Oxford

j4 has been posting a series about <a href="http://j4.livejournal.com/332418.html"how she ended up at Oxford, and this seems an interesting exercise, so I’m copying her idea.

I’m very much the sort of person that people expect to be at Oxford. Those expectations are not entirely fair, but the facts are: I’m intelligent in ways that show up well in conventional education and exams; my parents are both university graduates (my father was at Oxford himself), and sent me to an academically competitive girls’ private school. Between all those, I’ve always been encouraged to think of myself as the sort of person who could do well academically, and given resources to make it easy to convince other people of this. I think when I was five or six I was talking about how I was going to be a maths professor at Oxford, having little idea what maths was or what a professor did other than being good at it.

Realistically, though, it was about midway through secondary school when it was clear that I was keeping up steadily good marks and not being thrown off course by puberty, that my teachers started taking it for granted that I would be in the Oxbridge stream. Mind you, the kind of school it was that really only meant being in the top quartile of the sixth form. I had a really hard time choosing A Levels; the only GCSE subjects I was happy to drop were English and physics, English because I couldn’t stand literary analysis, and physics because the kind of people who ended up teaching physics at a girls’ school tended to be a bit wet. Chemistry and maths were pretty much a given, and I let myself get talked into further maths without much persuasion. but that only left me with one more slot. I wanted to take French, but a combination of the teachers, my mother (a biologist) and my best friend Spanish M persuaded me that I’d be better off with biology. I was still really unhappy about having to give up French, though, and somehow or other it ended up happening that my French teacher took a public bet that I could get an A in French A Level if I just showed up to some of the classes and didn’t bother doing any homework that looked like it was going to interfere with my important subjects. School managed to fiddle the timetable so that I could take five subjects, which wasn’t really allowed, though I wasn’t the only one who did. The school had I think about 80 girls going into sixth form, and they prided themselves on giving everyone total free choice in subject combinations, not forcing you to take related subjects. I think they achieved this by all the teachers spending a week in the summer vac shuffling labels around until they could make it all work like a giant sudoku.

I had some really fantastic teaching at A Level, going way beyond what was in the formal curriculum and inspiring real curiosity about the subjects. (In retrospect, physics A Level would likely have been fine, because the teachers I looked down on for their inability to control a class of recalcitrant 15-year-olds would have been fine with sixth formers who actually wanted to learn.) I learnt to speak French nearly fluently, and just started to get the hang of analytic reading that had been so opaque and deathly in English GCSE. I loved the intellectual challenge of maths and chemistry, like a complex puzzle where all the clues were properly in place and if you really exerted yourself you could come up with a satisfying solution. And I got into biology enough to understand that it wasn’t just a collection of miscellaneous facts to memorize, and to discover that there was a whole field of molecular biology which was exactly like the genetics I’d loved as a kid.

There was some amount of support for Oxbridge candidates, advice on how to choose a college and practice papers for those subjects where you needed to take an entrance exam or S / Step papers. But the most useful stuff was available to everybody, interview practice and advice on filling in UCAS forms and most importantly, general confidence that we were intelligent and could expect universities to be fighting over us. I wanted to do some kind of joint honours, biology and chemistry, or biochemistry and French (still having that problem with dropping subjects I was enjoying!) but that wasn’t offered at Oxford, and I didn’t really want to stay in Cambridge or go for the Natural Sciences tripos. So I applied to Oxford for biochemistry, and Manchester, York, Nottingham and Sussex for weird joint honours or modular degrees. And, um, Southampton I think as an “insurance choice”, somewhere that would take me if I bombed out of A Levels. I went through the Oxford prospectus trying to get “vibes” off the different colleges; I assumed that all their descriptions were exaggerated, but I could get some good ideas based on which unrealistic claims they thought worth pretending to. I ended up with a shortlist of three colleges, and since one of them was my father’s old college, Merton, that seemed a reasonable deciding factor.

Interviews were in December. I dressed up smarter than I had in my life up to then, a matching tartan skirt and waistcoat and a nice blouse. Almost the only thing I remember about the interview days is meeting MK and instantly getting into the kind of deep, wonderful conversation that only happens when you’re 17 and you’ve just met a soulmate. His future wife was up for physics and he was so busy talking to me that he didn’t even notice her. At some point it got late, all my good intentions about spending the day before the interview doing more reading and making myself noticed by influential people were quite forgotten, so we decided to leave the JCR and continue the conversation in “my” room in Rose Lane. My whole upbringing had told me never ever to invite a strange man up to my room, but I was so high on wonderful conversation that I really didn’t care. Of course MK had no dishonourable intentions at all, and this led to me entirely rejecting all the messages about why I should never trust men. That might have been the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction, but not assuming men are predators has stood me in good stead. And it was very liberating to be able to consciously throw out such a frequently repeated piece of life advice, it was the realization that I was my own woman and could make my own judgements, albeit based on limited experience.

