If I was the vice-chancellor of Oxford, I’d be thinking about an urgent fundraising campaign that would allow the university to go private. Chris Heaton-Harris’s letter yesterday was dumb. A request for information on who lectures about Brexit and for links to their lecture materials made on House of Commons letterhead was bound to look intimidating. But David Lammy’s letter to Oxford, co-signed by the shadow Education Secretary and the Tory chair of the Education Select Committee, is even more of an assault on university independence.
Lammy not only wants Oxford to do more to fix the deficiencies of the school system but also to move to ‘centralised admissions’. Such a move would be a disaster. It would undermine the very nature of the college system. It would break the vital link between those who admit the students and those who teach them.
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