Mary Beard recently welcomed the disappearance of “Thick, White” rugby players and linked this to a general amelioration of intellectual standards she had witnessed during her distinguished career. She coupled the transformation of Cambridge from a “white, posh, male, enclave” to its current composition to higher grades and less third-class degrees. What a splendid endorsement of the advantages of diversity from a leading and prominent academic! Furthermore, she denied that our institutions are blighted by cancel culture. After all, she was never subjected to cancelation herself. Such claims are reassuring. Is not Cambridge a jewel in the crown of British academia? Professor Beard’s whiggish endorsement of the progressive “direction of travel” in the fens may be comforting.
Alas, it does not withstand scrutiny.
The drive for diversity is often code for preferring politically favoured mediocrity to excellence
Professor Beard is correct that the admission of males from independent schools has reduced considerably. Yet is this because of rising academic standards or the activism of academics who share Professor Beard’s progressive agenda? The combination of grade inflation at A level and de facto quotas for students from state school applications, makes it easy to implement affirmative action through the “back door”. Post-codes and free school meals become instruments for the social engineering of the college admissions process.
The drive for diversity is often code for preferring politically favoured mediocrity to excellence. Nor is this confined to Cambridge. The recent controversy surrounding the President-elect of the Oxford Union’s less than charitable remarks about the death of Charlie Kirk was reinforced by the revelation of his poor A level results. It became public evidence that the relentless drive for “diversity” drives a two-tier admissions system in which white males, especially those educated privately, face hurdles, if not active discrimination. Does the reduction of third-class degrees really herald the replacement of “Thick White” men? Or is it not part of a general pattern of grade inflation throughout tertiary education?
This general malaise is complicated by the fact that when Professor Beard began her career Britain possessed some of the best state schools in the world. One might have expected candidates from the state section up the 1980s to have largely the same syllabus as their privately educated peers, and often to have attended more rigorous and selective schools, However, the widespread destruction of these elite state schools and their replacement with schools catering for all had a levelling down effect. Whilst in Britain there are still good state schools, they tend to be in more affluent areas, i.e. favouring the wealthy. Generally independent schools are providing a better education, better provision in music, the arts and sport. Is it then surprising the students who have been trained in a more competitive environment will outperform those peers who have been schooled in a more egalitarian context? How can an essentially elite selective university like Cambridge maintain its commitment to “equity” without privileging those who were educated in non-selective egalitarian secondary schools?
A good example is with languages. This is an area where selective schools tend to outperform weaker state schools. It is a matter of dismay that so many undergraduates in the humanities at Cambridge have no or very limited language qualifications upon arrival. Ironically, it is often those academics most inclined to moan about Brexit, who rail against “elitist” language requirements. Nowhere is this more evident, surely, than in Classics. Doubtless a few exceptional linguists can acquire a complex language at university, but for the majority it is very difficult. Does Professor Beard really believe that contemporary classics undergraduates are better Hellenists and Latinists than their predecessors forty years ago? Or does she mean that they have been successfully moulded by the recent general intrusion of sociology into the humanities, and her students have happily accepted the dogmas propagated by the cultural Marxists.
Plato once wrote of a “noble lie” — a fiction propagated by the elite for the sake of social harmony. We have had quite a few instances of this of late and some might view the diversity agenda as the noble lie of contemporary culture. Professor Beard’s sanguine attitude to changes in Cambridge university may be just another version.
