Universities

I trust everybody enjoyed the boat race this weekend  Last week the editors of this magazine made me go through the purgatory of speaking with the person who disrupted last year's race. Listeners may come away with the idea that, contrary to reports, Trenton Oldfield was coshed most terribly upon the head by last years' varsity oars. This would be a mistake. As a graduate of the London School of Economics, he has simply imbibed each and every one of the stupidities which the modern university has it in its power to bestow.

There’s nothing quite like diversity. Take Manchester. It has a large Muslim population and a lot of gays. What could possibly go wrong? Last week Manchester University’s Student Union played host to the ‘Global Aspirations of Women Society’. This appears to be a front group of the extremists of Hizb ut-Tahrir and therefore by no means does what it says on the tin. Anyhow – as the university’s student newspaper puts it: 'A speaker at a Students’ Union affiliated society workshop said that homosexuals would be executed in an ideal Islamic state, describing the practice of two men kissing as an “atrocity.

Is there anything more pathetic, more risible than rich and privileged Britons whining that their cadre fails to receive a fair shake in the matter of admissions to this country's most prestigious universities? Oh, sure, I suppose there must be but the smugness and evident sense of entitlement on display in these matters remains enraging. Today, for example, Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington College, complains that his pupils are suffering unreasonable discrimination. Worse still, apparently, a presumed "bias" against public school pupils is a "hatred that dare not speak its name". As the Americans say, cry me a river. The evidence for this notional bias is, needless to say, emaciated.

The Daily Mail got very excited last month over 'a new student craze' called milking, where students post videos of themselves ‘pouring milk over their heads in public places’: The four-pint fad began in Newcastle and soon spread to Edinburgh, Oxford and other universities. Not to be outdone, the fine gentlemen of St Andrews University have given their own twist on the craze: ‘Champagning’: Robed up, their video speaks for itself. It certainly gives a new meaning to 'Champagne for the brain', but a damned waste of fine Pol if you ask me.

The Sutton Trust today criticised the system of personal statements for university admissions, as they favour well-connected children from private schools. Spectator readers might not be surprised by that, though: in September Molly Guinness revealed in the magazine that those who can afford to often contract the writing of the statement out to graduates for a generous fee. Guinness wrote: 'They need help, and they’d be crazy not to get it. ‘Why would anyone write their own?’ says my cousin Malachy Guinness, who set up a tutoring agency. He points out that with no interviews, there’s no way of checking the authenticity of the statements. His company fields dozens of calls each month on the personal statement question.

University admissions service UCAS published figures today showing the number of students applying early for university has fallen by 8 per cent on last year, following a drop of just under 13 per cent the year before. 'Oh dear,' tweeted Times Higher Education's news editor Simon Baker, adding that these figures are 'worrying' while NUS president Liam Burns said the data meant the government 'should now finally admit that its higher education policies are having a significant impact on application behaviour'. Universities themselves might be worried about the effect on their business models of a decline in the number of students, particularly for undersubscribed courses. But are these figures really an unsettling indication of the effects of the government's higher education reforms?

We have had the dreaded cartoons, films, teddy-bear and more. But I bet that until now nobody imagined we would ever see a (cue dreaded music) ‘Pineapple of Hate’.  Yet despite the now familiar feeling that this is all some terrible spoof, the fruit has joined the growing list of household items which can be legitimately regarded as ‘blasphemous’. As Student Rights reports, the crime-scene was the recent freshers’ fair at the University of Reading. For it was there that the Atheist, Humanist and Secular Society stall included a pineapple with the word ‘Mohammed’ on it. I always doubted that the Danish or French cartoons looked much like the prophet of Islam.

Cristina Odone begins her latest oh-woe-is-Britain post most amusingly: Around the world, people have long envied Britain's two institutions: the BBC and Oxbridge. Britons, however, (or some of them) are determined to destroy both. They are going about it in a brutal and obvious way, by lowering standards for both Auntie and the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The BBC abroad was a byword for beautifully written and brilliantly produced programmes such as "The World at War" and "Upstairs Downstairs". But in its obsession with "diversity", the Beeb has allowed standards to slip: comedies that aren't funny (but don't sound middle class) and reality shows that teach nothing but how temporal celebrity is, have taken over the schedule.

For the first year since GCSE’s came in we have not seen ‘the best results ever’.  Which is, of course, a great relief.  As Anthony Seldon, among others, has pointed out, these results suggest a return to credibility in our examination system. But there are already those, including some teachers and teacher unions who are now hinting darkly at ‘political interference’.  They are used to year-on-year grade inflation and expected this to continue forever. I think these people should themselves be asked to pass a simple test.

What do you say to an Arts graduate? ‘Big Mac and fries, please!’ I used to laugh at that joke until I was served a Junior Whopper by one of my fellow arts graduates in Edinburgh and ever since then I’ve been suspicious of the story I was sold at school: that going to university takes you into a new league of earning potential. The A-Level results came out yesterday, and anyone who has opened an exams envelope will be familiar with the feeling. That you may as well have the results tattooed on your forehead because they will define the trajectory of your life. But in the 22 years since I left school, the government has added to the pressure. It has made a switch from providing university education to actually selling it.

A drop of 8.8 per cent in the number of students applying for university is surprisingly small, actually, when you consider the size of the hike in tuition fees. Still, the figures released today by Independent Commission on Fees prompted an angry response from Labour's Shabana Mahmood, who said: 'The Tory-led Government's decision to treble tuition fees at the same time as cutting funding for higher education is already putting thousands of people off university who otherwise would be eagerly preparing to start their courses.' It's easy to brand this drop of 37,000 applications from the 2010/11 academic year as a failure for ministers who have insisted that the fee rise should not put off prospective students.