Oxbridge’s soft bigotry of low expectations

There are times when, in attempting to bend over backwards to be as ‘anti-racist’ as possible, you can end up coming across as pretty damn racist. How else are we to interpret the news that Britain’s top universities are considering dumbing down their exams to boost the grades of non-white students?

Several leading British universities have recently mooted introducing so-called inclusive assessments. This tends to mean things like open-book tests or sitting exams at home, rather than traditional exams sat under the supervision of staff. This is all part of a drive to shrink attainment gaps between white and non-white students.

One such university is Oxford. A proposal for ‘inclusive assessments’ appears in the university’s recently published ‘access and participation plan’ (APP) which, as the Daily Mail reports, has now been approved by universities regulator, the Office for Students. The APP notes that black students in particular are ‘less likely to obtain a good degree’ and so Oxford must ‘use a more diverse and inclusive range of assessments’ to give them a helping hand.

Cambridge University agrees that non-white students are put at a disadvantage by its traditional, closed-book exams. Its APP lists ‘assessment practices’ as a possible reason for the ‘awarding gap’ separating black and British Bangladeshi students from the rest of their peers. While Cambridge has not said it will make any changes to exams, it does promise to monitor the success of the incoming non-white cohort and make adjustments if necessary.

It’s not just assessments that these universities think need to be more ‘inclusive’. They want to upend the curriculum, too. Oxford claims that ‘black and racially minoritised students’ need to ‘feel their backgrounds, cultures and identities are represented in curricula’. Cambridge similarly points to the ‘lack of representation in the curriculum’ as a reason why non-white students might perform poorly.

This is the same patronising reasoning that lies behind the drive to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum of every subject, from maths to history to English literature. Non-white students – and black students in particular – are presented as incapable of understanding ‘Eurocentric’ scientific methods or finding value in the Western canon.

Other top universities have gone even further in this patronising push for ‘inclusivity’. The University of Bath’s APP claims that ‘the slight diversity’ in both the university and city of Bath itself ‘means that underrepresented student groups may struggle to feel they fit in’ and are therefore more likely to underperform in their studies. Other universities’ APPs, such as Bristol’s, stress the need for increasing the number of non-white teaching staff, presumably in case the content of what is being taught is somehow warped by the skin colour of the person teaching it.

These universities seem to believe that black students are only capable of learning when the curriculum features texts by people who look like them, when their lecturers look like them, and when they’re surrounded by people who look like them on campus.

Needless to say, all of these supposedly ‘anti-racist’ initiatives are insulting beyond belief. If we want to improve the attainment of ethnic-minority students, or indeed any group that is falling behind, then patronising them by lowering standards is the worst possible response. This soft bigotry of low expectations will only keep minority students down.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.