The alleged porcine transgression is supposed to have taken place at the invite-only Piers Gaveston society ball, which since the Seventies has enjoyed a reputation as a highly exclusive party, complete with sex, a litany of class-A drugs, and a fortune teller. It has hosted the likes of Hugh Grant, as well as political elites-to-be — and takes place in a forest where groups can take shelter in yurts, away from the photographers known to stalk outside the event, hoping for a glimpse of someone famous’s son or daughter.

But less well-known and storied than Piers Gaveston, however, are the houseshares. One such example is a 12-room townhouse, initially christened the House of Delphi, which has hosted fortnightly sex parties for the past ten years. These parties were smaller, more frequent, and styled as queerer and more progressive than Piers Gav — an alternative to the elite debauchery of the Bullingdon Club types. Oxford’s ceremonial and self-important bent lends itself to the more formalized sex party.

Delphi has variously been described as a polyamorous community, an “art commune”, a “polyamorous commune”, a space for queer youth to explore their sexuality — and a cult. The house members have actively engaged in their own mythologization, envisioning themselves as the spiritual descendants of Oscar Wilde or Lord Byron, and their orgies as bacchanals; cataleptic trance, epicurean excess. Oxford could never resist the arcane, the sense of ritual, history, and tradition being handed down from one generation to another. In this case, the “house of” prefix is a nod to the trans/drag ballroom culture of the Seventies and Eighties, and the Delphi part derives from the Ancient Greek oracle. (As a Greek, I always found Oxford’s obsession with ancient history amusing). The invitations arrive with little pomp and intrigue; usually in the form of a message on Facebook or WhatsApp.

I never attended any Piers Gav or House of Delphi events, and the sources I spoke to were initially reluctant to share their experiences. Some feared reputational damage, some had signed NDAs, and others retained close networks with current members of the scene.

Many described the parties as being “kind of weird”. Another dismissed Piers Gav as “really lame Oxford shit”. But it was also clear that these events were hugely important to people in finding their identity. Delphi, for one, was an experiment; how can a house, existing largely for the purposes of hosting group sex parties, actually work?

Delphi operated as a houseshare; in signing the lease, you agreed to turn over both rent money and your room for events. The houseshare structure allowed members to share the cost of the parties, and provided a private and intimate space. The houses were run by a sort of Board of Directors, with some alumni staying on in an advisory capacity.

As for the parties themselves, the various floors and rooms in Delphi were designated for different purposes. Much as a nightclub might have an R’n’B room, a cheese floor, and so on, Delphi had rooms for shibari demonstrations, pole dancing workshops, drag shows, dancing, and, of course, sex. It was next door to a houseshare of older nudists, so there was no risk of offending the neighbors.

Everyone I spoke to had developed an esoteric philosophy around these parties and their purpose. It was not merely a soirée, but something more deeply-penetrating than that: a mode of living. “What Delphi is like at its wankiest… is not a house. It’s a community of about 80 people who happen to have lived there at some point or are connected to the house,” said Robin (not their real name; as is the case with all of my interviewees.)

They took care of their own: there were instances when those who were part of the scene found themselves out of a job and unable to pay the rent. Often they were allowed to stay at Delphi, with room and board largely covered.

Jay, a postgrad student, was invited to a liturgical-themed sex party in the early 2020s in an Oxford houseshare that hosted sex parties, but was not Delphi. Guests were greeted with wafers, themed rooms, and nuns — lots of nuns, for the party was primarily attended by women. The ground rules were laid out, and then the announcement came — it was time to commence the sex.

Jay described it as a “really DEI” spiritual descendent of old-school Piers Gav — with a commitment to sex positivity and diversity. Still, no one was under any illusion as to what they were there for: debauchery.

The mattresses were propped up on the wall to clear space for activity on the floor. What stayed with Jay was a scene of someone performing “the most vigorous kind of cunnilingus I’ve ever seen in my life … like a pig in the trough”. Pigs seem to haunt Oxford.

Delphi was unable to avoid some of these pitfalls, endemic to life at Oxford or at universities generally. Around 2021, members found themselves reckoning with a reputation for lax rules and serious incidents.

The more seasoned would select their “favorite” 18-20 year old and take them under their wing, inviting them to these parties and initiating them into the more experimental sexual elements. Alex, who was part of the scene in the late 2010s, told me that this was possible largely because the elders were “well-established people. People with good careers, people with sometimes relatively high public profiles.”

“Everyone had to be bisexual and open to having sex with everyone,” said Jamie, who attended Delphi parties in the early 2020s. You could, in theory, say no, she explained, but if you did, you were made to feel like a “party pooper” or that you were being judgmental. If you didn’t want to have sex, then why were you there in the first place?

Robin said he enjoyed his time at Delphi, but left feeling unsettled by some of the things he saw and heard. “You would just have this group of people that was, frankly, incredibly horny, very open for whatever. And they would bring freshmen in who were not really aware of what was going on, and they would be confronted with stuff that was just not what they were prepared for.”

It wasn’t unheard of for students to see their tutors, or their friends’ tutors, in compromising positions. During my time at Oxford, there was a movement called “It Happens Here” which campaigned — successfully, as of 2023 — to ban intimate relations between students and tutors. The ban continues to inspire impassioned debate. One Oxonian, who is currently part of the sex party scene, confronted me recently, arguing that some postgraduates in teaching positions are not much older than undergraduates. If an undergraduate feels they need protecting from witnessing someone slightly older than them having sex, she argued, they shouldn’t be attending these events in the first place. To me this individual seemed to be showing willful ignorance of the dynamics at play.

In 2021, with Delphi’s reputation now marred, its community enacted a rebrand. As restitution, they excommunicated three or four members of the house over allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. They also gave themselves a new name — which they urged me not to share.

A current resident of the house reached out on Instagram to tell me that “a lot of bad stuff went down with Delphi”, and that they do not want to be associated with their predecessors. Representatives of the group are keen to impress that they are Delphi’s Manichean opposite (though they share a residence, culture, and purpose).

