Imagine if Durham University were to decide that for courses heavily over-subscribed with qualified applicants it would reserve a small percentage of places for would-be students hailing from within 50 miles* of the university. Would anyone raise an eyebrow? I doubt it.
Yet when Edinburgh University adopts precisely this approach – for some of the humanities and, I suspect, medicine – suddenly there are hysterical cries of “racism” and “xenophobia”. Tom Harris MP** [see update] says this is “shameful” and goes so far as to label the university “an embarrassment to Scotland”.
What piffle. It’s not the university that is obsessing about politics or the border here, it’s the likes of Harris who, I suspect, worries that the university is demonstrating some kind of nationalist prejudice. That seems to be what Rachael Jolley at Next Left thinks too, labelling this policy “Little Scotlandism”. This seems absurd, not least because more than 40% of UK-based undergraduates at Edinburgh are from south of the border.
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