I got through the interview itself on adrenalin replacing sleep. Tim Softley interviewed me, and I can’t remember who else. I had been prepared to be thrown curve ball questions, and I felt very confident. I think I didn’t care if I got into Oxford or not; I was fairly certain that one of the redbricks would take me, and I felt like having met MK would be worth it whatever happened. The interview was largely fair; they asked questions that probed my ability to think about biology rather than specific domain knowledge. I think the only unreasonable question I got was: I can see from your CV that you’re quite religious; how do you think you will cope attending a university that has produced such famous atheists as Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkin? I was quite indignant that they thought my convictions so weak I might tremble at the prospect of being in the same city with people who didn’t share my views.

Other than that, I remember the candidates buzzing with rage about the story that a candidate for Medicine from Brunei had been asked why she wanted to bother studying modern medicine that relies on the latest technology, when she would just go back to her primitive third world country and all her knowledge would be irrelevant. Even if they were trying to see how she’d react to an outrageous question that was inappropriate. The next day MK got called for interviews at pool colleges, and I got sent home.

I was annoyed with the university for keeping me on tenterhooks for weeks after that, and then demanding a firm commitment within three days when the offer finally arrived. I later learnt that they’d had nine candidates for three places, six indistinguishably excellent (really, what can you say about a bunch of 17-year-olds beyond their predicted A Level marks?) and three reasonably good, and had rejected the three weakest, offered places to the three of us who had both chemistry and biology A Levels, and pooled the rest (including MK). In a way that wasn’t totally fair, because the university literature said that only chemistry was a requirement and they didn’t care what subjects you did as long as you had three solid A Levels, and anyway there were pooled candidates like MK who were not English and therefore didn’t take A Levels at all. In a way it was, though, because if they had nothing to choose between us, they might as well go for some minor difference that would make our lives easier when we joined the course. So I was lucky that I got good advice from my school that if you were intending to read science at uni you should have at least two science A Levels.

MK was treated very badly by his pool college, Christ Church, and ended up at Imperial. Even aside from the fact that he met his wife there, she having been turned down by Merton also, this suited him much, much better than Oxford would have done. If the aim of the admissions system was to choose the most brilliant scientists, they should certainly have picked MK over me, but if the aim was to pick the three people most likely to thrive at Oxford, they made the right choice. MK would have been very impatient with all the quaint Oxford customs and the education designed, even today, to make you a gentleman as much as to prepare you for academia, whereas the truly excellent scientific education at Imperial was exactly what he wanted.

If you have that political inclination, it’s easy enough to read this and conclude that I only got into Oxford because I had a whole bunch of privileges in my life up to that point. Certainly I did have many advantages that made Oxford seem attainable and desirable. But when I got there, I found that the place was not at all filled with people like me. I met people of every different background imaginable, different countries, different social strata, different ethnic background, different ages and life situations, you name it. And you simply couldn’t tell someone’s background by how they took to Oxford society; the people from conventional middle-class backgrounds and private schools with lots of extra coaching weren’t all mediocre but confident beyond their ability, and some of the most appallingly posh tweedy, braying types actually came from poor backgrounds and schools that didn’t believe in sending their pupils to university, they just chose to adopt that persona and social set.

It seems plausible that there are some people who are at least as objectively “clever” as I am, who didn’t go to Oxford because they came from the wrong backgrounds. But I think it’s more likely that they never got to the point of applying in the first place, than that they were unfairly rejected because of not being middle class enough. At the same time, I did see direct evidence of unfairness, in the form of Christ Church telling MK that his inhumanly high Abitur scores were an obscure German qualification that didn’t count for anything, and the way that the Merton medics were openly racist towards one candidate.

What it comes down to is that Oxford is going to end up with several uniformly excellent candidates for each place available, and almost any means of choosing between them is going to have the potential for unfairness. That doesn’t mean that unfairness is a good thing, of course. But I don’t think it’s as simple as the system being rigged to favour people from posh schools.

Cultural sensitivity – ur doin it rong

may be turning into one of those American style liberals…

One of the most interesting conversations I had was with a guy from the relatively new Progressive community in Warsaw. (Incidentally, he doesn’t look like a stereotypical Progressive Jew, he has a beard and discreet but present sidelocks and a black velvet skullcap.) An English klezmer musician was enthusing about the klezmer revival that is happening in Poland at the moment, and our Polish friend was very dismissive, saying it was run by non-Jews for non-Jews and had nothing to do with the exciting Jewish cultural stuff that is happening over there. Musician and I both argued the view that you don’t have to be Jewish to play or enjoy klezmer, culture belongs to everybody. The musician is more of a fluffy spiritual type than I am, and had more time for the counterargument that klezmer comes out of a particular religious and cultural tradition, and simply playing klezmer style music in a band at a concert isn’t as meaningful as playing it as part of living a Yiddish life and using klezmer for religious celebrations. But even so, neither of us was completely convinced that the non-Jewish character of the Polish festival scene was such a big problem.

