Middle East’ and so a month after leaving Wadham he set off to Damascus to become a writer.

He worked his way up from fixer to stringer to correspondent for the Independent, the BBC and the Los Angeles Times before settling at the Wall Street Journal. But Pope soon realised that not much of what he wrote about ‘the real Middle East’ would make the final edit; “About 20% of the story would normally be missing, because it was considered too discomforting for the American reader”. When referring to the 3 million Palestinians living outside of pre-1948 Palestine as “refugees, barred from return” he would be told to change this to “original refugees and their descendants”.

With each of these omissions or white lies, he writes in his new book, Dining with al Qaeda, “we laid another brick in the great wall of misconception that now separates America and the Middle East.” He characterizes this misconception as the tendency to view the Islamic world as a monolithic bloc. All this, he says, is one of the reasons that the US stumbled into the war in Iraq and is finding it so difficult to get out of Afghanistan. Pope belives that if the media had not given such a sanitized version of what America was doing in the Middle East, their foreign policy might have turned out differently.

I ask about the title of his book, an effort to compete with ‘Tea with Hezbollah’ or ‘Recipes from the Axis of Evil’ (both recently published titles), perhaps? Pope tells me that it’s meant to grab people’s attention, “but it does also specifically refer to the time I went for a Chinese meal in Riyadh with a missionary from one of al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan camps.” The missionary began by asking Pope why he shouldn’t kill him. “I persuaded him that my invitation into the country was legitimate and that it would be ‘un-Islamic’ to harm a guest, especially an innocent journalist just trying to present al-Qaeda’s side of the story.” The missionary calmed down and then began to tell Pope all sorts of secrets about the system of recruitment in al-Qaeda’s training camps.
But secrets they remained; Pope explains that “back at the office of the Wall Street Journal the story was tossed aside. Much too provocative.” He’s certainly tetchy about this issue and quickly moves back to our first topic, ‘The Hurt Locker’.

“Have you ever seen such an absurd load of militarist nonsense? It clashes with almost every aspect of my experiences of Iraq, war zones and American soldiers…Although it’s shot with no overt politics there is a clear agenda behind all those brilliantly filmed slow-mo pressure waves, sinister improvised explosive devices and the cocky gait of Sgt. James as he lopes into action in his bomb suit.”

He points out that one by one Iraqis are portrayed as cowardly, poor, inadequate, base, stupid, treacherous, and threatening. “The only half-positive character is a cheeky DVD-selling boy who pretty soon is killed off by a booby-trap planted in his stomach by his fellow Iraqis.”

In 2007 Pope decided to leave journalism behind; the situation in Iraq and the realisation that what he wrote wasn’t having any impact on American public opinion forced him to seek other outlets. He became director of the Turkish branch of the International Crisis Group. This position, he says, has given him more freedom to ‘bridge gaps’ than journalism ever could have done.
Pope is optimistic about the future; he believes that an upside of the Middle Eastern ‘brain-drain’ is that more and more Middle Easteners are now writing for American papers. This means that the grossly misinformed Western public are now increasingly exposed to hitherto hidden truths.

Hugh Pope’s new book ‘Dining with al-Qaeda’ (Published by Thomas Dunne Books) is now available. RRP: £18.99.

It’s revision season again, and every morning sees a procession of weary, bedraggled first and third years dejectedly dragging themselves to the library to be subjected to another eight hours of dreary book-gazing, enlivened only by the lunchtime Mission trip and the occasional chance to snap at an over-loud fresher daring to whisper something to his friend. You sit there, gazing out of the window at happy second years gambolling carefree on the lawns, and the temptation to aim a judicious hardback right at their heads becomes almost overwhelming.
But this year is different. This year we have FitFinder. Some of you will have read the reports on it, or even the video on the Cherwell website. A few of you will be on it. All of you will acknowledge its utter greatness. FitFinder truly makes revision fun. Oxford’s libraries, hitherto prisons of academic toil, are transformed into show grounds of aesthetic talent. So you’re sitting there, deep in the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, when up pops a message on your screen: ‘Female, Blonde hair. Always in the same chair, why don’t you see me stare, you wear a flower in your hair, please notice that I’m there.’ Naturally, you’re rather curious to find out who this mysterious fittie really is. So you swivel round and check all the desks around you and mentally cross-off all the men, the brunettes, and the non-flower-adorned, until finally you’ve got it down to a shortlist of three possibilities. You’re trying to work out which one it is, and you think, no, can’t be her, she’s a bit tubby, and that other one has a nasty mole on her face, she’s not fit, so it must be that one in the corner, the one with the cute dimple on her chin…and oh God, she’s seen me, quick, I’ll pretend I wasn’t looking. So then you start wondering who it was who noticed her and posted on the website, so you look around and yes, there’s a weird-looking guy a few rows away, and he’s staring at her too, looking very happy with himself, and, oh, why is his right hand under the table?
And then another one pops up on the screen, and you look around for her, and accidentally catch the eyes of a dozen guys doing the same thing at the exact same time, and you all look down at your desks in embarrassment. So you do some work, and after two minutes you’re bored again. Refresh the page, and, damn, ‘male, blond hair, historian wearing blue.’
‘Is that me?’ you wonder, before deciding that it probably is, even though you’re a chemist and your shirt is white.
So now you’re a bit excited, and you flatten down your hair and tuck in your shirt like your mother told you, and look around expectantly for the legions of girls staring deep into your eyes. Only to see to your disappointment that they’re all still ignoring you. So then you start to wonder which girl it was who posted it, and you cross off the ones without laptops, and the ones who are actually working. And then comes the awful realization that the only one left is mole-girl, who is gazing at you out of the corner of her eye with a come-hither expression on her face. Suddenly you’re not so keen on FitFinder after all.