21 Oxbridge colleges took no black students last year

[MaeMobley]

Here is an article in the Guardian:

www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/dec/06/oxford-colleges-no-black-students?dm_i=D9F%2CBP8Z%2C2P0DKY%2CX1T9%2C1

There was an interesting discussion and analysis of this statistic on Radio 4's More or less today. I had to stop listening part way through, but they seemed to be saying that (surprise surprise) there was a lot more to this statistic than the headlines suggest. You can get it on Listen Again here.

There was an interesting discussion and analysis of this statistic on Radio 4's More or less today. I had to stop listening part way through, but they seemed to be saying that (surprise surprise) there was a lot more to this statistic than the headlines suggest

There is an interesting paper by Linda Gottfredson which discusses these issues in a US context:

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.

www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

This story only means something if we know how many black students applied.

Sorry,this was an old reply which I accidentally posted. Please disregard.

another article

Thanks for the link PickleFish. I think what bothers me is that it is unedifying to see senior academics who are now by every possible definition extremely privileged (whatever their childhood background) react so defensively. Cf. also e.g. Mary Beard's blog on this topic: timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/12/can-black-kids-get-into-cambridge.html

The statistics were certainly misused in the original article, and it annoyed me to see him spouting them without alteration or nuance in the Commons debate on Thursday as well; obviously there is a problem with the advice given to bright black A-level students about subject choice and so on; but I think it's disingenuous to pretend (as Mary Beard does) that a black teenager visiting Oxford or Cambridge is not going to be struck - and probably put off - by the "whiteness" of it all - not just students, of course, but faculty and other staff (e.g. porters, administrative staff) too.

I agree, Arionater. Ithink the response from Oxford which was published in the Guardian and linked to above was shocking. Especially the defence of Merton College's record, which is just indefensible.

Frankly I think any student who has been in a state school and has understood racism is going to feel pretty freaked out in a bubble where racist - and indeed elitist - attitudes are not only common, but the norm.

I think it would be unfair to describe either Oxford or Cambridge as bubbles where racist attitudes are common or the norm. I think that is mostly not the case, but that too many people there, as in many institutions, are too complacent about the difference between personal, consciously-held prejudice and the ways in which an institution as a whole can function to discourage or work against minorities of various kinds. Most academics are thoughtful people who believe in social justice - and many give freely of their own time to speak to schools and open days and so on. But it's very easy to lose sight of the oddities of the place (in architecture, institutional organisation and so on), or to remain conscious of them but to view as them purely neutral or endearing eccentricities rather than aspects that can and do strike many people as intentionally exclusionary.

There's also the straightforward point that both Oxford and Cambridge are provincial cities - Cambridge is very small and East Anglia is very ethnically undiverse (!); Oxford has a large Indian and Pakistani population, but very few members of that community are employed at the university in any capacity. So that contributes to the very white "feel" of these places in contrast to, say, a university in London.

I agree, arionater - but I also think that Oxbridge has an infrastructure that's very well designed to protect dons with dodgy attitudes. It's not specifically a racist attitude, but I think there is an attitude that Prof. X, who is so very distinguished and whose research is so good, should not be troubled with too much political correctness. So instread, his teaching load is restricted (as in your example), perhaps he's banned from interviewing (as with Eric Griffiths at Cambridge a while back); maybe his students or colleagues are simply told he's elderly and a product of his time.

Because Oxbridge is organized into colleges that are small, you don't get the sort of very formal, organized, depersonalized structures for complaining that I've seen at other universities.

I think Oxbridge do lots of things very well, btw - I just think they are not as good as that article I linked to makes out.

You are preaching to the converted LRD! I spent three years after my PhD as a very junior academic at a small, old-fashioned, conservative Oxford college. I was regularly the only woman on high table in the evenings. I felt constantly self-conscious and on display as a young women in that environment. Needless to say I had no colleagues who were seriously disabled, or from an ethnic minority. I was made to feel self-conscious about being RC (as opposed to CofE) for goodness sake! There were at that time two women (only) who were full 'fellows' (senior to me), out of about 40, but neither of them came in often. All the other women were on temporary contracts of one sort or another, or were administrative staff. I am used to very male, traditional institutions after years of them but I was shocked by this experience, which happened very recently by the way.

