Unfair to Oxford?

CALLING for ‘systemic change’ at Oxford, Labour’s David Lammy condemns the university as ‘a bastion of entrenched, wealthy, upper class, white, southern privilege’. Isn’t he being a tad unfair?

To their credit, admissions dons have striven for decades to make this great university more socially, culturally and racially diverse, going out of their way to select bright students from deprived and minority ethnic backgrounds.

The result is that today, the proportion of Oxford students describing themselves as black and minority ethnic has risen to 18 per cent – higher than the proportion in the UK population as a whole, which was shown to be 14 per cent in the most recent census.

Doesn’t this suggest Oxford has been successful in its drive to be inclusive?