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Sunday, 23 June 2019
How Oxford university shaped Brexit — and Britain’s next prime minister
Simon Kuper in The FT
You turn the pages of yellowing student newspapers from 30 years ago, and there they are, recognisably the same faces that dominate today’s British news. Boris Johnson running for Union president, Michael Gove winning debating contests, Jeremy Hunt holding together the faction-ridden Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA).
You turn the pages of yellowing student newspapers from 30 years ago, and there they are, recognisably the same faces that dominate today’s British news. Boris Johnson running for Union president, Michael Gove winning debating contests, Jeremy Hunt holding together the faction-ridden Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA).
Six of the seven men who survived the first round of the Tory leadership contest earlier this month studied at Oxford. The final two remaining candidates, Johnson and Hunt, were contemporaries along with Gove in the late 1980s.
The UK is thus about to install its 11th Oxonian prime minister since the war. (Three postwar PMs didn’t attend university, and Gordon Brown went to Edinburgh.) This beats even the grip of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration on the French presidency (four of the past six presidents have been énarques), let alone Harvard’s on the White House.
When I arrived in Oxford aged 18 in October 1988, it was still a very British and quite amateurish university, shot through with dilettantism, sexual harassment and sherry. Gove, Hunt and the much less political David Cameron had graduated that summer, and Johnson in 1987, but from my messy desk at the student newspaper Cherwell I covered a new generation of wannabe politicians.
You couldn’t miss Jacob Rees-Mogg, seemingly the only undergraduate who always wore a suit, or the early Europhobe Dan Hannan. Both became ideological fathers of Brexit. I’m still covering them today.
This isn’t a jolly boys’ story about the japes we all had together. I didn’t know any of the Oxford Tories personally, because we were separated by the great Oxford class divide: I was middle class, from a London comprehensive (after years abroad), and they were mostly upper-class public schoolboys. But the night Brexit happened, I sensed it was rooted in 1980s Oxford. I wrote a column about this in July 2016, then gradually came to see that the roots went even deeper than I had realised.
Any understanding of the British ruling class — and the next prime minister — requires returning to that place and time.
At Cherwell, we were always writing about the Oxford Union. The debating society, off a courtyard behind the Cornmarket shopping street, was a kind of teenage House of Commons. Its officers wore white tie, speakers black tie, and everyone called each other “honourable member”. You won debates not by boring the audience with detail, but with jokes and ad hominem jibes.
Almost all aspiring Tory politicians passed through the Union. Theresa May never won the presidency — disadvantaged by her gender and with no rhetorical gifts — but in 1979 her future husband Philip did. The Mays had been introduced at an Oxford Conservative disco by another Union president, Benazir Bhutto, future prime minister of Pakistan.
In May’s day, the Union was a small circle of debating obsessives. But then it hit financial trouble and began recruiting among the broader student population. By 1988, about 60 per cent of Oxford’s undergraduates had paid the £60 joining fee.
I never joined but I sometimes got press tickets to debates, and I still remember a young Benjamin Netanyahu trouncing hecklers, and, on the 50th anniversary of Dunkirk, the former prime minister and ex-Union president Ted Heath evoking Oxford on the eve of the second world war, when German invasion loomed. Another lure was the Union bar, which — almost miraculously in 1980s Britain — stayed open till 2.30am, until the deferential local police finally intervened.
Most Oxford students opposed Margaret Thatcher by the late 1980s, but the Union’s biggest political grouping was the Tories, split between Thatcherites and “wets”, who would exchange arcane factional insults.
The biggest political issues in mid-1980s Oxford, recalls Tim Hames, then a Union politician and member of OUCA, were Britain’s deployment of nuclear weapons, apartheid (many Tories weren’t entirely anti) and the miners’ strike. Europe rarely came up then. The European Commission had given Thatcher the British rebate she had demanded, and she was working with the Commission’s president, Jacques Delors, to create a European single market. The Single European Act was passed in 1986.
Most Union politicians weren’t very interested in policy anyway. Anyone wanting to make policy that affected students’ lives got involved in the separate Oxford University Student Union or their college’s junior common room (JCR). That kind of politics mostly attracted aspiring Labourites. Dave Miliband chaired the student union’s accommodation committee, while Yvette Cooper, Eddie Balls and Ed Miliband were JCR presidents.
By contrast, the Union favoured debating skills and ambition without a cause. Every eight-week term, the Union elected a president, secretary, treasurer and librarian. The “hacks”, as student politicians were known, would traipse around the colleges soliciting votes from ordinary students.
As the future Spectator columnist Toby Young wrote in the Union’s house magazine in 1985: “It doesn’t matter how unpopular you are with the establishment, how stupid you are, how small your College is or how pretentious your old school: if only you’ve got the sheer will you can succeed.”
Johnson’s Oxford days are now usually mentioned in connection with his membership of the hard-drinking, posh and sometimes destructive Bullingdon Club, but in fact he was a vessel of focused ambition. Arriving in Oxford from Eton in 1983, he had three aims, writes Sonia Purnell in Just Boris: to get a First-class degree, find a wife and become Union president. That post was “the first step to being prime minister”, said the 1980s Tory politician Michael Heseltine. At speakers’ dinners, a 20-year-old Union president would find himself or herself sitting next to cabinet ministers and other useful contacts.
Most students arrived in Oxford barely knowing the Union existed, but Johnson possessed the savvy of his class: he had run Eton’s debating society, and his father Stanley had come to Oxford in 1959 intending to become Union president. Stanley had failed but Boris was a star. Simon Veksner, who followed Johnson from their house at Eton to the Union, tells me: “Boris’s charisma even then was off the charts, you couldn’t measure it: so funny, warm, charming, self-deprecating. You put on a funny act, based on The Beano and PG Wodehouse. It works, and then that is who you are.”