They also insisted there had been no sex parties since — though all other sources attest otherwise. According to these accounts, in the early days of Delphi’s rebrand, members spent hours in meetings trying to find a way to keep the party going without people getting hurt. They opted for a strict guest list — no plus-ones — and sex before 2 a.m. was prohibited. By then, attendees would have dwindled, the inebriated would have been carted home, and the remnants would know what to expect.

None of these rules, however, made for a failproof recourse — and complaints over a lack of accountability have persisted. Jamie told me that when incidents were brought to the attention of house members, they were dismissed, as the perpetrators were established members of the scene, and close friends. When I asked the current resident whether they had made any substantial changes to anything other than their name, they did not respond.

Delphi, and the other house shares, were supposed to be a more enlightened alternative to the Piers Gaveston — which gained a reputation as a place for posh boys to get laid. Sam was involved with Piers Gav’s organizing team in the early 2020s. In a post-#MeToo and Everyone’s Invited era, safety and consent were at the forefront of organizers’ minds. Still, those organizing Piers Gav events were untrained — insofar as anyone can be well-versed in putting on a party. The promise of sex at Delphi parties meant people felt entitled to it, or “think it’s expected of them”, Sam added. Meanwhile, those presiding over the parties were reluctant to get police involved if things went awry.

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Discussing her experience of Piers Gav, Sam suddenly looked harrowed. “It’s hateful that this thing was handed down,” she said. She compared the ball to a cargo cult — a “pretend” version of an imagined Piers Gav. She also mourned Piers Gav’s potential: “It’s actually quite a tragic tale, where there was a utopian ideal, and it got punctured by the fact that these guys were kids and were not able to look after anybody, let alone themselves.” Sam often ponders over the collateral that enabled people to have this “profoundly freeing space”, and whether it was all worth it.

Others were still more damning in their retellings. Angela, who attended parties between the late 2010s and early 2020s, came to be dismayed at the make-up of the organizing committee. “It was plain creepy how, once people became leaders of the society, they would stay on committee for years,” she said.

It took a few weeks of talking for Angela to provide me with a full testimony of her time in the Oxford sex scene. When sex, teenagers, NDAs, social clout and secrecy are thrown into the mix, she said, “it’s a recipe for disaster”. The principal problem with Piers Gaveston, as she saw it, was the way 20-somethings were elevated to positions of authority as purveyors of these experiences. “The word ‘cult’ is quite diluted nowadays but here I vehemently mean it,” she says. “It was astounding how the very same people who applied razor-sharp critical thinking in their tutorials turned utterly docile in that social setting.”

In 2024, a group of students appealed to the Piers Gaveston committee via letter to expel a committee member for predatory behavior. There was “an unspoken rule where for certain potential invitees, entry to the event was conditional — it rested on first having sex with [the committee member]”. The polemic cited threats of social isolation and being blacklisted from Piers Gav as a way to silence allegations against committee members.

The authors of the letter did not feel that Piers Gav was, as they hoped, “a space of flamboyant creativity, queerness, and bacchanalia”, but was instead a space where sexual misconduct was permissible on the condition that the perpetrator had social status.

Piers Gav, with its gag clauses and official committee, also resembled “a legacy corporation”, said Alex, who was part of the scene in the late 2010s. This was how you got a party which is passed down generation to generation, almost cryogenically maintained, but with more women, queer people, and working class people in attendance. Straight white men were de facto discounted from being on the committee. Still, said Jamie, the Piers Gav parties were attended mainly by “rich, privately-educated techno types who want to be really cool. They all did just go to the same private schools.”

These structures imbued the events with an institutional feel, which, in turn, set them up to disappoint. “Once you’ve given something a name, then people have expectations, and then you have to start running things like a business,” Jamie said. Unlike most businesses, however, there was no HR, and no oversight.

Similar dynamics, of course, play out across the university, outside the sex party scene. In 2021, a PhD student in my college, Harriet Lester, went to Al Jazeera with her story; she alleged she had been systematically sexually assaulted by a fellow postgraduate. When she went to the college for help, Bruce Kinsey, formally responsible for student pastoral support, told her “it depends where you want to land up… you don’t want to powerfully piss off people who you may meet again downstream.” The implication was clear: don’t piss off people who are, or who will become, powerful. Students straddle the boundary between teenager and adult. You’re old enough to make your own mistakes, but not old enough to be taken seriously.

Still, for many of the people I spoke to, the experience had its positives. Most people’s entry-point into these parties came via their partners; a sort of benign flirt-to-convert scheme. They often had fun, met cool people, and were able to explore their sexuality. It was a resonant part of their university experience — and they wanted to add to a more nuanced picture. This was a group of well-intentioned kids, enjoying one another’s company, interspersed with a number of wrong-doers who got too “heady”.

For Robin, the house parties were “a network for future networking … you are meeting people who are probably going to be doing something very cool at some point.” The same is true of just about any Oxford society — only here, participants were bonded by their participation in BDSM, exhibitionism, voyeurism, costume and kink.

Breakneck, a well-reviewed new book by Dan Wang, makes the case that China is catching up with America because the former is run by can-do engineers, and the latter by don’t-do lawyers. But if America’s lawyer problem is bad, ours is worse. Not worse because our lawyers are more powerful — America’s codified constitution and litigation addiction suggests the opposite — but because our lawyers simply weigh heavier in the makeup of our elite. The US has Silicon Valley, a colossal military-industrial complex and various other fearsome power centers that fight for control of the national steering wheel. In the UK, what is there outside of the City-adjacent, high-end service sector, of which corporate law is a dominant constituency? A few bioscience labs in the southeast, barred from expansion by bat-shagging Lib Dem councilors.

