Lord Patten, I read in the Telegraph, thinks that universities “cannot accept more ethnic minority students without eroding standards”. Did the chancellor of Oxford University really say that? It turns out: no. The Telegraph later corrected the story. Chris Patten believes that high-class universities should not “lower their standards in order to make up for some inadequacies in our secondary education system”. Not the same thing.
I’ve been in Oxford now for just over seven months as principal of Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), the first college to admit an excluded sector of society – women. There were quite a few who thought that LMH would lower Oxford’s standards when it was founded in 1878. We recently announced that we are creating a foundation year to encourage other people who probably feel excluded from Oxford to come here. We will open our doors this autumn.
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