Black students reluctant to apply to Cambridge University 'due to lack of Afro-Caribbean hairdressers'

What a joke! Most blacks rightly know that they will have difficulty competing so wisely opt out. Hair is just an excuse that only gullible do-gooders would believe

Black students are failing to apply to Cambridge because there is a lack of Afro-Caribbean hairdressers in the city, the university’s pro-vice-Chancellor has said.

The “unexpected” finding arose during research into what deters black students from considering the institution, according to Professor Graham Virgo.

Speaking at an event held at King’s College, Cambridge, he said this was one of the barriers that black students face in applying to the university.

“We have been doing some quite detailed research, particularly with black students, particularly in London, looking at obstacles to applying to Cambridge and thinking about Cambridge. And number three on the list was hairdressers,” he said.

Prof Virgo, who is a QC and expert in criminal law as well as Cambridge’s senior pro-vice-Chancellor for education, said this revelation sent a “really important” message to the university.

The research, which involved surveying some Cambridge undergraduates and sixth form students, was carried out in preparation for a new campaign aimed at encouraging more black students to apply to the university.

“[We asked] what is the obstacle, what is stopping you from thinking about Cambridge? The real message was about hairdressers,” Prof Virgo said.

“It’s unexpected but we need to look at applying to Cambridge from their eyes. For those students this is their concern. Really being able to engage with these perceptions enables us to say ‘how are we going to respond to that?’”

Students also had anxieties around whether they would have enough money and whether they would fit in, he added.

Prof Virgo made the comments at a panel discussion on Wednesday evening, convened by the investment bank J. Stern & Co as part of a series of seminars on education.

Universities are under pressure from the higher education regulator to admit more students from ethnic minorities and disadvantaged backgrounds.

Last year it emerged that six of Cambridge’s colleges admitted fewer than ten black British students in five years. The university said at the time that  it cannot change diversity “on its own” and called for parents and schools to encourage ethnic minorities to apply.

Naomi Kellman, founder of Target Oxbridge, a programme to assist black students with Oxford and Cambridge applications, said the question about hairdressers "comes up really frequently".

“If you are from a majority group you assume you will be catered for, anywhere in the country can manage your hair," she said. "But if you have afro hair, the expertise is needed. Things that are really basic and simple become quite a big challenge.”

As well as asking about the academic demands of courses at Oxbridge, black students are also concerned about what kind of food and night life will be on offer, Ms Kellman said.

Cambridge has a number of hairdressers including the Afro European Beauty Centre, which says on its website it specialises in "Afro and European hair care for both men and women".

However, Dr Tony Sewell, CEO of Generating Genius, a charity that encourages youngsters from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue STEM subjects, said a lack of hairdressers is not the reason why black students are put off from applying.

"It may be another lame excuse - kids need to get more resilient and get with it," he said. "As a minority,  you will have to be confronting a situation where you are the only one. You have to face that and learn how to adapt to that. That’s the key issue."

Sir Peter Lampl, chair of the social mobility charity the Sutton Trust, said “cultural differences” mean that some ethnic minority students are more likely to apply for a university in their home town rather than move away.

"This difference is holding some young people back in terms of going to their local university when they have the potential to go to a much higher ranked university," he said.

“Part of this is about cultural differences with many students worrying that they won’t fit in."

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Amazing destruction of an elite French educational institution

Fifteen years ago students at France’s elite postgraduate civil-service college were preparing to celebrate their graduation.

Behind them lay the Alsatian city of Strasbourg, its beer halls, and two years of intense study at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. Ahead stood fast-track jobs in the parquet-floored corridors of power in Paris and the guarantee of brilliant careers. As the top-ranked graduating student stepped towards the front of the amphitheatre, however, she handed the astonished director a 20-page report, written by pupils and entitled, ENA: The Urgency of Reform. Among its signatories was a fellow graduating student with a shock of unkempt hair, Emmanuel Macron.

The student rebel, it seems, has turned into the presidential revolutionary. On April 25, in response to the gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) protesters and their rage against the out-of-touch elite, Mr Macron announced the abolition of ENA. “Makeshift repairs”, the French President declared, would not do: “If you keep the same structures, habits are just too strong.”