Johnson also came equipped with the peculiarly intimate network that an upper-class boarding school confers. Ordinary schoolchildren spend eight hours a day with their classmates but boarders live together, and often have inner-class family connections going back generations. Johnson arrived in Oxford knowing dozens of people, whereas some state-school kids knew precisely nobody.
He didn’t let his degree — Classics — interfere with his Union ambitions. In 1980s Oxford, studying was almost optional. A common workload for arts students was one essay a week, often penned during an overnight panic, then typically read aloud to one’s tutor. When I reread my old essays while revising for finals, they were so pathetic that I wanted to write to my tutors to apologise.
One thing you learnt at Oxford (even if you weren’t in the Union) was how to speak without much knowledge. Underprepared students would spend much of a tutorial talking their way around the holes in their essay. Cherwell praised Simon Stevens (a Union president in 1987) as “Oxford’s most talented off-the-cuff tutorial faker”: “Recently Simes read out almost half of an essay to his tutor before his partner revealed that he was ‘reading’ from a blank piece of paper.” Stevens is now chief executive of the National Health Service, appointed in 2013 under health secretary Jeremy Hunt, his Oxford contemporary.
Johnson just missed his First. His tutor Jonathan Barnes recalls, “If you’re intelligent enough, you can rub along in philosophy on a couple of hours a week. Boris rubbed along on no hours a week, and it wasn’t quite good enough.” Johnson’s sister Rachel said that it later fell to her to “break the terrible news” to Boris that their brother Jo had got a First. (Rachel, Jo and Boris’s first wife Allegra Mostyn-Owen all edited the Oxford magazine Isis.)
In 1984 Johnson ran for Union president against the grammar schoolboy Neil Sherlock. The election dramatised the Oxford class struggle: upper class versus middle class. (Working-class students were rare.) In the vernacular of some public schoolboys, state-school pupils were “stains”, below even the “Tugs” from minor private schools.
Sherlock, later a partner at KPMG and PwC, and special adviser to the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in 2012/13, recalls: “Boris mark one was a very conventional Tory, clearly on the right, and had what I would term an Old Etonian entitlement view: ‘I should get the top job because I’m standing for the top job.’ He didn’t have a good sense of what he was going to do with it.”
Mostyn-Owen invited Sherlock for tea and tried to charm him into not standing against “my Boris”. Undeterred, Sherlock campaigned on a platform of “meritocrat versus toff, competence versus incompetence”. Johnson mobilised his public-school networks but lost. Sherlock came away underwhelmed by his opponent: “The rhetoric, the personality, the wit were rather randomly deployed, beyond getting a laugh.” Sherlock expected OUCA’s president Nick Robinson to become the political star, and Johnson to succeed in journalism. Instead, Robinson now presents BBC radio’s Today programme.
Johnson learnt from his defeat. A year later he was elected president, this time disguising his Toryism by allying himself with Oxford’s Social Democrats. His second campaign was more competent: the American graduate student Frank Luntz, now a senior Republican pollster, conducted polls for him. And Johnson worked his charm beyond his base.
Michael Gove, a Scottish fresher in 1985, told Johnson’s biographer Andrew Gimson: “The first time I saw him was in the Union bar . . . He seemed like a kindly, Oxford character, but he was really there like a great basking shark waiting for freshers to swim towards him.” Gove told Gimson: “I was Boris’s stooge. I became a votary of the Boris cult.”
In an essay for The Oxford Myth (1988), a book edited by his sister Rachel, Johnson advised aspiring student politicians to assemble “a disciplined and deluded collection of stooges” to get out the vote. “Lonely girls from the women’s colleges” who “back their largely male candidates with a porky decisiveness” were particularly useful, he wrote. “For these young women, machine politics offers human friction and warmth.” Reading this, you realise why almost all Union presidents who become Tory politicians are men. (Thatcher’s domain was OUCA, where she was president in 1946.)
Johnson added: “The tragedy of the stooge is that . . . he wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth. The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.”
Tory MPs now backing Johnson’s candidacy for leader may find the essay interesting. Gove, who wore a kilt in debates, was such a gifted speaker that he could even make a compelling case to a student audience against free choice in sexual behaviour. He was unusually ideological by Union standards, a Thatcherite meritocrat. As Union president in 1988, he wrote a paean to elitism in the Union’s house magazine: “I cannot overemphasise what elitism is not. It is not about back-slapping cliques, reactionary chic or Old Etonian egos. It is a spirit of unashamed glamour, excitement and competition . . . We are all here, part of an elite. It is our duty to bear that in mind.”
Meanwhile, Jeremy Hunt, an OUCA president in 1987, made much less noise. Hames sums up: “The Boris appeal was Boris. Michael was interested in ideology and ideas. Jeremy was more a small-c managerial conservative.”
Hunt wasn’t charismatic or eloquent, and had no obvious political passions, but he was the archetypal head boy (a role he’d held at Charterhouse). An admiral’s son, distant relative of the Queen, tall and courteous, he usually rose above Tory factionalism. After Cherwell reported that a “libertarian faction” was trying to “take over” OUCA, and that one committee member was a “Moonie” (a member of the Unification Church cult), Hunt wrote a letter to the editor: “OUCA remains a moderate association controlled by neither libertarians nor any other faction within the Conservative party, and exists to represent the views of all Conservative students at Oxford.” The Moonie, he added, had been expelled.
Amid all this Oxford politicking, there was one notable absentee: David Cameron. He got his First, and amused himself in posh dining clubs, but felt no need to do anything so vulgar as burnish his CV with student politics. After all, he too was distantly related to the Queen, his father chaired the establishment club White’s, and his cousin Ferdinand Mount headed Thatcher’s Policy Unit. Cameron went straight from Oxford to the Conservative Party’s research department, where he later encountered his successor in the Bullingdon and future chancellor, George Osborne.
