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The University of Cambridge barred white working-class students from one of its postgraduate courses, The Telegraph can reveal.
King's College Cambridge - Jonathan McManus/Moment Mobile ED© Jonathan McManus/Moment Mobile ED
The university’s School of Arts and Humanities internally promoted “an exciting new widening participation project” that will “give an opportunity for students from under-represented groups to experience postgraduate research at Cambridge”.
The school, one of six at Cambridge that oversees degrees across all the colleges, told lecturers it was “more reliant on Oxbridge applicants than most other schools”, at around 40 per cent per year compared to 25 to 30 per cent university-wide.
It said the new scheme was needed because the school “has had massive offer gaps between Oxbridge pathway and others – and most of our under-represented groups apply from outside Oxbridge”. This would “encourage more applications from candidates outside of its traditional recruitment pathways”, it added.
But in the “call for supervisors” on Feb 6, lecturers were told: “The programme will be advertised for second or third year UG [undergraduate] students from Black, British Black, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or British-Pakistani, British Bangladeshi students studying at traditional research-intensive universities, who are planning to continue their studies in 2024.”
One source described the requirement to be non-white, explained in an email seen by The Telegraph, as “race-based social engineering”.
After being contacted by The Telegraph on Wednesday, Cambridge confirmed it had reversed its position since the Feb 6 email as concerns had been raised. The course is now “open to a wider group defined by socio-economic factors instead, including white working-class”, the university said.
Concern over diversity priorities
In the scheme, four interns will be provided with accommodation in Cambridge colleges for six weeks this summer and paid the real living wage for 35 hours per week of training in research skills, before writing a 4,000 word essay to give them “the confidence and skills to apply for postgraduate study and other research careers”.
But the initial plan to exclude of white working-class students has sparked concern about Cambridge’s diversity priorities.
Prof David Abulafia, a leading historian at Gonville and Caius College, told The Telegraph: “It’s good that the programme has been recalibrated so that the criterion is disadvantage rather than race. The racial criterion seemed to assume non-white students are automatically disadvantaged. Isn’t that a little bit racist?”
Dr James Orr, a Cambridge lecturer in divinity, told The Telegraph: “Getting undergraduates excited about postgraduate research and an academic career should be a central aim of any university, so the basic idea behind this course is excellent.
“But this kind of opportunity should surely be available to everyone on the basis of merit and need, not ethnic background. Undergraduates from ethnic minorities do not need a helping hand from the university to progress to graduate research. If it is the case that the decision has been reversed, the administration should be commended for doing the right thing.”
‘Race-based social engineering’
One source claimed the original plan represented “race-based social engineering”, while another source described the broad-brush description of black and black-British people in the internal memo as a “racial stereotype”.
Three of the remaining five Cambridge schools run similar internships, which are open to all disadvantaged students. The School of Arts and Humanities oversees degrees in English, classics, philosophy and others.
The University of Cambridge said the decision to allow white working-class students to apply for the SAH scheme “was made to bring it into line with other similar schemes” and it will not be advertised for applications for several weeks yet.
In 2021, data showed that, across all of the postgraduate Cambridge courses, most applications came from white students, at 38.9 per cent, from Chinese students at 23.1 per cent and Indian students at 8.8 per cent.
However, the success rate of offers to confirmations – where an offer is met – was highest for mixed white-black Caribbean students (75 per cent) followed by 61.7 per cent for Indian and British-Indians, with white students in third at 61.4 per cent.