Corporate law, consulting and finance, the troika of City professions that Britain has bet the house on since Thatcher, are pitilessly effective at sucking up our elite graduate class. It’s the third and sometimes the second, closely identified with hyper-capitalist greed and PowerPoint-tweaking bullshit artistry, which get most of the attention. But corporate law might be the most symptomatic of a service-geared economy that’s totally dependent on the global financial tides for business — reactive rather than weather-making. “A bank is ultimately more real economy than a law firm,” says Jack*, an Oxbridge humanities graduate who works at Slaughter and May, one of the five “Magic Circle” companies which constitute the pinnacle of British corporate law. Banks have money, with which to do stuff. Corporate law firms are hired to help banks (and other businesses) do their stuff, whether it’s mergers, acquisitions, due diligence or whatever else. “We’re facilitators rather than actual doers.”

Jack, who’s around 30, is one of many humanities grads to have gone into corporate law recently. That’s another thing about the profession. Consulting and finance tend to attract those wanting to make a lot of money. But as mounting property and day-to-day living costs push formerly middle-class jobs like teaching into the precariat, corporate law has emerged as the profession of choice for clever, well-educated sorts who don’t have a particular facility with numbers or passion for business but would still like a salary that allows them the comfortable life they expected growing up. “When I was at uni,” says Adam*, another Oxbridge humanities graduate around 30, “there was a lot of quite confusing talk about finding a passion, that I listened to and got quite engaged with for a couple of years. And then I started to think a bit more practically about it.” He ended up at the London office of an American corporate law firm.

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And neither are they especially worried about AI eating their Pret lunch. They use the technology to do basic research, but find it’s still too inaccurate to rely on without proper checks. Law firms don’t want to be feeding confidential info into AI systems anyway, which is perhaps why there doesn’t seem to be any immediate squeeze in hiring trainees quite yet. In the longer term, who really knows? AI evangelists would say that corporate law is exactly the kind of structured, fact-rich knowledge work that will be well automated sooner or later.

It certainly puts a faint crack into the profession’s reputation as the platonic ideal of a stable upper-middle-class career. But in the more immediate term, isn’t it the stability itself that’s the problem? Becoming a corporate lawyer “is the opposite of doing anything entrepreneurial”, says Jack. It’s for “very smart people who are fundamentally not risk takers”. The fact it holds such appeal contributes to Britain’s “massive growth problem”. When “the smartest people in the country go off to be fucking consultants and lawyers”, what hope do you have of founding companies and industries that actively shape the world rather than being dependent on globalization cruising along as usual?

Reactive doesn’t necessarily mean constricting, thinks Jack, who says that though “excessive or incorrect legal frameworks are not helping the UK”, this is not a problem of bad lawyers but “a problem of bad laws” — and bad laws are the fault of politicians, who increasingly conceptualize law as an immovable obstacle rather than something that their mandate demands they shape and reshape. But maybe that conceptual blindness is, as Wang says of America’s politics, due to a legalism which ultimately flows from the profession’s popularity and prestige among our elite. If every politician’s son and daughter and partner and best friend is a lawyer, why wouldn’t they adopt a similar mindset?

And in our case, there is no Californian tech idyll on hand as an alternative. There is, simply, the City. Trump 2.0 coupled up with Silicon Valley in its anti-legalistic crusade. Britain’s populist troublemakers will have to fight on their own, because there’s no extra-government power center that shares their sensibilities. (That’s if the Labour government of lawyers doesn’t pre-empt them, as Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has recently shown intimations of doing.) Good corporate lawyers, and good lawyers in general, might know how to wind their way around Britain’s legislative maze with consummate skill. But a non-legalistic kind of politics knows a more effective trick: that the best way around something is often through it. You don’t unpick the knot — you take a knife to it.

*Names have been changed

For if these universities were or are racist, their self-knowledge must be low, lower than one might expect from institutions founded to promote it. But if they are not racist institutions, how can they explain their willingness to be so falsely charged?

The Vice-Chancellor of my student days at Sussex University was the historian Asa Briggs. At 21, he went to work at Bletchley Park where he spent three years deciphering Nazi codes. We can presume he knew what real racism sounded like. We can presume too that the thought that Sussex could be a racist institution (coloniser or colony?) would be, for him, a sign of utter madness. I don’t know whether Sussex has declared its intention to ‘decolonize’ or not. I hardly dare look.

In the 1960s and 70s Sussex University was special. I got off the bus at Falmer and the first thing I saw was a low grey slab declaring this be the University of Concrete Modernism. This is it, I thought. This is me. After a particularly poor interview (got stuck on the world price of copper) I patted the slab for luck on the way out.

Then one lovely October morning I got off the bus again to be handed a leaflet denouncing the university as a form of ‘oblique state repression’. I didn’t know what that meant. In those days, nobody talked about the British ‘state’. If we had a state at all it was a ‘welfare state’. The concrete slab spoke of modernism, welfare, and social democracy. If this was repression, bring it on.

Sussex University was an astonishing example of the hope and aspiration of post-war British social democracy. At the time, only about 5% of school leavers went to university. A mere twenty years since working-class children had started going to secondary schools, let alone universities, the vast majority of students came from middle-class homes. But all that was changing. At 15, I could have left school and followed my father into the shipyards. At 18, here I was walking into what promised to be the finest education money could buy (but I didn’t have to).

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First of the ‘new’ universities, Sussex saw itself as modern but scientific as well. Even the Soccer Club promised “a modern approach to the science of soccer”. We took IQ tests designed to measure our brain power against Oxford freshers doing the same test at the same time on the same day. I copied from the lad sitting next to me, a fresh-faced Scouser who let me look.

If Oxford was olden and golden, Sussex was planned down to the last red brick — planned, in fact, to be like Oxford but not Oxford. Sussex ‘schools’ of study were intended to operate like colleges. Most teaching was done in tutorials rather than in mass lectures. While I was happily chatting away with my tutors, supping their coffee, at Manchester my wife (not yet) was shuffling into vast lecture halls un-noticed and unheard.

