630 Black British students get 3 A's and yet 1 in 4 Oxford colleges did not have a single Black British student in the entire cohort in at least one of the last three years. Not one Black British student offered a place for Computer Science or Psychology. Go and find the talent. https://t.co/dbJBnyXnY1
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) May 23, 2018
Oxbridge gets £700 million a year from the taxpayer and the Oxbridge admissions system decides who gets to be the next Cabinet Ministers, newspaper editors, senior civil servants, FTSE CEOs etc. So it does matter to my constituents and to every person in this country, actually. https://t.co/C0tJJN7vTQ
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) May 23, 2018
Toby Young said no no, it’s not like that.
https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/999256518850641920
Toby tell us again about that time you got into Oxford because your Dad (a Baron) rang up the College to ask them to let you in because you didn't get the grades? And then come back to talk to me about institutional bias and why white students twice as likely to get in as black. https://t.co/1iVhwjBad3
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) May 23, 2018
H/t Maureen Brian
Comments
3 responses to “Toby tell us again”
During my first degree in computer science (not at Oxford, at Teesside of all places) in the early 90s there were four women out of about 300 students. There were eight people who were not white. During later degrees at Newcastle and Leeds and having worked in those universities for decades, I didn’t see as much improvement as I’d hoped.
There were women and people of colour in top faculty positions, for sure. But there was also a very obvious funnel: women and people of colour didn’t seem to rise through the ranks as easily as white dudes did. Women of colour in particular seemed to find it difficult to find employment in their department once they’d completed their PhDs regardless of the quality of their work.
I served on hiring committees for at least 50 people at Newcastle and Leeds, supervised a dozen PhDs and acted as a consultant in hiring at some other universities. White men were hired overwhelmingly, even over and above outstanding candidates we had already worked with for several years.
I spoke about this a *lot* within those faculties but nobody really believed there was a problem. They figured that since they were academics they were immune to prejudice.
I worked with so many amazing people who didn’t really stand much chance of getting jobs even though they had done great work, written several journal papers while they were students and knew how to get the business of science done better and more efficiently than fossils like me.
It is the main reason I left academia. In my experience it doesn’t realise it has a problem. I rose through the ranks more easily than people who worked harder than me, were smarter than me and who wrote more and better papers than I did. White dude coming through.
[…] a comment on Toby tell us […]
When I was working on my Ph.D., I was in a very large school with a very diverse population. The students came from every imaginable background, from countries far removed from Texas (where I did my work). Females dominated the student body, at least in the graduate program, and the male population was heavily Asian. White males were so scarce in the students they were noticeable when they appeared.
Every single prof in the program was white and male. White. Male. Male. White. Nothing else. No diversity. No gender balance. No hint of reflecting the student body. Many of the white males went on to obtain some permanent position on the faculty; one white female (who wasn’t really part of our student body because she was an education major) was given a minor position in administration. The rest of us? We left. Went to community colleges or low level government jobs, with the same credentials as the white male students who were succeeding beautifully.
It isn’t just prejudice, though. There is another pervasive problem…the requirement for post-doc credentials and huge numbers of papers stymied a lot of the women and non-white students, who were not in a position where they could remain in school forever (many of the white men took more than a decade to complete their program, writing dozens of papers but not getting that damn dissertation done. Okay, they had to retake classes, but they considered that worth it). The women were all either paying for it themselves or expected by parents/spouse to complete quickly and get their asses to work, not lingering in the program sucking up resources. The foreign students had limits because of their visas. African Americans were almost totally unknown in my program (in the time I was there, we never even had one African American graduate student, because at this point too many people have convinced them that Environmental Science is all about rich white people wanting places to hike and they have better things to do with their education than enter a low pay, low prestige field where they have to work at least as hard as they would in the higher paying, higher prestige field of medicine, where we had many students of color).
The one faculty position that was hired while I was there….a white male. Go figure.