Rees-Mogg arrived at Oxford at the same time as me in 1988. Almost immediately, Cherwell nominated him (as it had Gove before) for the traditional title of “Pushy Fresher”. The paper printed a photograph of him speechifying in his suit, above the caption, “What more need we say?”
Studying the picture, you realise: Rees-Mogg hasn’t changed. Like Johnson and Gove, he even has the same hairstyle today. They were almost fully formed at 18. School had given them the confidence, articulacy and know-how to bestride Oxford. They also already knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. If most students back then had had to guess who would be ruling Britain in 2019, they would probably have named Johnson, Gove and Rees-Mogg.
The last became president of OUCA in 1991, with Cherwell citing his “campaign for world domination and social adequacy”. However, he proved just too peculiar to be elected Union president and lost to Damian Hinds, who is now the education secretary.
The Oxford Tories were climbing the greasy pole before most students had even located it. The majority arrived at university uncertain, terribly dressed, trying to find themselves, often wrestling with imposter syndrome. Only at Oxford did they acquire the qualities that Johnson et al already had: a ruling-class accent, rhetorical skills and the ability to feel confident in any establishment setting.
In 1988, British politics changed. The previously pro-European Thatcher suddenly turned Eurosceptic. She had realised that her beloved single market would be accompanied by closer political integration. In her “Bruges speech” in September 1988, she warned against “a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels”.
That idea spooked the Oxford Tories. They revered Britain’s medieval parliament filled with witty English banter, whereas Brussels offered ugly modernism and jargon-ridden Globish. Ruling Britain was their class’s prerogative. It was none of Brussels’ business. In 1990, the future OUCA president Dan Hannan founded the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain at the Queen’s Lane Coffee House on the High Street. With hindsight, some see this as the start of the campaign for Brexit.
Toby Young had written in 1985 that it was lucky the Union existed — “that in an environment as full of ruthless, sociopathic people as Oxford, there should be an institution that sucks them all in, contains all their wilful energy and grants them power only over each other”. He hoped that one day its officers could be similarly contained within the House of Commons.
But the Commons couldn’t contain them. These people spent years agitating for Brexit. In 2016 they secured their referendum. Johnson sniffed the chance to become prime minister, and — in Union jargon — decided at the last minute to back the motion. Gove is a true believer in Brexit, but his decision to campaign for it — undermining Cameron — was partly an outflow of the Oxford class struggle. As education secretary under Cameron, he had thought they were friends, but when Cameron suddenly moved him to chief whip in 2014, Gove was devastated. He felt that Cameron and his coterie of Old Etonians (a stronger network for Cameron than Oxford) had treated him “like staff”, one person in his circle told me. He wanted revenge.
Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European Studies at Oxford, describes the referendum as “a Union debate with the addition of modern campaigning techniques”. He says, “One of the great things about British public life is that it’s irradiated by a gentle sense of humour — but ‘chaque qualité a ses défauts’ [‘every quality has its downsides’].” In a cross-class alliance with Nigel Farage and the tabloids, the Oxford Tories triumphed.
Politicians from 1980s Oxford dominated both the Remain and Leave camps, but they were divided by the subject of their degrees. Oxford’s “prime minister’s degree” is PPE: politics, philosophy, economics. It has often been associated with the Brexiters. Ivan Rogers, for instance, a grammar schoolboy in 1980s Oxford and the UK’s permanent representative to the EU until he resigned in 2017, discerned “a very British establishment sort of revolution. No plan and little planning, oodles of PPE tutorial-level plausible bullshit, supreme self-confidence that we understand others’ real interests better than they do . . . ”
Yet in fact in 2016 the PPEists were almost all Remainers: Cameron, Hunt, Stewart, Philip Hammond, Matt Hancock, Sam Gyimah, Hinds, Nick Boles, the Milibands, Balls, Cooper and Peter Mandelson. They had presumably chosen the degree in search of the cutting-edge knowledge needed to run a modern country. (Fatefully, the one great PPEist Leaver was the media proprietor Rupert Murdoch, who in 1950s Oxford had been business manager of Cherwell and a Labour Club member.)
By contrast, most Brexiters had studied backward-looking subjects: Classics for Johnson, History for Rees-Mogg and Hannan, and English Literature (which mostly meant the canon) for Gove. They were nostalgics. Hence Johnson’s hagiography of Churchill and Rees-Mogg’s much-mocked recent paean The Victorians, while Gove as education secretary strove to make sure pupils learnt 19th-century literature and Britain’s “island story”.
After the Oxford Brexiters won the debate, Cameron resigned, and they switched to another familiar format: the in-house leadership election. As one former Union president remarked, the ensuing contest could be described entirely in Union slang: “Boris knifed Dave. Michael knifed Boris. Theresa and Michael stole Boris’s slate. Boris self-binned.”
May became prime minister, and entrusted the Brexiters with executing Brexit. She gave them the key jobs in cabinet. But they were debaters, not policymakers. They couldn’t debate Brussels into submission, because the EU’s negotiators followed rules. So poorly briefed were the Brexiters that in December 2017 they accepted the principle of a “backstop” plan to keep the Irish border open, before spending the next 18 months fighting it.
Now the Tories have another leadership election. Second time around, just as at Oxford, Johnson is running a competent and centrist campaign, talking up his liberal reign as mayor of London. Like Sherlock in 1984, Hunt is targeting Johnson’s lack of “seriousness”. Then as now, Gove stands in his hero’s shadow. He needn’t worry: in the Oxford tradition, there may be another election coming along soon.
