Oxford needs inspiration

5 August 2006

The colleges continue to mount outreach programmes, home and away, to combat the anti-Oxford attitudes among the teaching profession and the media pictures of an Oxford fossilised in the age of Brideshead Revisited. They must and will continue to solicit applications from under-represented constituencies. But offers of places have to be made to those with perceived ability to manoeuvre successfully the shoals of the degree course. Political correctness and social engineering can have no place in a university concerned with talent alone.

But Oxford has since the 1960s belatedly pushed fully open a door that was once barely ajar to the second sex. When St Hilda’s goes co-ed in 2008, men and women will have an equal chance of obtaining entry. By accident, not design, they have achieved near parity of numbers within the colleges. They have enhanced the intellectual standing and civilised the social mores of the undergraduate community. They have had an enviable record in achieving office in the Oxford Union where, reflecting national politics, the skills required to ascend to the president’s chair are those of a Mandelson, not a Gladstone.

The direction in which the Vice-Chancellor wishes to move the University — with more graduate studies, more international students — may not appeal to old members whose wallets the University seeks to tap, but whose memory of and vision for Oxford is essentially one of a training-ground for British undergraduates. There is, too, a sense that the shift is fuelled by economic, not academic objectives. The teaching of undergraduates is a loss-making activity.

Yet it is in undergraduate education that Oxford outstrips its United States counterparts. Despite fraying at the edges, the centre holds: there is all to play for. It is the combination of three factors — higher admissions standards, a more intimate system of tuition by dedicated dons, and more intensive work — which gives graduates of the two ancient universities their dominance in so many areas of national life.