Oxford: the fatal choice

The Times, LondonOpinion - William Rees-Mogg
December 19, 2005

Oxford: the fatal choice

The best undergraduate teaching in the world is in peril if colleges cannot select their students

SIR TIM LANKESTER has had a distinguished career. He has been President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, since 2001. In the late 1960s he was an economist at the World Bank in Washington; he joined the Civil Service and became Private Secretary to two successive Prime Ministers, Jim Callaghan in 1978-79 and Margaret Thatcher from 1979-81. He rose to be the Permanent Secretary in the Department for Education from 1994-95.

There are positives and negatives in such a career. No one is given these promotions who does not possess high ability. His experience in public administration is wide. His years in Downing Street will have given him a view from the top down as well as from the base up. His work at the World Bank and as a Treasury official means that he must be highly numerate.

The negatives can be summed up in the anxiety that he may well have acquired the professional deformations both of the civil servant and the economist; it is usually the case that long-term civil servants absorb the ethos of their service, just as politicians become politicians, lawyers become lawyers, and journalists become journalists. Professional administrators have a preference for convenient administrative solutions. They tend also to have undue respect for central authority. They are seldom the last-ditch warriors for liberty.

Oxford University has been under pressure from the Government on the subject of admissions. This began five years ago when Gordon Brown, who is more than a bit of a bully, took up the case of Laura Spence, a gifted student from a Northern comprehensive who failed to get a place in her subject at Magdalen College.

In fact, Magdalen’s procedures turned out to be completely fair. Without pausing to establish the facts, Mr Brown let rip with his prejudices and demanded reform of Oxford’s admission system. He is accustomed to exercising power and accustomed to being obeyed.

This was backed up last September by a White Paper on university admissions that demanded “fair access”. There is no evidence that comprehensive school pupils have been given anything less than fair access by the Oxford colleges when deciding on admissions. Indeed, there have been many complaints of discrimination against candidates from independent schools because of the educational advantages they have enjoyed. Admissions tutors are more than sympathetic to candidates from those state schools that send few pupils to Oxford.

A real difficulty arises from the poor standards of many comprehensive schools, which do not give an academic education remotely comparable with that of today’s independent schools or the old grammar schools. Public school pupils enjoy a greater advantage than they did 60 years ago, when I went up to Oxford. That is because Labour chose to destroy the grammar schools.

Tony Blair, against the will of his party, is now trying to put that right by establishing independent, non-fee paying, trust schools that John Prescott regards as grammar schools under another name. I only hope he is right.

As educational administrators tend to do, Oxford University decided to deal with this problem by setting up a working party. It asked Sir Tim Lankester to take the chair. I suppose that was a reasonable idea. He has the experience. There is always a chance that Sir Humphrey will be the best choice to outwit another Sir Humphrey.

The result was exactly what a pessimist might have feared. The working party produced a staff college solution. It decided to centralise admissions. If these recommendations go through — and there will need to be a university vote — the colleges will lose the right to select their own undergraduates. Every candidate would be considered by members of the faculty in which he or she wished to study, and would be selected by the university, not by the colleges. The colleges would get the students that they were given, perhaps with some allowance for student choice.

There are serious disadvantages in this. Educational institutions maintain their standards by control of admissions. At the secondary level, the 58 Labour MPs who have sponsored the anti-Blair alternative White Paper are determined that trust schools should not choose their own students. They want the organs of the State to do that. They do not want these schools to become centres of excellence.

At the university level, Gordon Brown and the White Paper on admissions want the State to be the ultimate authority. They do not think that the colleges can be trusted to do what they are told; they believe that the university can be bullied.

Oxford is a collegiate university, with individual undergraduate teaching by the tutorial method. This has been a great international success in the postwar period. Few people would place Oxford in the top ten of world universities in postgraduate teaching and research. Even in the United Kingdom, Imperial College is probably better and so is Cambridge. Yet postgraduate work is largely the business of the university. Oxford probably is the best university in the world at teaching undergraduates and that is done by the colleges. Go to Oxford from 18 to 22 and then go on to Harvard for a doctorate is probably the best advice one could give a really ambitious student.

Small is beautiful; in terms of personal decisions, it is often wisest. When I was given a place at Balliol I was interviewed by the Master, by a young don who became the next Master but two, and by another young don, who became the president of Tony Blair’s college, St John’s. That was due care and attention. If Sir Tim gets his way thousands of candidates will be processed in an efficient mass production scheme by dons who will not teach them and may never see them again. The college tutorial system, and the independence of Oxford, would be fatally undermined.

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.