Let’s be clear: the boat race is still profoundly elitist
Today’s Oxford and Cambridge boat race will, for the first time, see women of the two universities permitted to race on the same course as the men and on the same day in front of a live television audience.
This is a step forward for gender equality and another blow to patriarchal assumptions that women are too ‘delicate’ for such sporting endeavours. As recently as 1962 the captain of Selwyn College at Cambridge wrote to the university’s women’s boat club to chastise them for perpetrating something that was “a ghastly sight, an anatomical impossibility and physiologically dangerous”.
But let’s be clear: the boat race is still profoundly elitist. We should all welcome the levelling of the playing field between men and women, but the next step is for Oxford and Cambridge – and by extension the boat race – to open themselves up more fully to those from non-privileged backgrounds.
Just one in 10 children who attend either Oxford or Cambridge are entitled to free school meals – compared with a fifth of children in Britain as a whole. A quick glance at some of the surnames which still dominate at Oxford makes the same point in a slightly different way. According to a 2013 study by the London School of Economics, a disproportionately large number of places at Oxford were taken up by people with Norman Conquest surnames such as Baskerville, Darcy, Mandeville and Montgomery.
This isn’t because a Norman surname is a sign of super intelligence; it’s because we live in a society where class privilege cascades down the generations like a tennis ball bouncing down a flight of stairs. More young people from the London borough of Richmond attend Oxford and Cambridge than from the entire city of Birmingham.
And so as much as today’s boat race may be a victory for gender equality, we should not ignore the class inequalities that persist at our top universities – and in society more generally – in a fit of liberal hubris. As I’ve written a number of times, equality isn’t a state of affairs that is half upper middle class women and half upper middle class men.
James Bloodworth is the editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
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75 Responses to “Hurrah for boat race gender equality. Now what about class?”
leftwing slander resistance
Oh piss off you pessimist – Oxford is about as “closed off to the public” as Kim Kardashian. It honestly baffles me why people whine about Oxford and Cambridge being elitist – obviously its elitist, it’s an academically selective intellectual institution – if you cant make the grades you dont get in, regardless of class, background, or your last name (I honestly spat out my tea with laughter when you put that down as a genuine reason for thinking that Oxford is elitist, because there are more people called Montgomery) – just the same as any other university. The fee’s are, funnily enough, the same as any other university too. Theres nothing elitist about Oxbridge other than their meritocratic selection process which is unanimous across all cultures worldwide. Stop crying about the fact that you blatantly didnt get in and write something with some actual substance.
Adam
Crying about the fact he didn’t get in? Maybe normal people might consider going there if 99% of the people there didn’t look down on anyone who doesn’t talk like the Queen. I’ve known many people who have felt totally out of place and so have gone elsewhere. We have enough ‘born to rule’ posh twats in government. And you also seem to be saying that rich people are all grafters and everyone else is bone idle and that’s why they don’t get in. Utterly deluded if so!
Matthew Blott
Maybe it’s the attitude of the place. My brother was fortunate to go to Cambridge and said he felt out of place, women and black students had the same sense of entitlement as their white male peers. Which is the point James Bloodworth is making – the most pernicious form of discrimination today is based on class and not enough is done to tackle it.
Leon Wolfeson
Don’t forget that Oxford is also quite expensive as a place to live (I worked there for three years, and can tell you chapter and verse on that one – there’s also not that many shops).
(Cambridge far less so, and I like it a lot more ><. I've worked but not lived there, sadly)
damon
This is a bit of a stupid way at having a go at top universities.
Anyone can join a rowing club if they want to. It’s just that working class kids don’t even think about it – or their schools don’t do it. I think rowing should be available to many more kids. As should joining the scouts or whatever would be it’s modern equivalent.
One reason that kids do better when they go to private schools is that they make sure that the children become engaged with what is being taught and have proper discipline. I saw children who were learning far more than some of ours in Sri Lanka just recently, obediently paying attention to their teachers in old fashioned classrooms where they just about had desks and blackboards.
The children of Sri Lanka don’t have the negative culture and distractions that many of ours have.