Sussex arts students did some science and Sussex science students did some arts – a nice idea but friendships have a life of their own. We mixed in Brighton flats and guest houses and in that vast range of Union clubs and societies that made the university swing. Experiences differed according to subject. My two flatmates read English and hardly had the time to look up from the 19c novel. One chose Jane Austen as his special subject not because she was good but because she only wrote six. I chose Human Genetics for my science module because I thought it might have something to do with, er…

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Instead of beautiful old buildings, we had Basil Spence’s beautiful new ones, and instead of crumbling quads, we had a ‘Great Court’ that reached out east and west to the very edge of our lives. In winter, when the wind lashed and the rain blew, we leaned across it like figures from a Lowry.

Sussex was planned, but the idea was to be natural, as if the university was itself a feature of the park it sat in, free to grow, but part of everything around it. There was no bureaucracy. Essex House was up in the corner and far away. The only office I ever saw administered my grant: in about three minutes. I once had to attend a disciplinary committee where I was fined 10 shillings by Macan, the Union president.

There were guys in ties and suits, but by and large they were the lecturers. The Vice Chancellor took classes, walked the campus, debated the Union, and could be seen Sunday mornings on his knees in prayer in a ring of light in the University Meeting House. The Student Left wanted to pick a fight with the university administration, and did so, but our hearts weren’t in it. We knew Asa Briggs was not the enemy.

Told from the start that “the University in the main expects students to run their own lives”, this was what we wanted, that was why we came. But when it came to the task in hand, I think too often we mistook weak teachers for liberal teaching, modular choice for intellectual diversity. If there were any conservative aspects to being human, or thoughtful, they weren’t taught.

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Sussex was a university that wanted us to find out, but lacked any collective sense of what we needed to know. And because we were not in a position to know what we needed to know…well, you can see the problem. Arts and social science lectures should have been compulsory. Briggs and J P Corbett (two of the main planners) understood how lectures provided a common ‘framework’ or ‘narrative’, but they underestimated how important that was in a system based on module choice. In any case, lecturing is a rare talent. I had to wait years before witnessing brilliance in the lecture hall. Still, at their best, Sussex’s teachers had a wonderful capacity for getting intellectually close.

Sussex was planned, but the outcomes could not be. Wordsworth talks in The Prelude about “Remembering how she felt, but what she felt remembering not” — and so it was on finding myself standing next to Jimi Hendrix in the gents, or being dropped off in Penge (ah! so this is London), or seeing my first art film (The Bofors Gun). We in Social Studies were so used to cause, pattern and effect, it was easy to miss what could be learnt on the wing.

Sussex in the Sixties sang that we came not so much for the S-u-s but more for the S-e-x (tune: British Grenadiers) but that apart, what the university really enjoyed, on the wing, was self-belief. It believed in itself to the extent that it believed in us and we, by and large, had no difficulty in believing in ourselves. You might think that sitting in a tutorial while the tutor bought an oil painting over the phone – long corduroy legs stretching out to a pair of desert boots – was a waste of our time, if not his. Not at all. It was great. Keith Middlemas was doing his thing (in the jargon), we were learning to buy an oil painting over the phone, and the tutorial wasn’t too bad either. I was learning to fly but had no wings. Coming down was the hardest thing.

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Universities have come a long way since 1970. With over 45% of the school population preparing to go, they have never looked so open. And yet, they have never looked so brashly corporate and market-greedy either, and not only have (some) sullied their reputation, they cost a great deal of money, incur a great deal of debt, and suffer from a great deal of grade inflation both on the way in and on the way out. The number of firsts has risen by 90% in eight years. Eighty per cent of degrees are firsts and upper seconds.

In my lifetime, going to university has gone from the unthinkable, to a rare privilege, to a middle-class right-of-passage, to something that well over half the post-school population can look forward to. In 1964, John Fulton, first Vice Chancellor of Sussex, asked two questions of the new universities. First, he wondered how much of the nation’s youth talent they should monopolise. Second, he wondered how much of the country’s resources they should share with other “post-school institutions”.

Fulton’s questions need to be addressed all over again. Adult education is self-evidently a multi-tasking power for good, and an effective levelling agent. Part-time degrees cost less and probably mean more. Life on the wing does not have to happen only to the itinerant young. Communities sustain a full cultural life by retaining people who are not only educated but resident, and not only resident but rooted. If adult education could be said to have a strategic plan, this is it.

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As for further and technical education, having already grievously misjudged our polytechnics, we should look to German models. If De Montfort University, which has recently woken to the fact that it is named after a medieval war lord, wants to cancel its eponymous hero, ‘Leicester College of Art and Technology’ sounds great to me.

If we don’t re-think our universities, others will. Circling above are private business ventures like Euan Blair’s ‘Multiverse’ — companies that sell themselves as alternatives to university. On the one hand, now that Sussex has declared its intention to appoint a new Vice Chancellor not by trusting to its own legacy but by hiring a firm of consultants that specialises in “appointing world-class leaders”, and on the other hand, now that De Montfort’s new Vice Chancellor has just delivered an inaugural address devoted to “how can we reset public perception of the usefulness of universities”, this seems like as good a time as any to turn and think again.

Isaiah Berlin’s two freedoms — freedom from and freedom to — only work when mixed together and thrown in the air. Sussex in 1970 looks better and better because it trusted itself to make the mix and trusted us to do most of the throwing. It planned itself to be schooled. It unplanned itself to be free. It believed in both. Nine years after I graduated, Pink Floyd taught some kids to sing we don’t want no education. Which was handy because they’d already had one.

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My young life was a travellator up that mountain. I come from precisely that generation for whom attending university was a no-brainer for those in the brains game. And I come from a place in which where you would go to university wasn’t something you ever had to think about. There were only two full universities within a 400-mile radius — and one of those taught in Afrikaans.

