Cambridge barred white working class from course

Project for applicants from ethnic backgrounds only branded ‘race-based social engineering’ by dons

THE University of Cambridge barred white working-class students from one of its postgraduate courses, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

The institution’s School of Arts and Humanities (SAH) 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 oversee degrees across all colleges, told lecturers it was “more reliant on Oxbridge applicants than most other schools”, at about 40 per cent per year, compared with 25 to 30 per cent university-wide.

It said that the scheme was needed because the school “has had massive offer gaps between Oxbridge pathway and others – and most of our underrepresented groups apply from outside Oxbridge”. This would “encourage more applications from candidates from 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, Black British, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or British-Pakistani, British-Bangladeshi students studying at traditional research-intensive universities, who are planning to continue their studies in 2024”.

Some dons branded the requirement to be non-white, explained in an email seen by The Sunday Telegraph, as “racebased social engineering”.

After being contacted by this newspaper on Wednesday, Cambridge confirmed it had reversed its position since the Feb 6 email after concerns were raised. It is now “open to a wider group defined by socio-economic factors, instead, including white working class”, the university said.

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 white working-class students has caused concern about Cambridge’s diversity priorities.

Prof David Abulafia, a historian at Gonville and Caius College, said: “It’s good that the programme has been

‘Undergraduates from ethnic minorities do not need a helping hand from the university’

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, said: “[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.”

The University of Cambridge said that 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.