Oxford needs inspiration

5 August 2006

The talk in the common rooms focuses on two subjects — money and access. The first Blair administration decided in a double whammy to phase out in a decade the Oxford premium, and to route all public funds direct to the University. To the fury of a powerful caucus of estates bursars, the University recently appeared to deny that an accord reached with colleges in 2000 as to how to share in the misery was still applicable. The JRAM — that most awkward of acronyms, the Joint Resource Allocation Method — will suggest a new, doubtless controversial scheme for dividing an inadequate cake. Protocols have been devised to determine where, how and for what the University or colleges may approach potential donors and the ethical criteria to be applied to such donations (if offered!). How to implant in British alumni the culture of philanthropy which prevails among their American equivalents, that is the question — as yet unresolved.

One explanation for these different attitudes to funding lies in the admissions process. Alumni preference in major American universities triggers alumni generosity — a bargain that cannot be struck this side of the Atlantic. Oxford pays a price for its admirable fidelity to meritocratic ideals.

But those ideals are assailed from another direction. The government complains that Oxford’s intake of students from state schools is lower than it would wish. Yet in the 1960s the percentage of undergraduates from state schools significantly outnumbered those from the private sector. The explanation for the altered statistics has nothing to do with conservative bias. It has everything to do with the destruction of the grammar schools, and the growing gulf between what the best independent schools supply by way of facilities and skills compared with all but a handful of comprehensives.