The rivalry between Britain’s Oxford and Cambridge Universities is generally good-natured—but nonetheless real for all that. Members of Oxford’s faculty and student body, for example, habitually avoid referring to Cambridge directly by name. Instead, they call it “the other place.”
When Cambridge decided to start teaching engineering, the best part of a half-century ago, “Oxford men” (an expression which in my day also embraced women) sniffily declared that “the other place” had ceased to be a university and had become a polytechnic.
Now Cambridge has offered Oxford yet another opportunity to snigger superciliously. And it was something that might best be described as a self-inflicted wound.
A Cambridge “don” (that’s what faculty members at the two universities are called) has denounced as sexist such words as “flair”, “brilliant” and “genius” when used to assess student’ work.
Dr. Lucy Delap, a lecturer in “gender history” at “the other place”, claims the words are generally associated with men and, thus, “carry assumptions of gender inequality.”
She explains: “Some of those words, in particular genius, have a very long intellectual history where it has long been associated with qualities culturally assumed to be male.”
In order to help her university “progress” in terms of “gender equality”, Dr Delap says her department wants to use language that is more “transparent”.
She explains: “We’re rewriting our first two years of our history degree to create a wider set of paper choices to make assessment criteria clearer, and to really try and root out the unhelpful and very vague talk of ‘genius’, of ‘ brilliance’, of ‘flair’ which carries assumptions of gender inequality and also of class and ethnicity.”
Actually, it’s hard to understand why Dr. Delap’s singles out the words “flair”, “brilliant” and “genius”. Judged by her yardstick, there should surely be hundreds, if not thousands, of other words equally deserving of condemnation—“capable”, “masterly”, “workmanlike”, “forthright” and “businesslike”, to name but five.
Indeed, by her standard, every noun, adjectival noun, and adjective that has been applied to male academics should be eschewed on the grounds that they “have a very long intellectual history where it has long been associated with qualities culturally assumed to be male.”
Dr. Delap’s “shtick” is that one of the reasons men get more first class degrees at Oxford and Cambridge than women is because female students struggle with the “male dominated environment.” She cites as examples reading lists dominated by male authors and the lack of diversity seen in college portrait collections.
It is true that until relatively recently (six or seven decades or so ago) Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and a vast majority of the less well-known British universities were exclusively male preserves.
But today the situation is vastly different.
The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS)—a British-based organization whose main role is to operate the application process for British universities—has just announced that more 18-year-old women are securing places to study at Cambridge and Oxford than men for the first time in history.
This indicates the problems Dr. Delap identifies might well prove to be self-correcting. Indeed, it might not be long before an equally humorless male “gender history” professor demands that such words as “flair”, “brilliant” and “genius” be dropped because they “have a very long intellectual history of being associated with qualities culturally assumed to be female.”
Oxonians (as Oxford scholars are commonly called) are doubtless chortling over Dr. Delap’s fulminations. Sooner rather than later, one suspects, they will cite her statements as evidence of their long-time rival’s further intellectual decline—from polytechnic to vocational college.
But folks in glass houses shouldn’t trade epithets. Oxford has its own problems when it comes to relations between the sexes. The university’s history faculty was accused of sexism for introducing a “take home” exam paper in hopes of boosting results for female students who are statistically better performers at long term assessment than sit-down exams.
Some faculty members, however, object to the proposal on the grounds that it risks implying that women are the “weaker sex.”
You don’t say!
Clearly there is at least one male author who does not appear as prominently as he should on reading lists at either university: George Orwell—one of the most prescient social critics of the modern age.
His seminal novel 1984 is an eloquent, and spine-chilling, denunciation of totalitarianism and the political correctness by which it comes into being and by which it maintains its tyranny.
The current social and political climate amply demonstrates the purpose of political correctness in shutting down discussion of ideas by the outright suppression of words and language with which they are debated.
In our universities, academic totalitarians employ politically correct epithets such as “sexism” and “racism” to shut down the dispassionate discussion about such issues as the alleged under-representation of female students in the disciplines of mathematics, the sciences, economics and engineering.
Could it be the totalitarians fear that an honest debate might reveal that their charges of “sexism” and “racism” are pure hokum because a majority of women simply happen to be more attracted to such disciplines as literature, the arts, sociology, and psychology?
Be that as it may, this episode graphically illustrates the degree to which political correctness is debauching our institutions of higher learning. Not least it has deprived them of the ability to distinguish between the biological and the grammatical.
Apparently, even Oxbridge men and women can no longer tell the difference between the word “gender” and the word “ sex.” Gender is the term that denotes whether a noun is, grammatically, masculine, feminine, or neuter. Sex, by contrast, is the biological term for the state of being male and female.
Dr. Delap is, thus, usurping a grammarian’s prerogative by calling herself as “a lecturer in gender history.” If her department is genuinely interested in “transparency”, her proper title should be “lecturer in sex history.” Truth in advertising demands it! GPH✠
Newsletter