The casual, unthinking prejudice about practically everything from men who were perfectly nice in many ways but just horribly complacent drove me completely crazy; and above all the unproffessionalism and the closing of ranks. I also found it, intellectually, fairly mediocre actually.

I have had better experiences in other contexts within both Oxford and Cambridge (I've both worked and studied at both) - especially Cambridge which is on average more professional and forward looking I think (probably partly because departments have more power relative to colleges). But I appreciate that precisely because colleges are all independent institutions everyone has very different experiences.

I got a lot out of my own undergraduate experience (in Oxford) in many ways but I wasn't very happy there and I really don't think Oxbridge is the be-all and end-all academically or in any other way. Lots of people get a better education elsewhere.

As an undergraduate I think most female students - as I was certainly - are reassured by the good gender balance among undergraduates and don't really notice the disparities among the staff. But I can imagine that a black sixth-former visiting Oxford or Cambridge would feel as I did on my first day as a young, female, fellow. I am an outgoing person and I don't mind being the centre of attention some of the time so I made the best of it, but it wasn't comfortable or a good working environment and I wouldn't have chosen it. A man who has spent all day every day at work surrounded by men of a similar background to himself simply has no idea how it feels to feel self-conscious all the time every day. To be honest, I didn't fully realise how uncomfortable it was until after I had left.

I'm sure casual unthinking prejudice must be part of it.

Different environment but I've just come up against a group of very senior largely male doctors who really do not begin to appreciate blindingly obvious sexism and deny it when it is brought to their attention. They just don't begin to get the sort of things that would be very basic HR guidance in any normal organisation. These are docs who went to the v. best medical schools, btw. And I'm sure they all think they treat colleagues and patients fairly. But they haven't heard of unconscious or institutional sexism. (The organisation concerned is also overwhelmingly white - one Black member, a couple of Asian members and one middle Eastern.

Sounds rather similar edam!

Feel like I'm back in the 50s, dealing with this lot, tbh. Amazing that a bunch of otherwise reasonably intelligent people can have missed what is blindingly obvious to anyone who has worked outside medicine (and probably some of those inside, as well).

but I think it's disingenuous to pretend (as Mary Beard does) that a black teenager visiting Oxford or Cambridge is not going to be struck - and probably put off - by the "whiteness" of it all - not just students, of course, but faculty and other staff (e.g. porters, administrative staff) too.

Wouldn't that also apply to Chinese or Indian students who are overrepresented? Again, I think you need to consider the psychometric data which Linda Gottfredson discusses. This accurately predicts that some groups, like Chinese, are always going to be overrepresented.

www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Just in terms of the psychometric results, the Chinese are researching the basis for academic abilities:

"The BGI was the first outfit to clone pigs, and it has developed a new and more effective way of cloning mammals that might ultimately be applied to humans, if that were ever permitted.

But the organisation is involved in even more controversial projects. It is about to embark on a search for the genetic underpinning of intelligence. Two thousand Chinese schoolchildren will have 2,000 of their protein-coding genes sampled, and the results correlated with their test scores at school. Though it will cover less than a tenth of the total number of protein-coding genes, it will be the largest-scale examination to date of the idea that differences between individuals? intelligence scores are partly due to differences in their DNA.

Dr Yang is also candid about the possibility of the 1,000-genome project revealing systematic geographical differences in human genetics?or, to put it politically incorrectly, racial differences. The differences that have come to light so far are not in sensitive areas such as intelligence. But if his study of schoolchildren does find genes that help control intelligence, a comparison with the results of the 1,000-genome project will be only a mouse-click away."

www.economist.com/node/16349434?story_id=16349434

Follow up article on the Guardian website - Should Oxbridge discriminate to boost the numbers of black students?.

