In the UK’s popular imagination, Oxbridge interviews are a zone of unreconstructed wackiness, a sacred space in which the nation’s most eccentric grown-ups are given infinite license to wrongfoot and confound its most nervous teenagers. I know of one person who claims he was made to sit at the far side of the room, and shout his answers as loud as he could. I know of another who claims his interviewer, in lieu of a greeting, simply drew a stick figure on a portable whiteboard and began the interview with the words: “Is this you?” His answer: “Of course not. He’s nowhere near good looking enough.”
In reality, Oxbridge interviews are nothing like this. Last year, I was hired to work as an interviewer for undergraduate admissions at one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. What an honour: only a decade ago, I had sat in the opposite chair, and tried not to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of power that the erudite stranger in front of me was able to exert over my future. Now, I had ascended to the role of interviewer; the sacred task of spotting academic potential had been entrusted to me.
A few weeks before the interviews, I was informed by an administrator that I would have to sit through a short online preparation suite. It was to take about two hours, and would instil in me, she promised, some of the Solomonic fair-mindedness that is required of the Oxford interviewer. Much of the suite’s content was reasonable, or at least harmless: a template to help us structure the interview, the usual salvo of unconscious bias tests, the helpful suggestion that we avoid mentioning the interviewee’s sexuality or ethnicity in our pre-interview chitchat.
To my surprise, however, the longest chunk of my “training” was devoted to various kinds of admonition. There was, I was reminded, a lot that could go wrong in interview settings. Increasingly, I was informed, students and parents were known to get litigious if they failed to secure a place in the long run.
The primary job of the interviewer, therefore, was to make sure that all his or her decisions were backed up by a paper trail of clear, transparent decision-making that proved that the selection procedure was fair. To this end, a handy list of “evaluation criteria” had been provided for each subject by the administrators: for every candidate, we ought to be prepared to provide a nice, clear list of boxes they had ticked upon subpoena or Freedom of Information request. Obediently, I began to click through screen after screen of standards, targets, benchmarks; vague reifications like “demonstration of analytic ability” vied with numerical scores denoting socioeconomic disadvantage.
I suspect that the rationale for this new regime of rubrics and targets can be found in the old stories of institutional hazing. After all, however well such outlandish interview techniques serve as anecdotes years later, they are hardly fair — at least if “fairness” is defined as the imposition of a nice, clear, non-arbitrary standard which all candidates have the same opportunity to prepare for, and to which all candidates are subjected equally.
At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel it was slightly absurd to take something as deliberately supple and formless as an interview — a scenario that is still prized by employers precisely because it allows them to see past the drab uniformity of the CV — and subject it to such rigid trammels. If we were simply going to ask candidates to tick pre-drawn boxes, then why not cut out the middleman and do away with interviews altogether? Nor, I began to suspect, was the new system even particularly fair: under the old regime, interviewers could seize upon whatever it was that the candidate seemed to be especially good at, or interested in, and follow the thread wherever it led them; now, they were constantly being yanked back by the rubric towards lines of questioning that would, inevitably, favour a certain kind of student over others. Viewed in this light, what we were calling “fairness” actually turned out to be something very different: protocol, paperwork, procedure.
Oxford may sit near the top of the great pyramid of British institutional prestige, but it is not alone in displaying this tendency to conflate “fairness” with pointless bureaucratisation. I have a distinct memory of working as a secondary-school teacher, and handing back a wonderful, insightful essay on Hamlet, which I had been forced to award a C because it addressed the wrong “Assessment Objectives” as stipulated by the exam board. Nor is the trend even confined to education: Justin Welby’s Church of England, with its Synod-mandated “talent pipelines”, functions in much the same way, as does the Civil Service, with its ornate systems for ensuring regional equilibrium between fast-streamers. The result is that, increasingly, academics, teachers, priests, and countless other professionals end up interacting with their charges, parishioners or public in a spirit of bureaucratic guilt: “If it were up to me, I’d do it differently,” we sigh as we watch the face before us crumple into disappointment, “but I don’t make the rules.”
In education, at least, the adoption of fairness as an organising principle is surprisingly recent. You certainly won’t find much mention of it in the great humanist educationalists like Humboldt, or Cicero — nor even the great egalitarian firebrands of the Sixties, like Paulo Freire and Jacques Rancière, who tended to avoid metaphors that implied they were simply doling out some education-commodity.
