The controversy surrounding Jason Arday and Jesus College, Cambridge, ought to be a red flag for Andy Burnham and for our Labour government - not because universities should be judged by the passions of the moment, but because education is one of those institutions in which equality and excellence ought not to be enemies.
It has always seemed to me that there is a traditional Labour ideal worth defending: equality of opportunity, with no regard for what is crudely described as race and the various circumstances of culture, gender, age or physical prowess.
But equality of opportunity means little if opportunity is divorced from merit.
Labour must simultaneously insist upon rewarding talent, hard work and genuine achievement.
Bogus credentials, if established, have no place in any hierarchy of recognition. Nor should institutions be reluctant to examine how such credentials are awarded, celebrated or promoted.
We must advance the best while encouraging the less fortunate, and we must do so without confusing compassion with credulity.
The controversy over Jason Arday has therefore raised questions, which deserve proper and independent scrutiny. Allegations concerning academic credentials and their presentation are serious matters, and they should be established by evidence rather than rhetoric. What concerns me most is not merely the fate of one individual, but the possibility of a system in which reputation can run ahead of reality and where institutional enthusiasm may become a substitute for rigorous examination.
The Cambridge setting makes these questions particularly poignant to me. Cambridge University is my alma mater, and Jesus College is one of those ancient institutions whose names carry weight internationally. The danger, of course, is that an institution with so much accumulated prestige may sometimes be tempted to assume that its judgment is automatically impeccable.
Sonita Alleyne, the Master of Jesus College Cambridge, has been drawn into the controversy, while Hilary Cremin, whose views on education have attracted considerable attention, has likewise become a focus of criticism. Cremin has been quoted on social media as saying that ‘we all know this, but education exacerbates inequality – it doesn’t reduce it... our obsession with grades and our inability to really teach young people to be critical thinkers and to move outside the norm is creating generations where there are huge wellbeing risks.’
I find that proposition difficult to reconcile with my own experience. Coming from a background of grandparents who worked on the London buses and trams, and parents who left school as early as was legal, I would on the contrary aver that education is liberating and mind-expanding. There was no wealth in our family, but education opened doors which otherwise might have remained firmly shut. In my final year at Trinity College Cambridge, I was allocated rooms on the same landing as the future King Charles III. It is difficult to imagine a more vivid illustration of how education can place people from very different circumstances in the same educational setting.
And I am not alone in this experience. Restaurateur Anthony Holmes tweeted, ‘I find her [Cremin] words deeply offensive: I grew up in a working-class family in Wales and went to a comprehensive school. My brother went to Cambridge, and I went to Oxford: this wasn’t a sign of privilege, and nobody bought our education’.
Posts by academics on social media also point towards a deeper malaise in our universities, with complaints about redundancies, especially in the humanities, and a work culture that some say is increasingly dominated by administrators. There are also concerns that academic freedom of speech and thought is being constrained. These matters deserve serious examination rather than partisan caricature. Universities cannot remain intellectually rigorous if academics and students become afraid to ask inconvenient questions.
Education should teach us how to think, not what to think. A university should be a place where ideas are examined rather than merely inherited; where arguments are tested rather than applauded; and where a student can discover that an intellectual opponent may be wrong without thereby becoming an enemy.
Tony Blair’s clarion call to promote ‘education, education, education’ should not go unheeded. Indeed, it should be taken more seriously than ever. In chess, the pieces do not begin on equal squares, and yet the game has rules by which every move can be judged. Education is rather similar. We cannot give every child the same family, the same upbringing or the same natural gifts. What we can give them is a system in which genuine effort matters, talent can flourish, standards mean something, and intellectual courage is rewarded.
That is not elitism. It is the very opposite: it is the democratic promise of education.
Raymond Keene OBE, MA, Trinity College Cambridge, is an international chess grandmaster and Patron of the Labour Asians Society.
