UK: University quotas will undermine education

Proposals to add social-disadvantage scores to applicants’ grades should be rejected.

American universities are in a mess over equality. Almost everywhere, a smorgasbord of admissions tweaks, diversity programmes and plain old-fashioned quotas – imposed with a heavy hand by a burgeoning bureaucracy of equality enforcers – ensure that affirmative action often trumps the pursuit of knowledge, and that this or that officially disadvantaged class is let in with lower grades.

Last week, the influential education think-tank EDSK, rather surprisingly, called on UK universities to go at least partly down the American path. Indeed, in one respect it went further, saying the whole admissions process should be government-imposed from the top down, with all funding withdrawn from any institution that does not sign up.

Under such a scheme, universities would set entry grades and maximum numbers for every course, but would then play no further part in admissions. A government body would collect the grades and then set mathematical discounts based on various forms of social disadvantage. Applicants would make a ranked choice – those who made the grade (discounted where necessary) would be allocated automatically to their preferred course. There would be a lottery to deal with over-subscription and a clearing system to fill unallocated places up to the maximum. All other entry tests or interviews would be banned.

EDSK deserves respect as one of the more thoughtful think-tanks (last year, for example, it sensibly suggested that government money should follow the student wanting to learn and not the institution wanting bums on benches). Further, its recent report has some good ideas. Banning applicants’ personal statements – in practice neither personal nor written by applicants – is long overdue. And maximum numbers, added to the suppression of the unconditional offers made at the behest of the marketing men, will rightly remove the incentive to see learning as a commodity to be sold like sandwiches or soap.

Nevertheless, the proposals to remove universities’ autonomy in the admissions process must be resisted. First, this will impose a dreadful sameness on all universities. At present, colleges may vary subtly. Some, for example, may prefer candidates who are purely gifted in their subjects, while others want students with a wider interest in life. This will go. Making all applications depend only on public examinations will prevent universities and colleges from being able to pick the students most suited to them. And the same is true of a ban on university-specific tests for subjects like medicine or law. Barring these is likely to lead to more students unsuited to these courses and, in the end, more dropouts.

Secondly, the idea of standardised disadvantage scoring (which EDSK suggests might be based on such things as past school-exam performance, an applicant’s experience of being in care, or how deprived their home postcode is deemed to be) is a blunt instrument at best. Care when young followed by successful fostering isn’t the same as leaving care at 18 and shouldn’t be treated in the same way. Similarly, postcodes may well vary according to which end of a street you live on, but it seems odd that your prospects of going to university should do so.

Thirdly, university education is (or should be) a people business. How to teach, who is likely to benefit from university teaching, and who will do well and add to the university community are matters that call for large amounts of human judgment. Yet the basis of the EDSK’s thinking here is diametrically opposed to this. Indeed, it is spectacularly misanthropic. It seems to suggest that humans, prone to error and rife with all sorts of bias, must be eliminated as far as possible from the whole process of decision-making. Unfortunately, whatever this may do to boost equality on a bureaucrat’s spreadsheet, selection by centralised software and admission by algorithm do not bode well for the actual, messy, hit-and-miss business of encouraging intelligence and promoting scholarship.

And, indeed, this leads on to the real difficulty. This lies precisely in the comforting-sounding words at the beginning of the report – ‘fairness, transparency and equity’ – which then pervade it and inform its conclusions. EDSK rightly trashes the idea of scholarship as a commodity like coffee or computers, needing just the magic of the market to create a knowledge consumer’s nirvana. But unfortunately, making fairness and equity the guiding principles of education is equally pernicious.

The underlying assumption, put shortly, is that university education is an officially sanctioned advantage and springboard to success, rather like being made a prefect at school or promoted in the civil service, which therefore has to be distributed according to strictly equitable and socially inclusive principles.

Except it isn’t. A good university is a place to read a subject you are interested in, not simply to be taught it to get a diploma. It is a place to study spontaneously and at times quirkily and without direction. It is not about clocking in for the student contact hours you have bought to achieve the learning outcomes in the course description. Unfortunately, regarding university education as a kind of prize to be distributed on equitable or social-justice grounds is likely to attract and promote exactly the latter kind of student.

No one doubts EDSK’s good intentions. But if it has its way, we will end up with a cohort of students arriving at their chosen institution, bringing with them a sheaf of exam results and an awareness that they have been chosen for social advantage. This is not likely to encourage the kind of intellectual curiosity or fascination with study for its own sake that makes a university thrive.

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David Starkey forced to resign from Cambridge college over 'damn blacks' slavery comments

Just one adjective condemned him.

The celebrity historian Dr David Starkey’s career lies in ruins, with him set to lose all his academic titles and book deals, after he made comments about slavery in which he referred to “damn blacks”.

Dr Starkey, who rose to prominence in the early 2000s for his writing and documentaries on Tudor politics, argued in an interview that slavery cannot be considered genocide because “otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain”.