In the UK, in fact, the fairness fetish only really took off in the Eighties, when a series of Thatcherite reforms standardised education across the country. The most dramatic intervention came in 1988, when the Education Reform Act homogenised national curricula, broke up schooling into a uniform sequence of national “Key Stages”, and laid the groundwork for Ofsted, with its byzantine edifice of fairness-promoting rules and stipulations. The other watchword during these years, propagated by Keith Joseph, the education secretary, was “accountability”. Education, it was argued, was to be transparent to society as a whole, its structures and values fully codified and immediately accessible to any would-be auditor — just like the best companies in the private sector, fresh from restructurings by McKinsey and Deloitte. Accountable schools were fair because they ensured children and parents alike always knew where the goalposts were; if they ended up undereducated, or unemployed, the only people they could blame were themselves.
With this in mind, it suddenly becomes much easier to discern what is going on in institutions like Oxford: less an egalitarian revolution than a kind of managerial coup, carried out by an elite administrative class. Thatcher (and just about every politician since) was bound to support the shift to fairness through “accountability”: after all, such measures take away the power to decide what is good from teachers — who are hardly the natural allies of the Right, what with their penchant for labour organisation and teaching the young to think for themselves — and give it instead to white-collar workers, neoliberalism’s natural constituency.
The “fairness”, in other words, is essentially rhetorical. What makes the rubrics and marks schemes and assessment objectives seem fair is not that their stipulations avoid favouring some candidates over others (clearly, they do), nor that they are systematic and holistic (they are just as arbitrary as any other system), not even that they are meaningfully “transparent” (after all, what does “demonstrates consistent analytic and evaluative ability” actually mean?). Rather, it is the fact that the people ultimately responsible for selection see themselves as impartial, capable of rising above the fray with a kind of serene bureaucratic neutrality. A commitment to “fairness”, we might say, is just a way for the administrative class to vest itself with the power of the judge.
As a result, administrators in places like Oxford like to propagate an entirely misguided sense of the way in which snobbery and elitism actually work today. Many people, it seems, are content to spout what is basically a recycled version of Pierre Bourdieu — the idea that wealthy people have “cultural capital” in the form of a sophisticated-sounding accent, decent Latin, a working knowledge of opera, etc., that makes them stand out in selection procedures despite not really deserving to do so. The rubrics, by this logic, are egalitarian because they prevent academics from falling head-over-heels for the first rich kid who name-drops Hegel in his interview.
But anyone who has spent time in an “elite” secondary school in the last 10 years knows that “cultural capital” is not the primary gift these institutions bestow. Wealthy parents don’t pay for their children to go to private schools so that they can learn more about Hegel or Humboldt or even Hamlet; they do it so that they can learn how to get good exam results and construct tight personal statements, which they hope, somewhere down the line, will be transubstantiated into a well-paying white-collar job. These days, in fact, the real marker of elevated social class is a kind of bureaucratic efficiency — the ability to navigate the rubrics and procedures that apportion success in the modern world, without losing the will to live. Even the kids who do slip through the net from difficult backgrounds tend to be the strivers, with their clean sweeps of exam results, rather than the dreamy, thoughtful kids who tend not to read the mark schemes in the first place.
Thankfully Oxford, at least, has not done away with the role of the interviewer entirely (the same cannot be said of most UK universities, where admission tends to depend entirely on personal statements and exam results). There still remains, despite the best efforts of some, a crucial unaccountability to the interview scenario: ultimately, what the interviewers are really looking for is a certain spark of insight or teachability, and most of them have enough rhetorical dexterity to find an analogue for this spark in whatever the administrators give them. The worry is that, by the time academics are able to exercise this discretion, it is too late: all students have been systematically undereducated, and have grown so adept at pandering to the structures designed to promote fairness and accountability in primary and secondary school that they have quite forgotten how to think. Already, vast numbers of students turn up at university unable to read or write properly — they simply flit, free-associatively, from mark-worthy buzzword to mark-worthy buzzword, just as the “assessment objectives” model teaches them. Vanishingly few of them are prepared to undertake the voyage into the unknown and ineffable that ends up producing the best prose.
Some kind of rediscovery of the virtues of “unaccountability” would benefit just about every institution in the UK. It would encourage their members to take risks, think freely and flexibly, rather than simply regurgitating rubrics; it would, in other words, promote the kind of behaviour which the UK’s institutions, with their widely lamented slide towards unproductivity and managerial bloat, sorely needs. Plenty of plodders and pencil pushers would feel hard-done-by; the strivers, no doubt, would have to be stripped of their birthright. But if such reforms were carried out correctly, our institutions just might be able to reobtain a sense that what they do is valuable for its own sake. And what, really, could be fairer than that?
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