In the small, insular world of the British establishment, every so often a clique of people can exert an extraordinary influence. There is a curious parallel between the 1980s Oxford Tories and the 1930s Cambridge spies. The charming, blond, dishevelled Etonian sybarite Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross also emerged from an intimate, all-male, public-school network. Four of them were at Trinity College, with Maclean next door at Trinity Hall. Confident enough to formulate a revolutionary worldview despite being ill-informed, they embraced a utopian cause: Soviet communism. It promised a far-off paradise that they never expected to live in themselves. Working towards it was great fun.
There is a similar element of play in Tory Brexit. Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, chastised Rees-Mogg last year: “This is not a parlour game or debating society. These are real people with real lives.” Well, that’s what she thinks.
The Cambridge Five were given roles of responsibility because they possessed elite CVs and came across as archetypal British gentlemen (partly through displays of eccentricity in hairstyles, drink and dress). They pursued their utopia for decades, ignoring all evidence that contradicted it and looking down on the rest of the establishment for its unimaginative thinking. When the spies were finally exposed, British trust in the establishment suffered a lasting dent.
Admittedly, the comparison between the Cambridge and Oxford sets isn’t entirely fair: though both betrayed Britain’s interests to the benefit of Moscow, the Brexiters didn’t mean to.
It’s an odd feeling to return to a town that you have barely seen in 25 years but where you know every street. Oxford looks almost unchanged, yet the time-traveller from the 1980s experiences a series of small shocks: there are Chinese tourists! Students sit in coffee shops working on laptops! The food is decent!
Wandering around my old college, I marvelled at the Chinese and German names at the bottom of staircases. There are far more applicants to places nowadays, lazy alcoholic tutors are dying out, and rubbing along on “no hours a week” is no longer tolerated.
But the Union, weekly tutorials and therefore the outsize role of rhetoric survive. Is there some soul-searching at the university over the triumph of the Oxford Brexiters? “I think there should be,” replies Garton Ash. He exempts the tutorial system from blame: “Having an hour a week with an expert on the field cross-examining you — that doesn’t seem to me to lead to glibness.”
But he adds, “Public schools and the culture around them provide a training in superficial articulacy: essay writing, public speaking, carrying it off. The Oxford Union reinforces that, even among those who didn’t go to public school. Compare and contrast the German elite. For me, Gove is the ultimate example.” Garton Ash says Oxford as an academic institution no longer encourages this style.
Kalypso Nicolaïdis, professor of international relations, says: “If a student is capable of producing two well-written essays a week, with well-structured arguments, they can kind of get away with not knowing much about the subjects. This may sound superficial, but communicating is useful in life. Sometimes you need to convince people succinctly, especially if you go into politics.”
But, she adds, “it’s not what Oxford is about. I believe most colleagues would agree that our commitment is to convey knowledge as deeply as possible. Whether as a student you want to take advantage of this is up to you.”
I deplore what my contemporaries are doing to Britain. But given that I too learnt at Oxford how to write and speak for a living without much knowledge, I can hardly talk.
Sunday, 29 October 2017
Dons, donors and the murky business of funding universities
John Lloyd in The Financial Times
The University of Oxford is in constant need of money — and it takes an approach to raising it that oscillates between the severe and the relaxed. Those familiar with its procedures say many would-be donors have been turned away. No names are given, outside of senior common room gossip. “Oxford doesn’t need to compromise,” says Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of the independent Buckingham University. “People want to be associated with it.” But that confident sense that the great universities will do the right thing has been called into question by a Swedish academic who has thrown down the gauntlet to one of Oxford’s most prominent donors.
The University of Oxford is in constant need of money — and it takes an approach to raising it that oscillates between the severe and the relaxed. Those familiar with its procedures say many would-be donors have been turned away. No names are given, outside of senior common room gossip. “Oxford doesn’t need to compromise,” says Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of the independent Buckingham University. “People want to be associated with it.” But that confident sense that the great universities will do the right thing has been called into question by a Swedish academic who has thrown down the gauntlet to one of Oxford’s most prominent donors.
For many centuries the deal has been clear: donations buy gratitude and even a named chair or library, but no rights to influence the running of the institution. In return, barring evidence of illegality, the university will not probe the funder’s finances. “You don’t have to like sponsors,” says the Canadian scholar Margaret MacMillan, an admired contemporary historian and former warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford. “But if they don’t interfere with your teaching and your choice of colleagues, then the rest is their own affair.”
The Rhodes scholarship is a case in point. It began in 1902 with a bequest from Cecil Rhodes, the enthusiastic imperialist who argued that Anglo-Saxons deserved to be the dominant global race. His scholarship was founded to bring “the whole of the uncivilised world under British rule”, by funding young men to Oxford. Two years ago a South African Rhodes scholar, Ntokozo Qwabe, started a campaign to recognise the “colonial genocide” underpinning Rhodes’ wealth. He called for the removal of his statue from Oriel College, Rhodes’ alma mater. The campaign escalated, but the university and college resisted and the statue still stands.
You cannot accept stolen money, but who is to decide what is stolen? Money from the oligarchs?
A more recent bequest, beginning with £20m in 1985 and rising to over £50m, is that of the Syrian-born businessman Wafic Saïd to Oxford’s business school, which bears his name. With high-level contacts in the Saudi royal family, Saïd had helped to arrange the Al-Yamamah contracts between Saudi Arabia and British Aerospace and other UK companies from the mid-1980s onwards, worth some £44bn. In the 2000s it emerged that millions of pounds had been paid to senior Saudi royals to smooth the deal. BAE agreed to pay over £250m in the US in 2010, after the Department of Justice found it guilty of “intentionally failing to put appropriate anti-bribery preventive measures in place”. No wrongdoing was proved against Saïd, who said he had received no commissions for assisting in the deal. Last year, he opened legal proceedings against Barclays Bank, which had forced him to close several accounts, and had told him he was no longer welcome as a customer. (He later dropped the lawsuit after the bank apologised and confirmed the closures had been a business decision that was not based on any wrongdoing in relation to account activity.)