The tyranny of choice, the terror of UCAS, the holy mysteries of “clearing”, all passed me by. As did the English “university experience”. When your university is a twenty-minute drive from your family home, you live in that family home. The upside of this model is that you can enter adulthood without much debt. The downside is that university becomes a kind of superannuated school experience: all the same friendship cliques re-establishing themselves. It can easily become a flatpack, wipe-clean lifestyle, notably low in personality formation, windswept romance and regrettable fumbling. Home by half past three. Dinner on the table at half seven. A time of bland stasis, at exactly the moment when everything from Brideshead Revisited to The Young Ones has promised you a rite of passage, adulthood and “freedom”.

These days, having lived in the country for over a decade, I can bluff Englishness easily: I’m odourless, flavourless, practically indistinguishable. But when it comes to that military service for the middle classes, The University Experience — that particular confection of shoe-vomiting on cobbled stones, of WKD-saturated student unions, of “blowing your grant on pills and Beefa then subsisting on baked beans for two months”, all the clichés — I know it only through careful study of BBC3 sitcoms and mid-period Adrian Mole.

Back then, this rankled — so much that one year into a degree, I dropped out, hopped a plane to England and spent 15 months emptying drip trays in a series of bad pubs and worse hotels, in search of a life less ordinary. Up above the bars, in scabby live-in rooms, I scanned various kinds of .gov.uk bumpf, searching for a way to join the English University Experience, until I managed to piece together that it would cost £12,000 per year excluding accommodation, no loans available. I binned the dream, and eventually returned home, thereby performing the uncommon feat of dropping-back-in.

This was still the Mbeki era, when the nation’s farcical political successes of the 90s hadn’t quite dimmed, and a sense of collective purpose still spanned from black to white. In South Africa, the key problem of student politics was “student apathy” — the student paper would run endless pointless pieces on it. A few years later, the storm clouds of Rhodes Must Fall would herald a prickly new world, but at that moment, university was positively prelapsarian. Identity politics was already inside the seminar rooms, but not yet beyond them. Cancellation was unheard of. One winter, a charity I was involved with staged a Big Brother-style live-in contest in a fake squatter camp on the main plaza. Coceka, the girl who won, did so with the slogan: “Keep the black in the shack”.

The university experience, such as it was, was a reflection of the city from which it emerged: suburban, laid-back, jocky, mildly anti-intellectual. The campus was dominated by the Commerce faculty — the eccentric if admirable British insistence on studying impractical subjects, like Spanish, Classics, or History, being largely absent. In a country with no social safety net and stonking unemployment, the wonderfully genteel mentality that leads to so many Brits spending three years studying History of Art is either for the high bourgeoisie or the terminally insane. The system of post-undergrad conversion courses and the graduate fast-tracks is a rather backwards-engineered First World bauble.

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In recent years, my position has come full circle. Ever more, I feel sorry for the English. I feel sorry for the rampant grade inflation in their school system, such that every fresh year requires another wheelbarrow full of A*s to buy a simple 2:1 from Leicester de Montfort. I feel sorry for the firewall of clichés that bound their experience. Most of all, I feel sorry for the oppressively hierarchical nature of the system — the tyranny of the eternal CV distinction between Imperial and King’s, between Bristol and Durham, Nottingham and Nottingham Trent.

And that hierarchy maps onto the job market, too, when you finally get into it. I recently worked with someone who beat out 5000 applicants to a BBC traineeship. The list of fillips you need on your CV to do that these days is mind-boggling. When people talk of “late stage capitalism”, this may be what they mean: a level of competition that turns the humans underneath it into mere abstractions of tendencies.

On the rare occasions employers have been made to scan my resumé, the Higher Education section has likely only baffled and annoyed them. Where exactly does this guy stand in the great horse race of British society — is he more Manchester or is he, you know, a bit Bournemouth?

The truth is that UCT was both and neither: South Africa is simply not the scale of higher education universe that can sustain twenty different words for “upper management material”. At the school on the hill, you got some world class profs, but you also got proper dimbos. It’s neither clubbable nomenklatura nor cultural wasteland. Some of the people I met went on to real greatness. From time to time, I look up the student paper’s chief sub, now a professor at Cornell publishing things like: “Quantum-dot spin-photon entanglement via frequency downconversion to telecom wavelength”. But then you also got the same loping C students who’d been along for the ride since high school. Throw into that the kids from township schools, who slogged through remedial years on lower grades, and you’ve got a fairly balanced pool of talents, all centred around the geography of the city itself. It made for a world that felt human in scale.

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Only the rich can afford to be woke

By Gavin Haynes

By contrast, the rigidly stratified British model seems to involve taking every BBB in the country, and disinterring them to one market town in the Midlands. On this lunar landscape, the colonists will never meet anyone from outside of their IQ standard-deviation. Even the Left-wing interest in social mixing ends at the eleven-plus. A very smart friend completely mucked up his A Levels, and ended up at a lower-tier university. He describes being treated as vaguely godlike by his peers and tutors in the seminar rooms: The Guy Who Seemed To Know What Derrida Was On About. It was perhaps awkward for each party to become aware of that gulf — and of quite what it was each wasn’t getting.

But whatever they lacked, they were getting their latter-day equivalent of the Grand Tour. In the era of Massive Open Online Courses, the price of knowledge is fast approaching zero. And the price of credentialism — of having the piece of paper that pushes you through the recruiter’s door — is finally in recession, as employers get wise to years of academic hyperinflation. In a society that has mislaid many of its rituals, one consumerised Rite Of Passage seems more popular than ever. The eternal desire of kids is to escape their parental homes and go ape — the Cameron reforms simply succeeded in opening the system up to working class kids also eyeing up the same domestic tourism bargain as the middle classes. But post-Covid, it does seem that the long-awaited reckoning on the value of higher education might be about to take place. It is no longer a no brainer.

I was desperate to get out of the provincialism of the New World. But as I look back, I doubt that swimming among Oxbridge super-achievers would have given me nearly as much imaginative scope. Hothousing can be the whetstone to greatness, but it’s also a good recipe for over-narrow specialisation. When I dropped back in, I realised that everything I wanted had been there all along, if I just threw myself into it. Competition for places on the student paper was thin. You could muck about, write what you liked, build fiefdoms, get weird. I did, and it was the making of me.