Then we heard about some of the context: apparently after the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, there was one street left standing, which became known as “Emptiness street” in the period after the war where there were too few Jews left alive to move back into their former homes, so the street was simply abandoned to the depradations of time and weather. The klezmer festival involves putting actors and stage sets in this street, to make fake stalls that mimic the kind of shops that would likely have featured in the pre WW2 Jewish quarter. The actors dress in the seventeenth century style black clothes associated with ultra-Orthodox or stereotyped Jews, giving the musicians a cute, olde worlde backdrop, while ignoring the historical reality of a pre-war Jewish community that was highly assimilated and secularized, and most certainly ignoring even the existence of the modern day real Jewish community.

I know a lot of people reading this don’t believe in cultural appropriation. But while I agree that art, culture and music belong to the whole world, I don’t think this is at all a morally acceptable way to celebrate world culture. Even though the people running the festival are not remotely the same people responsible for the atrocities of the past, there is something rather queasy about turning the place where thousands of Jews were forced to live in overcrowded and degrading conditions, and where they were eventually rounded up to be murdered, to stage a kitschy, romanticized version of Jewish culture, and make money which absolutely doesn’t trickle down to the contemporary Jewish community who are really struggling. I think appropriation is the only word for that.

I also had a series of much less interesting conversations with a particular attendee at the conference, a Catholic guy who has fallen in love with Judaism and is thinking of converting. Fine. Not so fine is the way he insisted on interrupting every single discussion to “give the Christian perspective”, ask totally irrelevant questions, or just enthuse about how wonderful and beautiful Judaism is. And he kept cornering people outside the sessions in order to pour his heart out about he’s just so in love with Judaism, and how difficult it is going to be for him to leave his Catholic background. When he did this to me, I actually told him in so many words, look, Christian perspectives are very interesting, but we’re trying to accomplish something specific here, as Progressive Jews learning and networking together, so this isn’t the right situation for you to talk about this stuff. It didn’t help. I think he was hoping that we’d be so delighted (and flattered) that he was considering joining us, that we’d bend over backwards to encourage him, whereas in fact most people expressed polite interest and wished him luck on his spiritual journey; Jews aren’t generally interested in interfering with other people’s religious choices.

A large part of the problem here is that this guy is self-obsessed and has poor social skills, which is nothing to do with the fact that he’s Christian. But I think the best way to describe this may well be the frame of saying he has an excess of privilege. He simply takes it for granted that he will be listened to, even when he has less than nothing to contribute, and this expectation is probably not unconnected to the fact that he’s a white, middle-class, Christian male. He took advantage of the fact that we’re the kind of group who are very careful not to exclude anybody, because we all know what it’s like to be a Jewish minority in a Christian world, and even a Progressive minority within a largely Orthodox leaning Jewish world. The amount of irritation he caused by trying to make every single possible conversation, both public and private, about his bloody spiritual search and his feeling of being welcome or unwelcome in the Jewish community, made me suddenly see the possible benefits of minority-only spaces, even though I’m reflexly against that kind of segregation. In truth there’s no real way we could have banned him from showing up, because he’s been attending a synagogue for a while and we generally don’t want to keep people out just because they haven’t finished converting yet. But perhaps it would have helped to be able to say, sorry, this is a Jewish event, it’s not about your relationship with Christianity or your enormous sense of entitlement.

(I stole the subject line from Joanna, by the way…)

Snippet

I know you shouldn’t eavesdrop, but the group at the table next to me this lunchtime weren’t speaking quietly or confidentially. They were having a loud, cheerful discussion of how difficult it is for a man to mention any of the fundamental biological differences between men and women. In fact, the way that is is hard for men to have a voice in feminist circles is just like the way that certain topics to do with race are taboo for white people. It’s a big problem for feminism, this unwillingness to listen to men and to put the movement on a sound, objective scientific basis rather than just clinging to victim identity and unempirical but ideologically sound political theories.

These are Swedish men, a sociologist and a couple of ecologists I think, the sort of people who would be deeply offended if you implied they were anything other than staunch feminists. They knew all the right buzzwords, they talked about the difference between sex and gender, and decried essentialism. They rather deplore the fact that women are under-represented at the senior levels they belong to, though they expect it’s probably mostly a matter of time lag and the fact that so many women choose family over career in spite of all the opportunities available to them.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain, perhaps a generation ago a similar group of middle-ranking academics would have bonded by means of loud conversations about the fuckability of their secretarial staff. And they really do mean well, they really do seem to feel hurt about not having an equal voice in feminist discourse. It’s extraordinarily unlikely that they were having this discussion with the deliberate intention of making female colleagues feel unwelcome. It’s just sad that people who have lived most of their lives in a remarkably egalitarian society, people who strongly believe in principle that women and men are absolutely equal, people who by the sound of it are better versed in feminist literature and theory than I am, just so fundamentally don’t get it.