The traditional argument justifying such relationships is ensuring a robust division between gift and subsequent influence. The economist and FT commentator John Kay, the first director of the Saïd Business School (1997-99), says he takes “a relaxed view of the relationship between the leadership of a university or college and the donor. It’s rare to have a very rich donor who has accumulated his wealth by simple hard work and dedication to honest business. There’s often something like monopolistic practices. You cannot accept stolen money, but who is to decide what is stolen? Money from the oligarchs? From Nigerian businessmen?”
Seldon at Buckingham adds, “Even if it’s bad money, it can serve good causes. The key thing is that there are no conditions attached, and that there is a clear statement of the establishment of a firewall between the money and the decisions of the institute. We would all be in a pickle if we were to be morally pure.”
Bo Rothstein, a former professor at Oxford University who resigned his post in protest against one of its funders But moral purity has come to Oxford, in the shape of Professor Bo Rothstein. A fellow of Nuffield College, Rothstein is a Swedish sociologist whose work has centred on ethical issues, most recently on studies of corruption in government. In 2015, he joined the faculty at the Blavatnik School of Government — where, in early August, he learnt that Len Blavatnik, the billionaire Ukrainian-born businessman whose £75m gift had founded the school, had given $1m to help finance Donald Trump’s inauguration. Blavatnik, one of Britain’s richest men, was knighted this year for services to philanthropy: he has given large sums to the Tate Modern and, with the New York Academy of Sciences, has established the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists. After a pause for reflection, Rothstein resigned in protest.
Rothstein believes Trump is an existential danger to western values. To become entangled financially with such a man in any way, he argues, is an affront to both universal and university values. “I teach about the importance of rights,” he says. “How am I to explain to a student why I am giving legitimacy, by teaching at the school, to one who gives money to him? It’s impossible.” How far would you take this argument, he adds. “Would you take money from one who was a Nazi? Would you have a Hermann Göring chair of aviation?”
Rothstein’s challenge to Oxford’s see-no-evil consensus has brought him into conflict with one of the university’s brightest stars, the economist and international-relations scholar Professor Ngaire Woods. It was Woods who conceived of and secured the funding for the Blavatnik School of Government, becoming its founding director in 2011.
She disputes almost everything Rothstein says about the immediate aftermath of his resignation — something he refers to as an “excommunication”, because he was asked to leave the school very soon after his resignation. On the central issue, she says that “we do not tell our donors how to exercise their political points of view; they do not tell us how to run the institute. Len Blavatnik has never said anything to me about what I should do or how I should teach. Never. Not once. There was a representative of the donor on the building committee for the institute, as is the Oxford practice, and that has been the extent of it.”
Woods believes Rothstein had not grasped the difference between supporting Trump’s campaign and giving to the inauguration. “Lots of people give money to the inauguration, because it can’t be paid for from government funds,” she points out. “You cannot seriously think that the institute is in some way linked to Trump. We teach our students to try to get the facts right, to reason and to learn from diversity. We recently held a ‘challenges to government’ conference, in which all the issues of governance were debated. We have an open, argumentative centre.”
Rothstein’s campaign has been a lonely one, not least given that established opinion in Oxford is squarely against him. Macmillan says that “to give money for Trump’s inaugural was quite legal, a perfectly sensible thing to do. I think he [Rothstein] put himself in an indefensible position.” Kay commends Rothstein for having the courage of his convictions, and “not engaging in a protest which costs nothing in the way of harm to the protester, but accepting the damage this will do to his position”, but he believes he was wrong to act as he did. At Buckingham, Seldon says: “I have sympathy for what he has done, but if the Blavatnik institute gets money that is unattached, and it’s clear there must be no influence, then that is OK.”
This consensual view is anathema to Rothstein, a Luther among Renaissance popes. “Trump is a very serious threat to liberal democracy. My colleagues think it’s not too serious. Some say we shouldn’t oppose him head on, but we should just give the platform to strong liberals and democrats. But I am not keen on that. It’s trying to take a middle course which, with Trump, now you cannot take.”
Rothstein sees the infamous case involving the London School of Economics as proving his point. In 2008, the LSE’s Global Governance Centre accepted a donation of £1.5m from Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the long-time despot of Libya, Muammer Gaddafi.
Amid charges that a PhD had been awarded to Saif improperly, and after a speech in Tripoli in 2011 in which he promised “rivers of blood” to flow if protests against his father’s regime did not stop, the LSE acknowledged it had erred in pursuing the relationship and in taking the money. The then-director, Sir Howard Davies, resigned. Says Rothstein: “There are of course donors whose behaviour you cannot just ignore and say, ‘Well, it’s their business.’ ”
Rothstein has at least one prominent supporter in the academy, back in his native Sweden: the president of the Stockholm School of Economics, Lars Strannegård. “I think he was right to do it. Things which a year ago were thought not even to be allowed to be said are now daily announced from the White House. This strikes at the core of what universities do. It is like when you dip a watercolour brush into water — the first time it is slightly darkened, then more, and more until it is completely dark.”
The Blavatnik affair finds an echo in the 1951 CP Snow novel, The Masters. Set in a Cambridge college in 1937, it concerns a struggle over the election of a new master — the two main contestants being an establishment figure seeking to bolster his chances by attracting a donation, and a radical scientist determined the college should take a stance against the steady advance of fascism.