Perhaps, far from the Oxbridges of the world, the platonic ideal of a university was always much closer than I’d imagined. 9-5, in the Colonies. If you’re going to dream on a spire, you want to have a sense that you’re Sebastian Flyte lounging on a lawn, not hyper-ventilating in a library.

I’m no genius, but I do know something about the social dynamics in that scene, because I kind of lived it.

All my friends got labouring jobs at the ages of fifteen or sixteen. To us, students were the middle-class kids who didn’t work, then left to go to “uni.” They never really came back, or if they did, they returned just to boss us around. Our home, for them, was something shitty to escape from. In their world, everyone babbled endlessly as if everything they had to say was fascinating. In our world, if you spoke self-importantly, people told you to shut the fuck up. They thought nothing of us; we thought nothing of them.

My experience of secondary education wasn’t good. I sat for five years in a crumbling comprehensive with thirty other bored working-class kids. There were fights in the corridors, bullying, shoplifting down the town at break times. We threw things at teachers, dragged our feet and our bags between lessons, and resisted every well-meant attempt to change us. Often disillusioned and half-broken teachers did their best to hold it all together. I hated it. I left as soon as I could with nothing to show for it.

My education might have ended there, but a decade later, I was talked into going back to school by my girlfriend. I got my A Levels by taking night classes at an adult education centre. A teacher there suggested I apply for university. I decided to give it a go. I didn’t tell my friends.

I was building a dry-stone-wall by a roadside, mulling over which through-stone fitted best, when the postman stopped to hand me a letter. He was a lad I’d been to school with. I opened it while I was chatting to him, and he seemed baffled when I told him the letter said I’d got into Oxford University. “But you’re thick like me,” he said.

After he’d driven away with a friendly wave, I thought, “How will I tell everyone?” Was I about to become one of the people I’d grown up hating? In fact, my people were proud of me and cheered me off to war against the posh people (they’d seen Good Will Hunting too).

I went for two main reasons, and neither of them were very nice. I went because our farm was struggling and had become very claustrophobic and small, way too small for me and my dad, and because I needed a new hustle: everyone I knew who had money seemed to have gone to university. But I loved books, too, and liked the idea that you could study just one subject, and skip the rest, which was handy as I was useless at most of the subjects. But it was terrifying. I didn’t want to leave the place and the people I was from, or give up being who I was. I wanted to come back afterwards, but had no plan for how that might work.

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Going to an elite university exposed me to the people that made me most nervous: the well-spoken, (supposedly) clever people. My first instinct was to flee from this strange new world with its archaic traditions, funny language and weird social habits. But I was too proud to go home defeated, so I decided to fight instead. It didn’t take long for me to realise that the posh kids were all leather shoes, woollen jackets, small-talk and bullshit. I soon shrugged off the idea that there were some mystical clever people somewhere that were better than me: I’d now met them, come up against them one on one, and they were often bang average. I could hold my own on anything substantive. I’d grown up among straight-talking tough people who loved to argue in smoky pubs, so Oxford tutorials felt strangely familiar.

If I’d been confined to a plastic chair, and told to sit in silence and listen for an hour to someone who wasn’t very interesting talk about a subject I hadn’t chosen to be interested in, I suspect I’d have messed about and misbehaved, just as I did as a teenager. But Oxford wasn’t like that. The teaching was personalised, flexible and interactive. That kind of system keeps people like me in the room, fired up and engaged. Kids like me, who don’t flourish in school, can benefit from such attention, and focus, and belief. A good society would strive to give it to them.

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By James Rebanks

But posh kids still dominate these institutions. I learned, when I was there, that their trick was not any kind of genuine superiority but pure conditioning. Their schools and families had taught them that university was as much a social rite of passage as an opportunity to learn. They aimed high, in terms of grades — and to be fair, often worked very hard to pull it off. I was from people with lots of excuses for not doing things out of the ordinary; posh kids strode into their extraordinary future with their heads held high. No one I knew had that kind of polish and swagger, but I soon realised you could fake it. I looked at them and thought: if you fuckers can do remarkable things, then why can’t I?

It was liberating to find that I was clever enough, if I worked hard. And I knew how to work hard — for hours, days, weeks and years. OK, my people didn’t achieve highly in education or the professional white-collar world, but we were proud farmers with a culture of striving. I simply switched that mentality and applied it to education — something I hadn’t realised was possible at school. I knew the posh kids couldn’t outwork me. And the fact that I’d failed a lot was a strength, faced with their easy but brittle confidence. I knew how to get back up off the floor. People from more disadvantaged backgrounds than mine often lack this self-belief. But what if they were surrounded by people and institutions expecting and helping them to excel, as the posh kids were?

So much of this is about self-fulfilling prophecies. For years university worked because we believed it worked. It turned out “clever” people for “clever” jobs with good salaries, and sent the rest down the mine, to the factory or the farm. No one asked whether these students were really the most intelligent people. The system just confirmed the advantages of birth and background. My odd, and entirely untypical, journey exposed me to the extremes of the British education system. It has left me with complicated feelings about what universities can and can’t do.

A lot of people treat you different when they think you are an Oxford graduate than when they think you are a farm labourer. They talk to you differently. They talk to you more. They invite you to their house and try to make friends with you. They talk about books. Some of this is perhaps based on not unreasonable assumptions. Some of it is just lazy snobbery. I knew people that would talk down to me or my friends because they thought we weren’t very bright or worth very much. With those people I’d shamelessly mention having been to Oxford to knock them back a bit. It was like sprinkling fairy dust. They’d shrink back as if I’d said the password — or worse, start fawning, when five minutes earlier they’d thought I was northern, common, and knew nowt. Snobs and the powerful fetishise ‘academic’ credentials. I didn’t even pick my degree up, but it didn’t matter. Once you are in the club the detail isn’t important. You just have to look at our leading politicians. Boris Johnson would be stacking shelves in Aldi or working down the chippie if he’d been born in Hartlepool.

