Stephen Pollard: Not academically gifted? Then why not try Oxford...

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Oxford academics quit after claims they gave college place in return for donation

Stop the presses! Hold the front page! Oxford College sells place to son of wealthy benefactor.

Who'd believe it, eh?

Pembroke College has been caught offering a place to the son of a wealthy banker (in reality, a journalist posing as a banker) in return for a hefty donation. As the college's former admissions tutor and subject of the sting, the Rev John Platt, put it: "If this story gets out, we'd all be blown away."

Gets out? The real shock value of the story is that it appears now to be more difficult to buy your way in. The "banker" could only find one college prepared to sell him a place for his son. The three other colleges he approached – Queen's, St Peter's and Mansfield – all turned him away with a flea in his ear.

T'was never thus. Ian McIntyre tells the story in his wonderful biography of Lord Reith of how the upstanding peer secured a place for his son. The young man was, as the phrase has it, "not academically gifted".

But Reith was concerned to ensure that he went up to Oxford, for all the usual reasons, and so he contacted the Provost of Worcester College. "He will take C S" noted Reith "to oblige me. He has turned down about a thousand fellows but said his conscience was quite clear because of what I had done for the country."

Whizz forward a few decades and here's what Reverend Platt had to say to the pretend banker: "Normally there is a quota for a course which is decided depending on the teaching resources of the college. So let's say there are 10 places, those 10 places go only to the very best students. Additional to that, if we agreed it is for the good of the college... then it may be that we could go over that quota." Delightfully put, Reverend. Cough up £300,000 (the money proposed by the banker) and it's very much for "the good of the college".

Hugh Stretton wrote in the 1950s of the "amiable, well-connected public school dunce, keen on rugger and beagling but usually too drunk for either, likely to pass without effort (or qualifications) into the upper-middle ranks of government or business, to the ultimate detriment of British power, prosperity and social justice, but sure to turn up to Gaudies" as being as much a part of the Oxford make up as the first-class mind.

That may no longer be true to the same extent, but I came across some distinctly dodgy (well, let's be blunt here: stupid) fellow undergraduates in my time at Oxford, many of whom were quite open about how they got in.

One fellow was a close relative of a Commonwealth politician who just happened, he told us proudly, to have given his college a six-figure donation. His tutorial partner was a friend of mine, and he used to crease up afterwards as he gave me the latest verbatim account of their encounters.

The young man in question was a law student, and I remember hearing how he had asked their tutor, at the end of his first year, what he meant by this phrase he kept using: "common law". Another tutor used to refer to a student as "Lady Moneybags"; her father had apparently fitted out a suite of rooms.

Colin Lucas, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, says he is "appalled by these allegations". No doubt. But appalled as he may be, he can't be that surprised. The cachet of Oxford is such that parents whose children can't get in on merit will always want to try to find a third way between normal acceptance and rejection. And, in any given case, it's almost impossible to prove that the line has been crossed between a philanthropic donation and a cash-in-hand sale of a place.

What a shocking lesson for us all: money buys privilege.

stephenipollard@hotmail.com