Prejudice, yes

Ignorant, wrong and stupid. That is Valentine Cunningham's view of ministers' attacks on Oxford's alleged 'elitist bias'.

Oxford University is being most unfairly vilified for its admissions practices. The attackers, silly and stupid, have selected the wrong target for whatever legitimate social anger they claim as motivation.

Many applicants to Oxford are disappointed - and from every kind of school. Our undergraduate places are hugely over-subscribed, especially in subjects such as English, medicine and law. Every year I could fill my English quota at Corpus Christi College twice over. Every year I get letters and telephone calls from schools - baffled, astonished, outraged at somebody's rejection. Some able people inevitably lose out. That nobody should expect to get what they want just because they want it is a tough lesson that some applicants have to learn early in their lives.

But these disappointments are not organised or systematic. We do not discriminate by age or gender, class, ethnicity, region or type of school, as our detractors profess to think. The stark truth is that for years candidates from the state and private sectors have got into Oxford more or less in proportion to their applications. Private schools have enjoyed a small proportional advantage. That has been obliterated this year, with 53 per cent of offers being made to state school applicants.

Still, there is a huge disproportion of private-sector students at Oxford compared with the national percentage of state-school pupils. No other topic so preoccupies Oxford common rooms. I would guess that Oxford anguishes over this more than many universities where the disproportion is just as stark - Bristol, York, Durham, Exeter and so on.

Much effort has gone into changing these figures. We have abolished our sit-down entrance examination because it was thought to favour public schools, where people could afford a third year in the sixth-form to swot for Oxbridge. We got rid of entrance scholarships, because so many were for people from old public schools, founders' kin and other closed shops. Admissions tutors put in long hours of missionary work at state schools. So does the student union. There are access schemes for various underprivileged groups. State-school children are brought to Oxford in the summer holidays for topping-up courses. The wooing effort is so intense it is almost embarrassing - tutors and undergraduates singing and dancing at the Man United football ground the other day for a throng of children from the under-represented northwest of England. What next? Sky-diving, adverts on trains?

And if you do apply, as urged, from under-represented groups and regions, northern proletarian, black, whatever, you are treated with exemplary kindness and tact. No tests are ever untesting, but our requirements are customer-friendly in the extreme: bits of school-work sent in, small but relevant tests during interviews - linguistic, mathematical, interpretative - and seriously conducted interviews with subject tutors. Discriminations not discrimination are what are in play.

Most interviewers are experienced and adept at handicapping their entrance runners - taking perceived advantages and disadvantages into account. How often at the extended faculty-based meetings at which candidates are discussed does one hear judgements such as, "Watch out: burnished right up to his capacities at his expensive crammers," or, "Grim school, terrible area, and more in her than first meets the eye."

The trouble, I believe, is not with biases at Oxford, but with prejudices out there about Oxford. Too many state-school children and their families erroneously write Oxford off as elitist, poshocratic, Bridesheady or only for geniuses. Not for the likes of you or me.

Why do state schools not send more applicants to Oxford? Much of the numerical remedy is in their own hands. Storm the place, I say. It is absurd that I am inundated with requests to talk to public-school sixth forms and scarcely ever get invited to a state school. Why in the past 28 years have I had only three black applicants from state schools -all were offered places, two were wonderfully able undergraduates? It is not because of lack of talent out there. I am asked, in effect, by ministers to go in for social engineering, to alter white southern bourgeois Oxford by positive discrimination. I cannot do that if whole categories of people sign themselves off. And the more ministers bang on about elitist bias - out of their gross, misleading, ignorant prejudice - the more schools and scholars will take their application forms elsewhere.

Valentine Cunningham is senior English tutor at Corpus Christi College.

20 SoapboxThe Times HigherJJune 9J2000 John Randall Chief executive Quality Assurance Agency Ham Khan