But universities are now far from Snow’s times. Those who now run them attest to a much more harried life than in the past. The state has retreated from full funding — universities charge fees, and most have created units that raise money — but it now expects higher teaching and research standards. At the same time as the universities have come under more intense financial pressure, their student bodies have become more combative. Aside from the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, there has been a rash of “no platforming” incidents in which controversial speakers have been barred from appearing on campus.
More threatening still are the campaigns to force universities to divest themselves of investment considered unethical. Cambridge university has ceased investment in coal and tar sand “heavy” oil, but the pressure to go further is intensifying. Many students, faculty members and influential figures including Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and now master of Magdalene College, are calling for Cambridge to divest from all energy companies. So far the university has resisted, but Nick Butler, a former senior executive in BP and now a visiting professor at King’s College London, believes the tide runs against them. “The universities don’t want to be told what to do with their money,” he says. “But I think that, since the protests will continue, more and more will give in.”
Money is power, but so is a university, especially one as storied as Oxford. Large donors are not always kept at arm’s length, and influences can be subtle, a question of implicit understandings more than explicit direction. They can also be fruitful: as a co-founder of the university’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2006), whose funding comes largely from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, I think it right that Reuters representatives sit on the committees of the institute — balancing those who represent the interests of the university. The idea was, in part, to have the academy and the journalism trade interact and inform each other — not always without friction, but always with benefits.
Donor-ship is an increasingly complex business in the digital age. What once might have been a campus kerfuffle can become a global furore. Last month, Washington DC saw such a dispute when a scholar named Barry Lynn was fired from the New America Foundation think-tank (not attached to a university) by its chief executive, Anne-Marie Slaughter. Lynn had written a statement about Google and “other dominant platform monopolists” and called for more robust antitrust action against them. Google, a major funder of the foundation, complained via Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of its parent company, Alphabet, according to the New York Times. Slaughter, a former director of policy planning at the State Department, at first called the Times’ report false, then backtracked. She later conceded: “There are unavoidable tensions the minute you take corporation funding or foreign government funding.”
Universities must now manage tensions more actively than before; in doing so, all make deals and ethical zigzags. The two main protagonists in this updated CP Snow imbroglio deserve each other, for both are driven: Woods, by a desire to fashion her school into a world centre for the study of good governance; Rothstein, by a hyperactive political conscience that demanded a demonstrative act, essential to dramatise the scale of the disaster that, he believes, the Trump presidency presages. Two beliefs clash: one, that continuing to offer a rational-liberal education will maintain and expand rational-liberal governance; the other, that these very assumptions are being destroyed, and that larger protest must be made. Both are, at root, principled. Both cannot be right.
Sunday, 22 October 2017
Oxbridge bashing is an empty ritual if we ignore wider social inequities
Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian
The numbers are clearly unacceptable. Several colleges in both Oxford and Cambridge frequently admit cohorts with no black students in them at all. Roughly 1.5% of total offers are made to black British applicants and more than 80% of offers are made to the children of the top two social classes. With offers made overwhelmingly to those in London and a handful of the home counties, both universities are consistently excluding entire ethnic and regional demographics. They also continue to admit a grotesquely disproportionate number of privately schooled students. In effect, the two ancients are running a generous quota scheme for white students, independent schools and the offspring of affluent south-eastern English parents.
There is undoubtedly a great deal that both institutions can and must do to remedy this. Our admissions processes at Cambridge are not sufficiently responsive to the gravity of the situation. Despite periodic panics in response to such media “revelations” or staged political scolding, and notwithstanding the good intentions of many involved in admissions, questions of diversity and inclusion are not taken seriously enough in their own right.
The focus on educational achievement, itself defined in purely numerical terms and worsened by internal league tables, means there is little sense of meaningful diversity as an educational and community good in its own right. Despite having contextual indicators that would allow us to diversify our admissions, we balk at non-traditional attainment profiles for fear that the student will not be able to cope once here.
For any Oxbridge college to not have a single black student at any given point in time, where they would rightly not tolerate having low numbers of women, is not just about looking institutionally racist but also impoverishes the educational and social environment we provide. The same holds true for regional and class exclusions.
When I first came to Cambridge in 2001, having taught at different institutions in the US, I was struck by the relative whiteness and sheer cultural homogeneity of this university. Even the minimal improvements I’ve seen since then in some years – more students from ethnic minority backgrounds, more young women from northern comprehensives – have made a huge difference both to me as a teacher and, more importantly, to what students are able to learn from each other.
Not all of them will get first-class marks, but they both gain a lot from and have a great deal to give to the educational environment here, not least by expanding the definition of what counts as achievement. We need more of them. (At Cambridge, in recent years, a quantum of vocal BME students as well as students from northern comprehensives has demanded change, often to good effect. There is some cause for hope.)
There is also undoubtedly a culture of denial when it comes to matters of race and racism, which students speak of both in class and privately and which I have experienced when I’ve tried to draw attention to them. And more than one student from northern comprehensives has told me about being discouraged by teachers from applying and feeling amazed to have received an offer only to feel alienated by the stultifying class conformity of the affluent south-east once they get here.
It is simply not good enough for Oxford and Cambridge to say that they are welcoming of diversity and in effect blame certain demographics for not applying despite their outreach programmes. It is Oxbridge that must change more substantially to provide a better environment for a diverse student body. The two ancients must be held to account; homogeneity must fall.
But should they be the only ones held to account? In having a necessary conversation about elitism and exclusion, are we forgetting – or being encouraged – to not have a larger one about wider deprivation and systemic inequality? It is striking that some quarters only too happy to periodically attack Oxbridge for its failings, from rightwing tabloids to Tory ministers, are rarely interested in the roots of inequality and lack of opportunity of which Oxbridge exclusion is a symptom but is hardly the origin.
