Look, an elephant, go on, shoot the elephant
Oxbridge, as we all well know, is a pair of incredibly elitist and stuffy institutions, full of Brideshead Revisited public school chums punting along the river drinking the tears of the poor and laughing to themselves before they take a cushy job in the upper echelons of society. Those are established facts and categorically irrefutable, so it is of course important that all satirical newspapers join as one and say boo, privileged ones, boo.
This long established approach has been helped greatly by the latest study from leading think tank Look Over There It’s Someone Else’s Fault. This has rightly drawn attention to the ongoing issues that men in tweed three piece suits who probably went to Oxbridge like to call “The Plight of the Black Man”. But there’s more to it than that of course. Leading radical feminist Tamara Pinkhair published a ground-breaking article in The Guardian last week with the shocking headline “Women of Colour – automatic ally, or actually entitled to their own concerns?”
This has caused some to question the current demographics of Oxbridge. Are people dark enough, female enough, and, goodness, wait, stop, are some of them both dark and female enough? Department of Education Spokesman Sebastian Pontington-Smythe said on Radio 4:
“Clearly, the onus is on Oxbridge colleges to reach out and engage with the black man. They are nearly completely responsible for his failure to attend Oxbridge. Of course, his parents must also bear some responsibility for not being rich enough, and not sending him to a proper school.”
Head of admissions at Rochdale College, Oxford, Frances Johnson said in response:
“Do you think it might be possible for you to invest more into the educational system in this country? Do you think that rather than bashing teachers with arbitrary targets, you could give them the resources that they need to help the kids in their care achieve the best of their potential?”
“Do you think the onus is solely on us to provide foundation years, so that state school kids, including people of colour, can catch up against more privileged white peers whose parents paid for them to go to public school? Or do you think you could try and sort out the damn education system and make sure everyone has the opportunity to reach their potential, irrespective of background?”
“Do you think you as a government are utterly failing the children of this country with your maladroit administration of the school system, or do you think everyone, especially satirists, should overlook that and aim at the easy target of people not being ready for selective tertiary education?”
Or at least that’s what we think she said, the Herald was too busy laughing at an Oxford admissions tutor having a northern accent. So erm, sorry for sharing the internal monologue, if you bear with, we’ll just spaff off a quick piece about Oxbridge being full of posho whites and you can laugh at that in a minute.
