Does the Guardian employ too many Oxbridge graduates? The question was posed by readers’ editor Chris Elliott yesterday. But it’s a stupid question, if you ask me, and you only get as good an answer as the question you ask. What Elliott and other editors should really be asking themselves isn’t if they hire too many of these graduates, but why there seems to be an unmistakable pattern.
Elliott did some informal research and asked his colleagues about their background. Of 178 respondents, 67 held degrees from Oxford or Cambridge, and many had a thing or two to say about it. Some suggested that the complaint of a high proportion of Oxbridge grads indicates that the public fears “that the Guardian shows the bias of a metropolitan elite” while others argued that Oxbridge is an elite selected by ability, and hence “to object to Oxbridge graduates having places in government/media/academia should, in theory, be like objecting to the fastest runners getting all the places in the Olympic team: absurd.”
It only gets interesting when someone highlights that Oxbridge itself isn’t the problem, but that privately educated people are overrepresented there and hence are “likely to be massively overrepresented at any organisation which they dominate.” Suddenly the concept of ability is up for interpretation. Who has the ability to make it to Oxbridge, and why? How much is nature, and how much is nurture, or should I say class?
If we agree that systematically, whether consciously or not, employing a disproportionate amount of people from particularly wealthy sections of society is problematic, we’ve got a situation worth thinking about. Elliott highlighting that he left school at 16 and that the Guardian does in fact hire fewer of these particular graduates now than in the past just seems a bit irrelevant, the same way that one woman at the top of an organisation doesn’t prove feminists wrong and women getting the right to vote wasn’t the end of the women’s rights movement.
Some say that we hire people we like, or better still, we hire people like ourselves. With a majority of Oxbridge grads at senior positions, is this what’s happening at the Guardian? If so, how can this change?
Elliott and fellow senior editors might say that I have non-Oxbridge-graduate-writer victim complex written all over me, and that’s fine. The truth is actually that I have missed out on more opportunities because of graduate training schemes being open exclusively to ethnic minorities, and you don’t see me going after them. I’m not on a personal mission here.
But if we’re going to ask these questions, let’s do it properly. Let’s be honest about it and admit that a CV with Oxbridge written at the top of it gets a magic glow to it, while it’s easier to miss out on something unique on a CV that reads former polytechnic. Let’s not pretend that all children have equal opportunities when they start primary school, and that a stable upbringing with private school education doesn’t help. Let’s remember that there are other great, creative, forward-thinking universities out there that encourage highly intelligent, articulate students to think for themselves and critically analyse the world they live in. And if we’re too lazy to go find these students, let’s not be hypocrites: let’s just admit that we’re happy to compromise on socio-economic equality because it’s easier that way.