We should be careful that a headline-friendly focus on these two institutions alone does not become an easy way to avoid even more painful and challenging questions. It seems somewhat selective and inadequate to focus on what David Lammy rightly calls “social apartheid” at Oxbridge without discussing the widespread and worsening economic apartheid in this country.
We know that access to university education in general is sharply determined by school achievement that, in turn, is shaped by parental income and education levels. In an economically stratified society, it is inevitable that most young people from economically deprived backgrounds have a substantially lower chance of achieving the kind of marks that enable access to higher education.
Hence it is incoherent to have a discussion about access to higher education without having one simultaneously about economic disadvantage, which, in some cases, including British Caribbean and Bangladeshi communities, has an added ethnic minority dimension to it. In a context of worsening economic fault lines, there’s a whiff of something convenient about only attacking the admissions failings of top universities.
The other obvious missing dimension to this discussion is the existence and encouragement for independent schools. It’s somewhat contradictory to encourage a market culture where money can buy a deluxe education and then feel shocked when the well-off get their money’s worth by easily meeting the requirements for offers from high-status institutions. It’s worth saying that as long as independent schools, hardly bastions of ethnic diversity, exist, there will remain a fundamental apartheid between two kinds of students.
Oxbridge, or even the Russell Group of universities more broadly, can only do so much to mitigate this state of affairs, which lifting the tuition fee cap will only worsen. Lammy notes that more offers are made to Eton than to students on free school meals.
But why not also question the very existence of Eton and the lamentable state of an economic order that necessitates free school meals for many? Add to this the parlous condition of state education with its chronic underfunding, inflated classroom sizes, an undermining testing and target culture and difficulties in recruiting and retaining good teachers.
The same politicians who rightly point to Oxbridge’s demographic narrowness are rarely willing to grasp the nettle of a two-tier educational structure in which some are destined to do much better than others. Who, for instance, would be willing to call for the abolition of private schooling, subject as such a suggestion would be to shrill denunciations about how individual choice, personal aspiration and the workings of the market are being interfered with?
There are other tough discussions that could be had if the aim truly is to address and undo inequalities in university demographics. Would politicians and institutions be willing, for instance, to impose representational quotas for both ethnic minorities and state-educated students that reflect the national pie-chart?
Currently, the Office for Fair Access (Offa) makes some toothless demands around “widening participation”, a rather feeble phrase, which are not accompanied by penalties for failure. Lammy, whose suggestion that admissions be centralised has some merit to it, not least towards undoing the unhelpful internal collegiate caste system at Oxbridge, has made also a comparison between Oxbridge’s abysmal intake of black students and Harvard’s healthy numbers.
Would the political and intellectual classes be willing to have a discussion about something like “affirmative action” in the US, a process of “positive discrimination” by which underrepresented ethnic minorities and disadvantaged groups are given special consideration? We must hope so. For failing a wide-ranging discussion aimed at radical measures, all the huffing and puffing about Oxbridge is destined to remain a yearly ritual, each controversial headline simply making way for the same unsurprising headlines every year.
The numbers are clearly unacceptable. Several colleges in both Oxford and Cambridge frequently admit cohorts with no black students in them at all. Roughly 1.5% of total offers are made to black British applicants and more than 80% of offers are made to the children of the top two social classes. With offers made overwhelmingly to those in London and a handful of the home counties, both universities are consistently excluding entire ethnic and regional demographics. They also continue to admit a grotesquely disproportionate number of privately schooled students. In effect, the two ancients are running a generous quota scheme for white students, independent schools and the offspring of affluent south-eastern English parents.
There is undoubtedly a great deal that both institutions can and must do to remedy this. Our admissions processes at Cambridge are not sufficiently responsive to the gravity of the situation. Despite periodic panics in response to such media “revelations” or staged political scolding, and notwithstanding the good intentions of many involved in admissions, questions of diversity and inclusion are not taken seriously enough in their own right.
The focus on educational achievement, itself defined in purely numerical terms and worsened by internal league tables, means there is little sense of meaningful diversity as an educational and community good in its own right. Despite having contextual indicators that would allow us to diversify our admissions, we balk at non-traditional attainment profiles for fear that the student will not be able to cope once here.
For any Oxbridge college to not have a single black student at any given point in time, where they would rightly not tolerate having low numbers of women, is not just about looking institutionally racist but also impoverishes the educational and social environment we provide. The same holds true for regional and class exclusions.
When I first came to Cambridge in 2001, having taught at different institutions in the US, I was struck by the relative whiteness and sheer cultural homogeneity of this university. Even the minimal improvements I’ve seen since then in some years – more students from ethnic minority backgrounds, more young women from northern comprehensives – have made a huge difference both to me as a teacher and, more importantly, to what students are able to learn from each other.
Not all of them will get first-class marks, but they both gain a lot from and have a great deal to give to the educational environment here, not least by expanding the definition of what counts as achievement. We need more of them. (At Cambridge, in recent years, a quantum of vocal BME students as well as students from northern comprehensives has demanded change, often to good effect. There is some cause for hope.)
There is also undoubtedly a culture of denial when it comes to matters of race and racism, which students speak of both in class and privately and which I have experienced when I’ve tried to draw attention to them. And more than one student from northern comprehensives has told me about being discouraged by teachers from applying and feeling amazed to have received an offer only to feel alienated by the stultifying class conformity of the affluent south-east once they get here.
It is simply not good enough for Oxford and Cambridge to say that they are welcoming of diversity and in effect blame certain demographics for not applying despite their outreach programmes. It is Oxbridge that must change more substantially to provide a better environment for a diverse student body. The two ancients must be held to account; homogeneity must fall.
