Dreaming spires

There was an interesting article in today's Times magazine by Sathnam Sanghera about access to Oxbridge. Sanghera, the child of immigrant parents and a state school boy from Wolverhampton, went to Cambridge, and has written an excoriating portrait of the barriers to entry for students from poorer, less privileged backgrounds. Oxford and Cambridge have, he avers, a long way to go, and he points to the much greater diversity achieved by Ivy League institutions in the States.

First, a mea culpa. I attended Oxford for a year, before a precipitate academic downfall, and I progressed there from a public school which knew how to prepare its pupils for the application process. So far, so white privilege. Consider it 'checked'. I know I enjoyed advantages that others did not; while very far from a scion of the aristocracy, I had university-educated parents who paid for me to get a good schooling and therefore be admitted, not only to Oxford, but to Christ Church, the grandest of grand colleges. So let's get that out there.

There will be people who will argue that all of the above doesn't just qualify my response to Sanghera's article but actively disbars me from any comment. How can I possibly know what it's like for an underprivileged child, maybe caring for a sick lone parent while desperately trying to study for A-levels, to look at the forbidding obstacles even to any university, let alone Oxbridge? The answer is twofold: first, I can't know what it's like. I can't know anything outside my own direct experience. But I flatter myself I am intelligent enough that I can imagine. And it must be bloody hard.

So, yes, the poor and the underprivileged have the deck stacked against them. That's true of every walk of life. In the great lottery of existence, there are winners and - I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion - losers. Some will drown under the obstacles put in their way, a lucky and talented few will flourish and prosper despite their disadvantages. Whatever your opinion of grammar schools (and I have my own), they did for a while provide an almost-miraculous ladder of academic success to people who would otherwise have been left floundering. Alan Bennett springs immediately to mind.

I hope all of the above is relatively uncontroversial. What sent my teeth slightly on edge, though, was Sanghera's willingness to pile the responsibility on Oxbridge itself. Are our two greatest and oldest universities diverse enough, in terms of race, social class and school background? No. Of course not. He includes a piece by a black student at Lady Margaret Hall, who reported that she was only one of 35 black people in her year of 3,000 entrants, and one of only three at LMH. That, clearly, indicates a problem. And I have no doubt that the stats for other measures of diversity are not much better.

When I went up to Oxford nearly 25 years ago, I was the (I think) penultimate year which could opt to take an entrance exam plus interview rather than rely on A-level results, which I did (thank God!). The masters at my (day) school drilled us pretty mercilessly, and were themselves largely the products of Oxbridge, and, I imagine (though I don't know), public schools. Elites breed elites. They are self-perpetuating. At our school, the Second Master (deputy head, basically) coached each Oxbridge applicant through the process, and the Headmaster read everyone's UCCA personal statement and discussed it with them. That with an upper sixth of 150-odd pupils. So we had a hand on the small of our backs, pushing us towards the finishing line.

What's my beef? Oxbridge can only do so much. Even Sanghera admits that Cambridge spends five million pounds a year on access programmes and that Oxford expects to spend seven million on outreach in the next financial year. They are not blind to the problem. Sanghera thinks the interview process should be dropped and admissions run centrally rather than by colleges. I think I disagree. Oxford and Cambridge are two of the best universities in the world, and should be looking for the most extraordinary minds (they were wrong about thinking mine was one of them). His LMH interviewee relates a story about a tutor showing her a coin and asking what one could infer about society by looking at it. That, it seems to me, is exactly the sort of lateral, inquisitive, almost outside-the-box thinking they should be looking for.

I also don't hold with the comparison with the Ivy League. Yes, Oxford and Cambridge colleges are wealthy - I remember reading somewhere that it used to be possible to walk from Trinity College, Cambridge, to London without ever leaving college land - but the big American universities dwarf them in terms of endowments. Harvard, to take an example, has billions to spend on means-blind applications and affirmative action, and there is a wholly different culture of lifelong giving to your alma mater in the US. By their own standards, Oxford and Cambridge are devoting substantial resources to outreach and access.

A final gripe, if it's not too tiresome. Sanghera characterises - I would say stereotypes - the clannish nature of Oxford colleges. You're supposed to act in a certain way, come from a certain background, speak in a certain way. He talks about "bops", and "ents", and "plodges". Well, in my year at Christ Church I never heard anyone use the word "plodge", and "bops" and "ents" were common currency at St Andrews, where I ended up (OK, OK, not the best advert for student diversity, but still).

The point is that there is an extent to which institutions are what you make them in your head. If you see them as shuttered and forbidding and clannish, then that's what they'll be. If you see them as vibrant centres of learning with an intellectual culture that seems to make the very air hum, then they can be that too.

I'm not saying Oxbridge is faultless. It has work to do, but it is doing at least some of it. Progress is being made. And change needs to come from other places too; from our school system, from parents, from communities. That there is a problem is not in doubt, nor do I think even the crustiest old don would deny it. (I am reminded of Enoch Powell, the most brilliant scholar of his generation at school at Birmingham, writing out a list of the Greek texts he had read and being told by his tutor, "This is a rather thin list for a Trinity man".) But simply to heap opprobrium on the heads of Oxford and Cambridge won't do.

I could say a lot more, but I think I've said enough, for the moment. We must all work harder to make sure that these two jewels of British academia, and, indeed, world academia, attract the very best and brightest brains it possibly can. But the shoulders on which that responsibility must fall need to be broad.