India Knight's take on this (she is, as many here know, mixed race):

'Those working-class cultures that sanctify education to the point of obsession produce children that go on to slide effortlessly into the finest universities. These cultures are broadly speaking not white or black but Asian, and their children?s success has nothing to do with money or entitlement but with hard work.'

I think she's got a good point.

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/indiaknight/article477005.ece

Follow up article on the Guardian website - Should Oxbridge discriminate to boost the numbers of black students?.

Yeah, I saw that. I hope they don't. It would undermine any black students who got in on merit and create resentment.

CPO - the problem is 'merit' as currently defined clearly isn't working. Young African-Carribean people aren't being judged on their merits, otherwise there would be more of them at Oxford.

Young African-Carribean people aren't being judged on their merits, otherwise there would be more of them at Oxford.

On what evidence? Virtual Economics has a good analysis of this:

"If you cut the data so finely as to narrow it down to the group "British black Caribbeans" only one was admitted, of 35 who applied. Cut a large dataset down to this level and these are just the sort of things that will jump out - Portugal had a similarly low acceptance rate, getting only one student accepted out of 25. Separately 23 "black African", 3 "black other", 7 "white and black Caribbean" and 7 "white and black African", plus 35 "other mixed" and 9 "other" got in, but the article doesn't mention that.

From outside the UK the university also admitted 3 Mauritians, 2 Nigerians and 1 student from Trinidad and Tobago (ethnicity in all cases unknown).

The scary "Oxford admits one black student" headline simply doesn't wash, and playing with the law of small numbers to show that some individual colleges didn't admit any black students is plain statistical illiteracy. There are 38 Oxford colleges. If the 221 "black Caribbean", "black African" and "black other" Oxford applicants had achieved the university's average acceptance rate of 26% there would still have been only 58 to go around. As it stands 25 achieved a place; even spread evenly throughout the colleges, this would have left 13 without a black student."

www.virtualeconomics.co.uk/2010/12/telling-lies-about-oxbridge.html

Hmmm.

Well, I'm not Afro-Caribbean, but I did graduate from Cambridge in 2009 and am mixed White/Black-African.

Cambridge is very 'white'. But at no point during my interviews or in fact during the three years of my degree did I directly experience racism, or feel uncomfortable because of my race - from teaching staff or other students.

I don't remember any Afro-Caribbean students - in my small college there were a lot of Asians, a couple of black students (black-African I think, but raised in the UK) and a mix of others. In my close group of friends we were Pakistani, Taiwanese, moi, Jewish ... and obviously also 'white'.

It saddens me that children from ethnic minorities might go to Cambridge and think, 'it's too white for me' - bollocks! That kind of attitude is what stops good candidates applying and so keeps the number of ethnic minorities down. I was pretty much always the only 'African' face in the room, but in a country where many places are like that, you have to just suck it up and get used to it. I'm aware that with half my family being white I'm 'used' to white people, but still ... I never experienced ANY racism at university.

Not sure what my point is ... I just hate that this 'news' makes Cambridge seem like it's racist, when I genuinely don't believe it is.

Thats just your experience.

Thanks, cashmygold, I didn't think that my post made that quite obvious enough.

I am merely presenting MY experience. And it was a good one - and hopefully it shows that despite there being very few 'black' students (of any ethnic origin) at Cambridge, that this shouldn't stop other applying because it is more than possible to have a great university experience there.

I'm not refuting the claims about the lack of black students - I entirely agree - but felt it would be sensible for me to point out that neither I or any of my 'black' friends experienced any racism while at Cambridge.

From our ANECDOTAL experiences, I don't believe that racism at application or intervew is the reason for the lack of black students.

That's all.

Of course, cashmygold, you may have had a very different experience at either Oxford or Cambridge, or know someone who has.

In which case, perhaps you could pose that alternate view.

Mahraih I do not think there is racism which is why neither you nor your friends have experienced such a thing. I have not seen anything to back up claims that Oxbridge is racists.There are a lot of press comments that have no substance and should be ignored.