{"id":104188,"date":"2026-08-11T04:00:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T08:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=104188"},"modified":"2026-08-10T13:37:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T17:37:00","slug":"cambridge-has-turned-into-a-quality-learing-centre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/08\/11\/cambridge-has-turned-into-a-quality-learing-centre\/","title":{"rendered":"Cambridge has turned into a “Quality Learing Centre”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even as I typed Sunday’s headline<\/a>, I knew the fallout from the Jason Arday affair wasn’t going to be over quickly: it’s too high profile and gores far too many sacred cows to just fade out of the headlines. On his Substack, Francis Turner<\/a> remembers what a Cambridge education used to mean and what progressive racists have turned it into now:<\/p>\n

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Once upon a time I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. Back in the day when men were real men, women were real women and Cambridge’s contribution to the national sense of humour were people like John Cleese, Tom Sharpe and Douglas Adams. Cambridge students were well aware that we were at the top of the intellectual tree and generally proud of the fact. In fact for many of us (e.g. your humble correspondent) coming to Cambridge was where we discovered that there were people far far smarter than we were for pretty much the first time in our lives. It was humbling. And once we got over that, exhilarating. You could have discussions about quantum mechanics or code optimizations or whatever with people who understood the concepts at least as well as you did. You could be lectured by professors who had Fields Medals or Nobel Prizes; often they had literally written the standard text book in the field. Sometimes they would drop digs about colleagues or rivals and you had to know that “Tony” was Tony Hoare who was in charge of Computer Science at the slightly inferior other place. And so on. Yes it was elitist. I’d say it was proudly so. Yes there were concerns about there being too many Old Etonians and other “public school”1<\/sup> students compared to those from state schools but the solution was seen as going out to state schools and ruthlessly headhunting the top students rather than putting a cap on the number of privately educated students.<\/p>\n

Some forty years later it seems that Cambridge no longer aspires to such intellectual heights — at least not for some areas of study. It is true that back then we generally held the Education Department and the associated students of Homerton College to be at a slightly lower level of intellect — and since they were mostly of the female persuasion many male chauvinist jokes were made at their expense. Also those of us reading for the more challenging degrees also disparaged some of the less challenging ones (sociology, land economy …) but even the most elitist MCPs agreed that even the ladies of Homerton had some intellectual assets to go along with what John Cleese might have called their attractive large tracts of land. However I doubt that even the ladies studying education back then would have put up with the quality of tuition offered today by professors such as J Arday, PhD<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However it isn’t just that the quality has gone down, what has also happened is that the racism, sexism and disableism has gone up at the same time as a deliberate part of the process. What do I mean by the racism etc. has risen?<\/p>\n

Start with this excellent substack by Katy Barnett<\/p>\n

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You should read the whole thing because it is truly excellent, but the most relevant bit is this:<\/p>\n