Politicians find political capital in university admission's prejudices

By DIANE ROBERTS

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 8, 2000

If you want to start a fight at an American dinner party, raise the subject of affirmative action in education. Jeb Bush's One Florida plan, which takes away race as a factor in admission to universities, riled so many people they marched on the capitol. Now there's this woman from Melbourne, Susan Wooldridge, charging the FSU and UF law schools with reverse discrimination. She's white and says she didn't get in while allegedly less qualified minority students did.

If you want to start a fight at a British dinner party, raise affirmative action based on class, not race. The current hot-button issue in Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" is what the newspapers are calling "The War of Laura's Brain," a story of elitism, educational prejudice and political desperation.

Laura Spence, a high-achieving 17 year-old from a state school in the economically-depressed northeast of England, applied to study medicine at Oxford University. She didn't get in. Harvard, however, admitted her and handed her a financial aid package worth over $100,000.

Meanwhile back in London, New Labor was slipping in the opinion polls. Conservative leader William Hague, once considered too pitiful to worry about, was scoring points just saying, "no," to the European single currency. For weeks, Labor couldn't BUY a headline. Then Blair's dark army of spin-doctors got a tip-off (from one of Laura Spence's teachers) and saw pay dirt in the sad tale of the hard-working girl from a tough area rebuffed by the toffee-nosed aristocrats of Oxford and driven into the egalitarian arms of Harvard.

"An absolute scandal!" thundered Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. He lambasted Oxford as a bastion of "old school tie" privilege, accused the university of favoring applicants from posh private schools over state schools.

Laura Spence was actually a well-off middle-class girl from a well-off middle-class school. But that didn't matter. The rest of the Labor government piled on. Cabinet ministers charged that "independent" schools such as Eton and Winchester turn out "upper middle-class bullsh--ers," long on confidence and charm even when short on intelligence. Statistics were trotted out showing that though private schools educate only 8 percent of British children, their graduates account for 43 percent of Cambridge's intake and 47 percent of Oxford's. "Elitism!" bellowed the party faithful.

Oxford fought back, showing a large increase in students from "disadvantaged" backgrounds over the past 20 years, claiming that Laura Spence was a good student, just not good enough. Even Tory leader William Hague, normally no defender of the lefty culture at Oxford, got into the act: "Someone should tell Gordon Brown that Oxford does accept kids from comprehensives [state schools]. I know, I was one of them."

I swear, I got all nostalgic watching New Labor revert to Old Labor's favorite: It was class war, but with a twist. I was at Oxford myself for most of the 1980s, and used to worry about how elite the place could possibly be if they went around letting in FSU sorority girls like me. That was when the university's big enemy was not the Labor Party, but Margaret Thatcher. She used to snarl that Oxford fostered "enemies of Conservatism." I should hope so.

Though Thatcher herself was an Oxford graduate, the university refused her an honorary degree on the grounds that she did her best to destroy higher education. We all assumed that when (if) Labor got into government, they'd understand the value of high-standard universities like Oxford, Cambridge, London and others. After all, they were supposed to be socialists, and socialists (especially British socialists) thought nothing too good for the workers. Moreover, Oxford is the alma mater of many of Labor's stars (you thought they were all ex-coal miners?), including a bright young barrister called Anthony J.P. Blair.

So it is bizarre in the extreme to see Labor snipe at the institution that educated half the cabinet. And even stranger to have Harvard held up as a paragon of educational democracy. Tuition at Harvard is pushing $30,000 a year; tuition at Oxford is about $1,600 a year. Oxford used to be FREE -- it was Blair's Labor government which imposed fees. To do it justice, Harvard, the richest university in the world, provides financial aid for anyone who can get in. But that often means that the poorer kids accumulate crippling debts or have to work in the kitchen, serving lunch to the richer kids. It's a fair point to say that too many of Oxford's students come from private schools: perhaps a little to do with residual prejudice against state schools, probably more to do with the sorry state of underfunded secondary education in Britain -- begun under the Tories and enthusiastically continued by the Blair government- which limits opportunities for too many young people.

The real story here is not about how one smart girl failed to get into one great university but got into another great university; it's about New Labor's discomfort with being part of a ruling class it used to set itself against. Blair created this monster when he abandoned Old Labor's gradualist socialism in favor of Thatcherism Lite. The War of Laura's Brain will be fought and refought over the next 10 months as Blair's government goes into campaign mode. His ministers are considering imposing admissions quotas of state-school students on the top-ranked universities, figuring this will bolster their populist credentials. And the class divide will be raised again as Blair struggles to differentiate his policies from the Tories.

Universities make useful enemies for politicians, since by their very nature they are (or ought to be) selective. So when a creditable candidate for admission doesn't get in, or gets in when other creditable candidates don't, there's political capital to be made. One Florida brought the unresolved issue of educational discrimination against blacks to the boil, and may spill over into future elections. Susan Wooldridge's claims that she was rejected by the state's two big law schools because she was white, will just stoke the fire, despite the fact that her test scores are not as high as other white applicants who also did not get in.

As for Laura Spence: She will have a great time at Harvard, and maybe even be grateful she's out of range for Labor spin doctors. But universities -- on both sides of the Atlantic -- will continue to serve as metaphors for various kinds of prejudices for all kinds of politicians. There are not now, nor have there ever been, votes in higher education.

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