But should they be the only ones held to account? In having a necessary conversation about elitism and exclusion, are we forgetting – or being encouraged – to not have a larger one about wider deprivation and systemic inequality? It is striking that some quarters only too happy to periodically attack Oxbridge for its failings, from rightwing tabloids to Tory ministers, are rarely interested in the roots of inequality and lack of opportunity of which Oxbridge exclusion is a symptom but is hardly the origin.
We should be careful that a headline-friendly focus on these two institutions alone does not become an easy way to avoid even more painful and challenging questions. It seems somewhat selective and inadequate to focus on what David Lammy rightly calls “social apartheid” at Oxbridge without discussing the widespread and worsening economic apartheid in this country.
We know that access to university education in general is sharply determined by school achievement that, in turn, is shaped by parental income and education levels. In an economically stratified society, it is inevitable that most young people from economically deprived backgrounds have a substantially lower chance of achieving the kind of marks that enable access to higher education.
Hence it is incoherent to have a discussion about access to higher education without having one simultaneously about economic disadvantage, which, in some cases, including British Caribbean and Bangladeshi communities, has an added ethnic minority dimension to it. In a context of worsening economic fault lines, there’s a whiff of something convenient about only attacking the admissions failings of top universities.
The other obvious missing dimension to this discussion is the existence and encouragement for independent schools. It’s somewhat contradictory to encourage a market culture where money can buy a deluxe education and then feel shocked when the well-off get their money’s worth by easily meeting the requirements for offers from high-status institutions. It’s worth saying that as long as independent schools, hardly bastions of ethnic diversity, exist, there will remain a fundamental apartheid between two kinds of students.
Oxbridge, or even the Russell Group of universities more broadly, can only do so much to mitigate this state of affairs, which lifting the tuition fee cap will only worsen. Lammy notes that more offers are made to Eton than to students on free school meals.
But why not also question the very existence of Eton and the lamentable state of an economic order that necessitates free school meals for many? Add to this the parlous condition of state education with its chronic underfunding, inflated classroom sizes, an undermining testing and target culture and difficulties in recruiting and retaining good teachers.
The same politicians who rightly point to Oxbridge’s demographic narrowness are rarely willing to grasp the nettle of a two-tier educational structure in which some are destined to do much better than others. Who, for instance, would be willing to call for the abolition of private schooling, subject as such a suggestion would be to shrill denunciations about how individual choice, personal aspiration and the workings of the market are being interfered with?
There are other tough discussions that could be had if the aim truly is to address and undo inequalities in university demographics. Would politicians and institutions be willing, for instance, to impose representational quotas for both ethnic minorities and state-educated students that reflect the national pie-chart?
Currently, the Office for Fair Access (Offa) makes some toothless demands around “widening participation”, a rather feeble phrase, which are not accompanied by penalties for failure. Lammy, whose suggestion that admissions be centralised has some merit to it, not least towards undoing the unhelpful internal collegiate caste system at Oxbridge, has made also a comparison between Oxbridge’s abysmal intake of black students and Harvard’s healthy numbers.
Would the political and intellectual classes be willing to have a discussion about something like “affirmative action” in the US, a process of “positive discrimination” by which underrepresented ethnic minorities and disadvantaged groups are given special consideration? We must hope so. For failing a wide-ranging discussion aimed at radical measures, all the huffing and puffing about Oxbridge is destined to remain a yearly ritual, each controversial headline simply making way for the same unsurprising headlines every year.
Thursday, 16 March 2017
Oxford comma helps drivers win dispute about overtime pay
Elena Cresci in The Guardian
Never let it be said that punctuation doesn’t matter.
In Maine, the much-disputed Oxford comma has helped a group of dairy drivers in a dispute with a company about overtime pay.
The Oxford comma is used before the words “and” or “or” in a list of three or more things. Also known as the serial comma, its aficionados say it clarifies sentences in which things are listed.
As Grammarly notes, the sentences “I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty” and “I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty” are a little different. Without a comma, it looks like the parents in question are, in fact, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.
on the one hand I love the #oxfordcomma, on the other hand these sentences truly are SO GOOD
In a judgment that will delight Oxford comma enthusiasts everywhere, a US court of appeals sided with delivery drivers for Oakhurst Dairy because the lack of a comma made part of Maine’s overtime laws too ambiguous.
The state’s law says the following activities do not count for overtime pay:
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.
The drivers argued, due to a lack of a comma between “packing for shipment” and “or distribution”, the law refers to the single activity of “packing”, not to “packing” and “distribution” as two separate activities. As the drivers distribute – but do not pack – the goods, this would make them eligible for overtime pay.
Previously, a district court had ruled in the dairy company’s favour, who argued that the legislation “unambiguously” identified the two as separate activities exempt from overtime pay. But the appeals judge sided with the drivers.
We conclude that the exemption’s scope is actually not so clear in this regard. And because, under Maine law, ambiguities in the state’s wage and hour laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose, we adopt the drivers’ narrower reading of the exemption.
AP style fans, we know you'll appreciate an #APStyleHaiku about Oxford commas. You can write, count and share, too. twitter.com/nathanfrontier…
The Oxford comma ignites considerable passion among its proponents and opponents. In 2011, when it was wrongly reported that the Oxford comma was being dropped by the University of Oxford style guide, there was uproar.
“Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” opens one Vampire Weekend song.
The Guardian style guide has the following to say about Oxford commas:
a comma before the final “and” in lists: straightforward ones (he ate ham, eggs and chips) do not need one, but sometimes it can help the reader (he ate cereal, kippers, bacon, eggs, toast and marmalade, and tea).Sometimes it is essential: compareI dedicate this book to my parents, Martin Amis, and JK RowlingwithI dedicate this book to my parents, Martin Amis and JK Rowling
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