Oxford in the 80s

Simon Kuper's article on Brexit and Conservative students at Oxford University in the 1980s is worth reading. It's especially interesting to me because I was there. Apparently Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, and David Cameron were all in my year. I remember Boris Johnson being president of the Union. (I joined because it gave you something to do in the evenings, the bar was pretty good, and the library was useful.) I don't have much to say about all this beyond recommending the article, but I will add a point or two and try to correct some mistaken impressions that I think the article could give rise to.

Kuper says that Oxford taught you how to speak without much knowledge. (He mentions Simon Stevens, who I believe was one of Rupert Read's tutorial partners, as someone allegedly very good at this.) I'm not so sure. Certainly no one explicitly tried to teach you how to do this. It would be a useful skill in a tutorial, which is like an interview in some ways, so those who already possessed this ability probably honed it, but the rest of us would just have floundered if we showed up unprepared.

Kuper also says that students only have to write one essay a week, and that this can involve very little work. But as Kalypso Nicolaïdis says in the article, it's actually two essays a week. And, as I've said, most people would find it very hard to do this without much preparation. If you're wondering how anyone ever got away with doing no work all week, the answer (apart from repeating that this is probably both an exaggeration and very rare) is that all work until your final exams is basically done pass/fail. Tutorials and tutorial essays are meant to prepare you for your final exams. It's up to you how seriously you take this preparation, although if you are too lazy you will be kicked out. So doing just enough to get by is not that hard, but is likely to hurt you in the end. Final exams are all written and anonymous, so there is no bluffing your way through them using your Old Etonian charm. 

Finally, you might get the impression that Oxford is full of sad women who will do anything to help get some boy elected to office in the Union. This is not how machine politics works, as far as I know. The Union has many elected offices, mostly (as I remember it) positions on various committees. The voters--Union members like me--know nothing at all about most of the candidates. So groups of candidates form alliances, all voting for each other and encouraging their friends to do the same. Being part of one of these groups doesn't guarantee that you'll be elected, but it certainly helps. If you arrive at Oxford already knowing about this system and already knowing other people from your old school, you have a big advantage. I was clueless, and by the time I might have worked out that this was the way to become a future prime minister, it would have been too late. Not that I have any ambitions like that, or the skills to get anywhere in politics, but it's obviously an unfair system. Which is why Kuper's article is worth reading.