This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Troubling Admissions
I don’t doubt for a moment your correspondent’s suggestion that Oxford and Cambridge dons have invented bogus reasons for why they now conduct admissions interviews with potential undergraduates by Zoom rather than in-person when the real reason is because it’s more convenient for them. (UNIVERSITY CHALLENGED, FEBRUARY).
But isn’t this professional laziness a symptom of a wider problem that the more our elite institutions are focused — and encouraged so by funding sources — to be “research universities”, the less they care about the character and breadth of aptitudes of the undergraduates they admit?
Until relatively recently, our leading universities not only recognised their applicants’ ability to get top A-Level marks, which is the obvious academic requirement for entry, but also their wider interests and talents as young people of promise.
This helped ensure that they could cope not only with the stresses and workload of student life but also exhibited the sort of personalities that equipped them to harness an intellectual training for the subsequent enrichment of society beyond academia as much as within it.
By contrast, because the emphasis of postgraduate study is on research more than teaching and on precision rather than breadth, graduate students were selected on scholastic potential alone, and rightly so.
Now, it seems that the narrow scholarly ability that universities look for in admitting students to postgraduate study has also become the yardstick for admitting undergraduates. This implies that producing the next generation of academics is the primary purpose of undergraduate study. It never was. And it shouldn’t become so.
What teenage applicant would now mention their participation in a wider range of clubs and societies beyond their chosen degree subject? Evidence of such breadth is a “red flag” to admissions tutors that they may lack the required narrow scholarly focus (or worse, come from a privileged background).
What is the result of pretending the criteria for undergrads should be the same as for graduate research students?
According to the university’s own statistics, almost one in five Oxford students state they are disabled. This includes high levels of autistic behaviour, depression and heavy reliance on the universities’ counselling services — which, I would hope, do still find time to interview in person.
Peter Swinton
London
Weeding out the well-off
Your understandably pseudonymous correspondent (THE REVENGE OF THE BLOB, FEBRUARY) rightly laments the introduction of socioeconomic “equality information” elements to the public appointments system and questions whether they are compatible with the Nolan Principles of Public Life.
In fact, the skewed nature of the questions is worse than even the examples cited in the article. They include “When you were aged about 14, how many people did the main or highest income earner [in your household] employ?” Options include “1 to 24” or “25 or more”.
This is followed by a list of occupational groups that the candidate should circle (unless they damn their chances by ticking “prefer not to say”). So, if, for example, one’s father was a toolmaker, the correct box to tick would be “Technical and craft occupations”.
Let’s be honest, we all know what sort of person these questions aim to sieve out of participation in the public realm. But it is rather obnoxious to do so not on the qualifications that he or she brings to the role but rather on whether their parents should be classified as “Kulaks”.
Rachel Farmer
Canterbury, Kent
India’s summer
I wouldn’t disagree with Boris Starling (THIS SPORTING LIFE, FEBRUARY) that cricket’s greatest ever Test series was the 2005 Ashes. It had it all, not least England’s eventual reclaiming of the urn after 18 years of toil.
But the excitement of tight tests is not the only yardstick of greatness. Cricket’s history is also marked by decisive results which were, in their way, just as dramatic.
In June 1971 England had gone 24 matches without loss when India’s not greatly fancied touring team arrived for a three-test series. The first two tests were drawn. But England were going well in the deciding test until Bhagwat Chandrasekhar’s bowling spell of 6 — 38. India duly secured their first ever series win in England.
A more entertaining series than the 2005 Ashes? Well, only if you are Indian perhaps. But as an early, if premature, marker of what was to come in later decades, I suggest the more significant.
Rajiv Singh
Birmingham