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By David Goodhart

My story is sometimes seen as a rags-to-riches tale. But I wasn’t exceptional; I was lucky. The point of this story is that a society that is blind to the potential of so many of its young people, is a wasteful, unfair and ineffective society.  I look at bookshop shelves and wonder where half the stories are. Where’s the book by the girl that works in the laundrette, the man who serves you in McDonalds, the Romanian woman who cleans your hotel room, by the lads that work on the railways or the building site? We don’t care about these people enough because they don’t get heard, and they don’t get heard because we build a success machine that they don’t want to be part of, or can’t access, or use, or afford. Instead of a fair system, the machine churns out entitled mediocrities, born to be heard, born to rule.

And though universities are trying hard to become more “accessible”, there is only so much they can do. Perhaps it’s too late by the time the kids are eighteen. And if working class kids don’t apply, what can an admissions system do?

Around this time eighteen ago, I was sitting down to take my final exams. I did well. I could probably have stayed and become an academic, but I was drawn home to my own landscape and work — to the place and people that made me. Oxford didn’t make me, as a person, or a writer, but I’ve returned there over the years. The people that once taught me seem sad. They say it has gotten worse: the posh kids arrive, use it, then leave to work in the City.

And perhaps all the debt this training requires means that the kids are right to be mercenary about it all. Work hard, get the grades, move to London, do the job, get promoted, earn more, pay it back. Love of subject, creativity, taking risks and experimenting: these things feel marginal. I can see why people are sceptical about universities, and angry at the elite ones. They are often now little more than training camps for the stormtroopers of capitalism. I may have been lucky to go when I did.

In any usual week, you’ll read news stories that are annoying and some that are disagreeable. Occasionally you’ll come one that is outright reprehensible. At the end of January, one such piece sidled onto the BBC’s website, where it received far less attention than it would have done in any normal season. It was published on the front page of the BBC’s website under the headline: “I’m mixed race, is Cambridge university right for me?”

I had to read the headline a couple of times before it made any sense. My first thought was, “What the hell?” Then: “Why would it not be?” For a nano-second I wondered whether, since my last visit there, Cambridge had perhaps become some kind of infamous racist hellhole?

The piece itself was written by a young woman called Anoushka Mutanda Dougherty. She had been offered a place at the university and was using the article to weigh up the relative merits of the offer. It was, though, the framing, presentation and prominence given to the story by the BBC that I found most appalling.

Introducing the story, the BBC website stated:

“Anoushka Mutanda Dougherty has been offered a place at Cambridge University, but she’s mixed-race and from a state school – and only 3% of students who started at Cambridge in 2017 were black, or mixed-race with black heritage. So is it the best place for her? At this point, she’s not sure.”

It is, first of all, worth noting the casualness of that “but”: “…but she’s mixed race.” As though the latter fact (being mixed race) would negate or significantly throw into question the former (being offered a place at Cambridge). Deployed so provocatively –or carelessly – it undermines years of work by institutions, such as Cambridge University, to improve access to people of all backgrounds. It suggests to young people coming up that a set of such contradictory possibilities must indeed be carefully weighed up.

Only the relatively small proportion of the public who have seen these institutions first-hand will know how misleading this is. There were black and mixed race students at Cambridge, when I used to visit 20 years ago, just as there were at Oxford at the same time. Other than an ongoing push to increase access to people of all backgrounds, there was no problem about any of this.  So what could possibly have changed?

Nothing negative, that is for certain. Over recent decades Oxbridge has spent considerable time and money attempting to ensure that its facilities and world-class tuition are available to the widest possible variety of people. It has significantly reduced the number of people getting into the university from private and public schools, and significantly increased the number of students attending Oxbridge from state schools.

Like every other publicly funded institution in the UK, Oxbridge pursues ‘diversity’ as an objective. More than a decade ago, an admissions tutor at Oxford explained how the top universities have attempted to ensure that students from minorities aren’t underrepresented. As Tom Kemp of St John’s said, there are only three options open to the universities to improve access: to wait for every school in the country to be as good as the top private schools; to have a government-enforced mandate which would mean that universities would have to seriously compromise on quality; or to do what universities like Oxford and Cambridge have been doing for decades now – which is to engage in “positive discrimination in favour of candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds”.

He continued: “I know of no subject tutor in my college, or in my subject university-wide, who would not give the benefit of the doubt to an applicant from an under-privileged background who appeared to have a spark that belied their modest achievements to date.”

There is no evidence that the country’s oldest universities are failing in this ambition. In fact, the percentage of black students at Cambridge University which the BBC piece presents as some outrageous example of under-representation (3%) is almost exactly in line with the number of British citizens who identified as black in the last census.

So does the BBC expect Cambridge to have an over-representation of people of one racial background? If so, then which racial groups would they wish to see under-represented? None of these mitigating facts is included in the piece and none of the follow-on implications is remotely contended with.

In her piece, Mutanda Dougherty did tell us her own back story. She explained that her mother is one of the Ugandan Asians forced by Idi Amin to flee Uganda in the 1970s; she claims that the story of her mother and fellow Ugandan Asians is “largely overlooked” and that there is “little understanding” of the struggles that they faced – and says this is one of the reasons why she would feel nervous attending Cambridge. While this may be true, this it is hard to prove. For while many may be ignorant of the history of Ugandan Asians, many others will not be. Besides which, most people are ignorant of most things, and all of us are ignorant of an awful lot. In the UK, 70% of young people have never heard of Chairman Mao. So perhaps ignorance about what went on in Uganda decades before they were born, while sad, may not be entirely out of the question.

Of course, one way for more people to become aware of what took place would be if a bright young student such as Mutanda Dougherty were to tell people about it – both in her circle of contemporaries and friends, and eventually, perhaps, to some wider audience.  The alternative – seclusion only with people of precisely the same ethnic background and the identical hereditary experience – would be the best way to make sure such history were eventually forgotten.