It was the most controversial and spectacular of all the announcements made to mark the end of his months-long “great national debate”. At a stroke, Mr Macron gave in to a populist demand, and sent his own alma mater and a symbol of modern France to the guillotine.

All countries select a governing elite but France takes the principle to extremes. Though its annual intake is only 80 postgraduate students (compared with about 2000 undergraduates for Harvard and about 3000 for Oxford), ENA has supplied the country with four of its eight Fifth Republic presidents, including Mr Macron, and eight of its 22 prime ministers, including the incumbent, Edouard Philippe.

Today enarques, as its graduates are known, run the French central bank, the finance ministry, the presidential office, the Republican party, the external intelligence service, the constitutional council, the state railways and a raft of top French private-sector companies.

When Charles de Gaulle founded ENA in 1945, from the ashes of Nazi occupation and World War II, the Resistance leader explicitly sought a meritocratic antidote to the chronic cronyism of the pre-war era. In his memoirs, le general wrote that his ambition then was “to make rational and homogeneous the recruitment and training of the main servants of the state”.

ENA was to turn out an impartial, unified army of administrators, motivated by the “noble” calling of public service, to rebuild a powerful, stable France. It supplied the overseers of the trente glorieuses, or 30 postwar years of prosperity and planned industrial growth.

Amid today’s angry, ruthless populism, however, the concept of an elite is denounced on the streets and roundabouts of France. Far from admired as a dedicated public servant, the enarque has come to embody the perceived arrogance and disconnection of the governing class, skilled at devising technocratic policies and blind to their effect on ordinary people.

It was in car-dependent France profonde, after all, far from the bike-sharing quarters of Paris, that the government’s planned raising of the carbon tax first provoked the gilets jaunes.

The solution, one of them said, was to “get rid of the enarques” and put some “real people” in government instead. With their calculators and spreadsheets, graduates of ENA have replaced the silk-stockinged nobility of pre-revolutionary France as the public enemy of choice.

The reality is more complex, and more nuanced, than Mr Macron is letting on. The President knows full well that France will still want a top administration college, even if he closes the one with the now-damaged acronym.

He also knows that the problem is not the concept of a high-flying school itself but recruitment to and from it.

Through the years, partly because applicants from bookish families better survive the marathon years of preparation required to get in, ENA has admitted fewer, not more, pupils from poorer backgrounds.

In the quarter-century after 1985, the share of pupils at the school whose fathers were blue-collar workers fell from 10 per cent to 6 per cent.

Broadening access cannot be ENA’s problem alone. It also means ensuring that more school pupils from modest backgrounds apply to classes preparatoires, which train applicants to France’s grandes ecoles. This is the baffling parallel world of elite higher education that leads (among other things) to ENA, confuses the uninitiated, and crowns the univer­sity system.

This privileged perch also gives ENA a monopoly on jobs in France’s elite “grand corps”, a sort of top civil-service officer class, the most prestigious of which is the inspection des finances (which Mr Macron joined). Graduating pupils are guaranteed a spot in one or other, according to their exit ranking, rather as in imperial China. Indeed, this turns time spent there into a race for position rather than a chance for reflection or creativity. And the school’s tiny intake forges an exceptionally tight network of alumni, which fuels suspicions of caste-like behaviour by its members.

With his own satchel of diplomas, Mr Macron knows all these arguments by heart. But he is treading a perilous path. That ENA has flaws, few contest. Yet it has done its bit to help create in France a deep culture of public service. And the country itself, with its much less entrenched private-school system, is in many ways better placed than Britain or the US to achieve merit-based education.

Mr Macron’s real challenge is to give a meaningful nod to the ambient distrust of elite institutions while making sure that any reincarnation preserves what ENA gets right and fixes what it gets wrong.

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A Labor Party win in the upcoming Australian Federal election will have come from the classrooms

If the Coalition government is defeate­d on Saturday and Bill Shorten becomes prime minister next week, there’s no doubt Australia’s ­education system will be a major reason.

While policies, campaign management and strategies targeting marginal seats are vital, more importa­nt is how voters think and react to the issues and what they see as paramount.

Even though politicians may believe they are in control and can act independently, voters decide who wins an election and forms government.

The expression that politics is downstream of culture reinforces the point that it is the broader cultur­e and way of life that determines what happens in the polit­ical sphere. And if politics is downstream of culture, then it is equally true that culture is downstream of education.

