British Education may be the envy of the world - but also, to large parts of the world, also unreachable - at least at England's most elite universities. According to the Guardian today, at Cambridge, "of more than 1,500 academic and lab staff none are black." Italics mine. Yes, that's right. And then you wonder why American has Obama, and we have Clegg and Cameron. Then turn to the student access statistics, and some Oxford colleges haven't accepted a single black student in: 5 years. This is why raising tuition fees to £9,000 a year will not benefit the many, but only the few - even now the system benefits the few. It can only get worse...
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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When I was at Oxford in the 1970s there were quite a few black students around. Things seem to have deteriorated since then.
Best wishes from Simon