On Friday he lost his academic positions at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and Canterbury Christ Church University, while his role as a visiting fellow at the University of Buckingham has been placed under review.

Lancaster and Kent universities both said they were reviewing his honorary graduate status.

The news came as Dr Starkey’s publisher, HarperCollins, which was expected to publish two more of his history books, said it was cancelling their release.

Hodder and Stoughton, which has published the historian in the past, said it would never work with him again.

The Mary Rose Trust, a charity that runs a museum in Portsmouth, yesterday accepted Dr Starkey’s resignation from its board, while he faced calls for his CBE to be stripped from him.

“He’s been saying this stuff for years, said Dr Louise Raw, another historian. “It’s only because of the work of #BlackLivesMatter that it’s being taken more seriously.” Personally believe he should lose his CBE too.”

Dr Starkey’s various sackings follow widespread anger over comments he made about slavery in an online discussion about the Black Lives Matter movement.

In an interview with the conservative commentator Darren Grimes, the historian claimed: "Slavery was not genocide,” adding: “Otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there? "An awful lot of them survived."

Dr Starkey went on to discuss the relationship between slavery and the British Empire. "As for the idea that slavery is this kind of terrible disease that dare not speak its name, it only dare not speak its name, Darren, because we settled it nearly 200 years ago," he said.

"We don't normally go on about the fact that Roman Catholics once upon a time didn't have the vote and weren't allowed to have their own churches because we had Catholic emancipation."

A clip of the interview was posted online and generated hundreds of angry comments, many of which condemned the historian as a racist. Sajid Javid, the former chancellor, called the comments "appalling".

Mr Grimes has since acknowledged he “should have robustly questioned Dr Starkey about his comments” and has removed the clip from his website.

Sir Anthony Seldon, Dr Starkey’s employer and vice chancellor of the University of Buckingham, condemned the historian for his comments. “It’s just not acceptable, what he said,” he told The Telegraph.

“With freedom of speech goes responsibility. It’s not an absolute right,  and you cannot thoughtlessly provoke and incite and inflame, particularly at such a sensitive time.  “The absence of any apology from him, I think is extremely disappointing.”

Canterbury Christ Church University, who sacked Dr Starkey on Friday morning, said his comments were “completely unacceptable”.

Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge underlined its own opposition to racism and said honorary fellows had a responsibility to “uphold our values”.

Dr Starkey previously provoked outrage after appearing on television in the aftermath of the 2011 London riots to say “the whites have become black” and condemn ''destructive, nihilistic gangster culture”.

The BBC received almost 900 complaints, which Dr Starkey said showed the subject of race had become “unmentionable”. He has since appeared on several of the corporation’s programmes, including Question Time.

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Australia: NSW curriculum review is a fail

Despite the Berejiklian government’s  ‘back to basics’ rhetoric, the NSW curriculum review is proposing a radical overhaul that isn’t based on evidence, but will make life more difficult for teachers and students.

The curriculum definitely needs to be improved. But while many of the minor proposals of the latest review are sensible, the suggested major changes will make matters worse.

The most radical proposal is to move away from the normal year-level curriculum to an ‘untimed’ curriculum, so it will “not specify when every student must commence, or how long they have to learn, the content of each syllabus.”

This would remove any absolute standard for what all students should be expected to achieve in each year; yet another downward notch for the already-low expectations in our school system.

Teachers’ work in the classroom will be made harder because apparently they will need to — somehow — deliver lessons to students working on different syllabi within the same class, depending on their progress. It’s already a constant challenge to teach lessons to students with differing abilities and progress when covering the same syllabus.

How could a teacher possibly be reasonably expected to teach many different topics at the same time in one class and track each student’s progress against different standards? It’s a recipe for even more red tape for teachers, who already suffer from a heavy administrative burden.

Proof that this idea isn’t a practical one is that the review cannot point to any high-achieving school system, anywhere in the world, that has an ‘untimed’ curriculum. Not one.

Another proposal is that the HSC will have less emphasis on exams and introduce a “major project” for each Year 12 student.

But take-home assignments like this are far less fair than exams in demonstrating proficiency of a subject. For example, students from disadvantaged backgrounds would have less access to parental help or tutors at home for their major projects. This would undermine the integrity of the HSC — which is arguably the most rigorous Year 12 certificate in Australia — and negatively impact disadvantaged students in particular.

The review itself acknowledges these potential equity problems, and the best it can say in response is that they are “probably not insurmountable.” So that’s alright, then?

The NSW government’s response to the proposals for an untimed curriculum and major projects for the HSC has been “support in principle” but “further advice will be sought.” We can only hope this is bureaucratic code for “not going to happen.”

A review is one thing, government policy is another. The NSW government has only itself to blame if it implements the review’s recommendations and school results fail to improve — or continue to worsen — despite more taxpayer funding.

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