Long live elitism

Spectator, The, Jun 3, 2000

No words arouse the wrath of the mean-minded with greater certainty than the words 'elite' and 'elitist'. To the envious and the resentful they have connotations of conspiracy, unearned privilege, injustice and illicit self-enrichment, to the exclusion of everyone else. In the mind of such people, there is only one acceptable fate for an elite: its total destruction. Politicians who call Oxford and Cambridge elitist appeal to a mindless egalitarianism, and stir up hatred and paranoia.

Of course universities are elitist; they are predicated upon the fact that intellect is not evenly distributed through the population, and they exist to foster precisely those disciplines which are intellectually the most taxing. A university that was not elitist would admit everyone indiscriminately to its lecture halls, including the mentally deficient, and award everyone the same mark in examinations, if indeed it held any. It would cease to be an institution of learning.

Without elites and elitism, man would still be in the caves. Every achievement of civilisation is the achievement of an elite. There can be no art or science worthy of the name without an elite. What is more, freedom and justice require elitism; for a world in which no elite was permitted to form would be a world of abject and arbitrary totalitarianism.

Far from being the enemy of an open society, elitism is its precondition. It is a wilful misrepresentation of British history and society to depict it as having been divided into ossified castes, with Oxford and Cambridge serving only to perpetuate the highest Brahminical caste.

The five prime ministers who preceded Mr Blair in office were John Major, Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan, Edward Heath and Harold Wilson, all of them of comparatively humble social origin, and three of them graduates of Oxford. Their humility of origin did not prevent their rise in society and their achievement of elite status. In fact, the British elite has for centuries not been an impenetrable caste but a class that is extremely permeable to talent of every kind. Indeed, the hope and possibility of entry into the elite has been one of the principal incentives to endeavour in Britain, and helps to explain why it has been an extremely creative society in so many fields for so long.

The attempt to apply levelling measures to Oxford and Cambridge (and, no doubt, soon to other elite institutions) will, if successful, lower their standards catastrophically and thereby reduce their contribution to social mobility. The possession of a degree from Oxford or Cambridge will come to mean no more than the possession of the same from any other establishment, so that the levelling will have defeated its own ostensible purpose.

If Oxford and Cambridge take a disproportionate number of students from public schools, that is only because a disproportionate number of the best pupils are educated in those schools. Standards in the state sector are abysmally low, and the whole argument about the ancient universities diverts attention from this cardinal fact. The suggestion that the student intake at Oxford and Cambridge should be deliberately changed by reference to the social origins of the students may be innocently intended, but it is reminiscent of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, where university places were available only to those who could prove their proletarian origins.

Mr Brown has, for reasons of cheap demagoguery, confused an elite with an oligarchy. The two are not by any means the same. An elite exists by virtue of its superiority, both aesthetic and intellectual. It is open to new talent, indeed welcomes it, though in part it is inevitably self-perpetuating because of the advantages its members are able to confer upon their offspring. An elite serves some end other than its own power.

An oligarchy, by contrast, is the kind of social group to which the members of the government all too transparently wish to belong. It is closed and conformist, brooks no dissent, gathers all power unto itself, regulates everything, prevents social mobility, is afraid of genuine merit, is thoroughly bureaucratic and generally unimaginative, and rules by patronage, of which it aspires to be the sole dispenser.

Britain, under the present government, is showing signs of turning into an oligarchy of nonentities, whose only discernible talent is the ruthless manipulation of public opinion. The government finds the freedom of the universities, or of any other institutions, to regulate themselves irksome. Nothing must escape its grasp. It presents itself as the defender of the British people against the traditional elitism of the universities only to further its own establishment as an unassailable oligarchy.

What have the elitist universities given us? Marlowe and Milton, Newton and Darwin, Johnson and Coleridge, Thackeray and Macaulay, Wordsworth and Tennyson, Russell and Keynes, Watson and Crick. What have the demagogic oligarchs of the government given us? The Millennium Dome.