Universities

I know what it is like to receive an unconditional offer for university. In 1984, when I took the Cambridge entrance exam, if you passed, you then only had to meet the matriculation requirements of the university, which were two Es at A-level. For someone predicted straight As (virtually all Oxbridge candidates), that wasn’t asking a lot. It was hard not to slacken off a little, to take a mental gap year, or six months at any rate, for the last two terms of the sixth form. I slipped to a B in further maths, which seemed an embarrassment at the time, though I know others who took a bigger plunge. What with a real gap year, too, I never really did get back into numbers.

One of the depressing aspects of writing a column attuned to social hypocrisy is so rarely running short of new material. Any pundit keen to highlight the grievous injustices committed haughtily in the name of justice these days is spoilt for choice. So: Augsburg University, Minneapolis, Minnesota. A student reads aloud a quote from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time: ‘You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.’ The last word causes a stir. When the white professor, Phillip Adamo, asks the class what they think of the student’s reciting of the quote verbatim, he repeats the word. The next day, the students kick Adamo out of his own classroom; since as ever the animals are running the zoo, he complies.

It's a well-worn complaint that universities are dishing out firsts as never before. Today, a report by the Office for Students (OfS) confirms the true extent of 'grade inflation' at our universities: 124 of the 148 higher-education providers they assessed in England show ‘a statistically significant unexplained increase’ in the proportion of firsts and 2.1s awarded, compared with figures in 2010-11. Between 2011 and 2017, the average percentage of firsts and 2.1 degrees rose from 67 per cent to 78 per cent. The figures uniformly document the same upwards trend.

A letter appeared in the Times this morning defending Dr Noah Carl, the young Cambridge scholar who was branded a ‘racist pseudoscientist’ and accused of making ‘errors’ in an ‘open letter’ signed by over 200 academics in fields like ‘critical race studies’ and ‘media and communications’. The letter in the Times today is signed by three postgraduate students from Nuffield College, Oxford, where Dr Carl, who describes himself as a ‘conservative’, did his PhD. They argue that ‘popularity should not be allowed to take the place of intellectual debate’ and urge the Cambridge authorities not to be swayed by ‘popular opinion’.

When I first read about plans for a new academic periodical called The Journal of Controversial Ideas, I got the wrong end of the stick. Fantastic news, I thought, particularly when I saw the distinguished group of intellectuals behind it. They include Jeff McMahan, professor of moral philosophy at Oxford; Peter Singer, the well-known Australian philosopher; and Francesca Minerva, a bio-ethicist at the University of Ghent. An authoritative magazine bearing the imprimatur of these distinguished free-thinkers is a great way to persuade other, less celebrated academics to stick their heads above the parapet and publish essays that dissent from groupthink. Then I spotted an important detail: all the material will be published pseudonymously.

To anyone who knew the late and much-missed Norman Geras, the idea that the state could consider his work an incitement to terrorism would have been incomprehensible. Geras was an inspirational politics professor at Manchester University, and a polemicist and moral philosopher of exceptional insight. He devoted much of his energy to opposing the murder of civilians, and lost many friends on the left in the process. You could level all kinds of charges against him, we would have conceded. But incitement to terrorism?  The charge would be insane. We should have known better. We should have realised that academic bureaucrats could find reasons to label any and every work ‘threatening’ or ‘triggering’ if the mood so took them.

Imagine a world where employers judged applicants solely on their dress. Anyone in frayed clothes or scuffed shoes would never get a job. This would be unfair to poorer applicants so, in the name of equality, the government might offer favourable loans up to £1,000 to buy interview clothing. At first glance this would seem a wonderful way to promote fairness. Yet if the number of jobs remained constant, such a policy would have the opposite effect: it would merely ratchet up the level of wasteful, zero-sum competition for what limited chances exist. Soon, anyone not sporting Savile Row tailoring and handmade shoes would be written off. Rather than widening opportunity, it would raise the bar to existing opportunities still higher.

A fellow academic once said that working at a university is one of only a few places where you grow older while everyone around you stays the same age. It was this remark that occupied my mind this week as I trundled through campus, smiling and greeting our ever-younger-looking first-year undergraduates. The whole idea of ‘Welcome Week’ was no doubt conceived by a university bureaucrat with good intentions. But having experienced it first-hand, and as the one doing the welcoming, I can only conclude that it is torture. Once a year, like clockwork, we older folk must be visibly reminded not only of the relentless passing of time but also of our general insignificance amid life’s great generational churn.