As argued by American educa­tionalist Christopher J. Lucas: “Culture is learned … the culture of a society must be internalised by each generation. Education, forma­l and informal, unconscious and conscious, is a means for the preservation of culture.”

Best summed up by the 16th US president, Abraham Lincoln, “the philo­sophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government by the next”. One only has to look at the ALP and Coalition government campaign launches to see how prescient Lincoln was.

Scott Morrison’s speech was very much in the conservative Liberal­ Party tradition espoused by Rober­t Menzies.

The narrative is one of “Aust­ralians going quietly about their lives”, where home ownership, the traditional family and serving other­s underpin our way of life.

The slogan “Building Our Economy. Securing Your Future” reinforces the belief that the most effective way to gain voters’ suppor­t is to convince them that a Coalition government, compared with the ALP, is better at economic management and safeguarding the nation’s future.

In addition to having much in common with Menzies’ Forgotten People speech, the Prime Minister’s description of Australians serving others and being committed to simple, honest aspirations reflects a bygone era and an educatio­n system that has long since ceased to exist.

Older generations will remember a time when teachers were authority figures to be respected, classes were ordered and discip­lined, and students were expected to master the basics. History dealt with the narrative associated with the evolution of Western civil­isation, geography dealt with topograp­hy and the rain cycle, and English with grammar, syntax, clear thinking and the literary canon.

Education rewarded those willing to apply themselves and work hard, and the majority of students left school and went on to further education or into the workforce with the belief that their futures were positive, and confident they could achieve home ownership and material success.

Labor’s campaign launch and Bill Shorten’s speech presents the opposite narrative to that of the government.

The Opposition Leader’s­ ­open­ing exhortation, “You have the power to change our country for the better”, empowers those ­voting for the ALP and reinforces a sense of social justice and ­egalitarianism.

The statement that the election provides an opportunity “to take Australia into a new decade with new vision, new purpose”, instead of relying on the past and ­continuity, signals that a Shorten-led government would be prog­ressive and forward-looking.

The ALP’s focus on addressing climate change, refugees, increasing the minimum wage, funding government schools and taxing multinationals also reinforces the impression that it is the ALP and not the government that is more in tune with the times and better able to address the future.

Given the type of education experience­d by the millennials (born between 1983 and 1994) and Generation Z (born between 1995 and 1999), it’s clear why the ALP’s campaign and policies resonate so well with the younger generations.

As a result of the cultural Left’s dominance of the education ­system since the 1970s and 80s, ­students have been taught that societ­y is riven with injustice and inequality, that unless urgent actio­n is taken the environment is doomed, and that Western civilisation is oppressive and guilty of white supremacism.

Schools have long since replaced meritocracy and a commitment to academic study with the belief that all deserve success and that knowledge has no inherent value as subjects such as mathematics, science and English are social constructs reinforcing the power of the elites.

Instead of pursing truth and a commitment to being impartial and objective, the dominant ortho­­doxy, given the rise of postmodernism and deconstructionism, is one where subjectivity pre­vails and being emotional is more important than being rational.

As noted by a report commissioned by the Centre for Independent Studies, it should not surprise that 58 per cent of millennials survey­ed viewed socialism favourably and 59 per cent thought capitalis­m had failed and that govern­ment must take a greater role in regulating the economy.

Given that the school curriculum has long since prioritised deep-green ideology in areas such as clim­ate change with mining companies such as chief enemy BHP, it’s understandable why so many young people have a negative view of business and making a profit.

Last year’s Deloitte Millennial Survey mirrors the judgment reached by the CIS publication when concluding that millennials “feel pessimistic about the prospects for political and social progress, along with concerns about safety, social equality and environmental sustainability”.

The Deloitte survey also conclude­s that young people want “business leaders to take the lead in solving the world’s problems” and to shift the focus from making a profit to “balancing social concern­s and being more diverse, flexible, nurturing of and generous with employees”.

The challenge for the centre-right side of politics if Shorten becomes prime minister is how to address the fact Australia’s education system has long since promoted an ideology that is the antithesis to its more conservative political philosophy.

A good place to start is to acknowled­ge that, while the econom­y and issues around productivity and border protection are important, even more importa­nt is to engage in the ­culture wars and to win the battle of ideas.

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