To their credit, her parents encouraged Mutanda to apply to Cambridge, and it is their daughter who says that she is worried about being among “quite a high proportion of pupils from private schools” in a “majority white and majority posh (!) institution”.

This difference between the generations gets to the heart of why an argument like this, and a piece like it, are so disheartening.  There are any number of ways to write about majority populations and minority access. It can be written about and contemplated in a spirit of imperfect progress, or it can be written about and contemplated in a spirit of ever-renewable grudge.  The opportunity of going to a university such as Cambridge can be written about as something available to anyone who works, and applies themselves, and is then fortunate enough to win a place. Or it can be written about in the weaponised, racialised tone that is contaminating everything at present.

Mutanda Dougherty is not alone in adopting this tone. It has been deployed by a much older and more seasoned practitioner: Polly Toynbee. It is over a decade since Toynbee published her book (with David Walker) Unjust Rewards, in which she accompanied a group of black schoolchildren from Brent to see the colleges of Oxford. Were they there to inspire the students and instil in them the lesson that, with enough hard work and a little bit of luck they might get there too?

No such luck. Toynbee and her co-author took the children to Oxford to flaunt it before them, only to explain that it would never be for them (see Giles Coren’s memorable evisceration of this here. As Toynbee and Walker concluded, “The Brent students will likely find themselves in a rust-stained concrete polytechnic not far from home.”

Such a situation would only be ‘likely’ if students from disadvantaged backgrounds or from any minority group were presented with the idea that the top universities are loaded against them from the start. Toynbee and Walker chose to push that idea 10 years ago. But there can have been few higher profile or more damaging perpetuations of the same demoralising claim than the piece the BBC so prominently published last month. In any other season it would have caused outrage. It should summon a little in this season too.

That is why I simply cannot understand why well-meaning, normally intelligent, people on the Left keep coming back to ‘separate but equal’ as if it were anything but a fraud. The latest proposal is from Lord Adonis, who has proposed tackling the dominance of private-school pupils at Oxbridge by setting up new separate colleges for children from poor backgrounds and state schools. He tells us, in his Guardian article headlined “Oxford and Cambridge must launch new colleges for disadvantaged young people”, that this will be just like previous access efforts for women and “persecuted religious minorities” for whom separate colleges were set up in the past.

Let’s not even try to celebrate how progressive these universities were to set up special colleges for persecuted religious minorities. Until 1854, Oxford kept out anyone who wouldn’t sign the 39 articles of the Protestant faith – and the first Catholic halls were not set up until the 1890s. Those who weren’t members of the Church of England were simply not welcome in our universities for generations, and allowing Catholics to set up a college was a simple way to prevent integration.

The case for women is more complex, because women still have their own colleges at Cambridge, though no longer at Oxford. As it happens, I studied at one – New Hall, now known as Murray Edwards. I know exactly what it’s like to be in a separate but equal institution. These separate institutions are always second class, however noble their founders’ dreams.

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For starters, there isn’t any money. Unlike the old colleges, the new ones don’t have land and investments dating back centuries to fund the costs of today. Book grants, subsidised food, cheap rent: forget about it. I was student union president and there was student demand for a rent strike over our high bills. The bursar showed me the books. There was no point. The place was permanently cash-strapped.

And no money means the academics are overstretched. They are often underpaid, too, and however dedicated they may be to the cause of women’s education, most have their eye on a more comfortable gig, down the hill, in the town centre, in a nice old building with a quiet courtyard and a little slice of history.

A good friend of mine used to invite girls back to the Trinity College library to see the manuscript copy of Winnie the Pooh held there. He tells me it was a great way to seal the deal; every girl loved it. At New Hall we didn’t have any rare books, and our most famous alumna was either Mel or Sue from Bake Off – I can’t remember which.

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Lord Adonis has a predecessor in his fool’s errand. In the 1870s, educational reformer and clergyman Joseph Paul Brereton tried to set up a college in Oxford for poor children from the county school system. When that failed, he set it up in Cambridge, to be known as Cavendish college. It was a mile out of town. The accommodation was bad. The schools didn’t want to send their pupils to this inferior Cambridge college – they wanted to send their pupils to the proper ones. Cavendish college lasted less than 20 years.

So we already know what would happen if we did as Lord Adonis recommends. He’d take the poorest group of students, with the lowest family resources, and put them into the poorest college, least able to afford book grants or hardship funds, forced to charge market rent to pay the cost of the buildings in which people are housed. These students would be far out of town, the only place cheap enough to buy land for these new colleges, so they’d have commuting costs those town-centre elites could only imagine. They’d probably have to work to make ends meet, putting them at an academic disadvantage against those with low bills, low costs, and independent funding.

The new students would have the same potential but they wouldn’t live it out.

But the most insidious effect would be to take the pressure off the old colleges to reform. Establishing women’s colleges allowed women into Cambridge without the old colleges having to open their doors. It was several more decades before the first colleges went co-educational, and decades again until the last men’s-only college reformed.

When I matriculated at New Hall in 1999, the senior tutor told us to believe – above all – that our college wasn’t second-class, and we were not second-class students. The old colleges, she said, just don’t know what clever women look like. And the sad truth is that the existence of New Hall – and Murray Edwards – means they still don’t need to learn.

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There are probably plenty of fusty old dons in Oxford and Cambridge colleges who would like Lord Adonis’ idea. It would keep the plebs out of their old traditions. It would give them a guilt-free excuse to stop worrying about access for poor children, because someone else (out of sight and out of mind) is worrying about that. In fact, they are the ones who must leave.

The funny thing is, when I first saw the headline for Lord Adonis’ article, I thought the idea was for Oxford and Cambridge to set up new sixth-form colleges, which is a brilliant idea. Hot-house kids with great potential and poor family backgrounds, either for their A-levels, or for a gap-year in between, and you have the best chance to level the playing field with those educated in our most expensive private schools.

So let’s do that instead, and leave the idea of separate-but-equal colleges where it belongs: on the scrap heap.