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Unfortunately, this strategy of ‘narrowing the attainment gap’ is not about levelling upwards with high-quality academic teaching. Rather, the advocates of ‘inclusive assessment’ are more interested in lowering the already low expectations that universities have of students from certain backgrounds.

One of the key tactics of the inclusive-assessment outlook is to brand genuine academic expectations and standards as ‘elitist’. This is why some university administrators are instructing academics not to lower students’ marks for spelling mistakes – because good English is increasingly seen as an elitist demand; as something associated with the ‘homogeneous, north European, white male elite’.

Paradoxically, these zealous promoters of inclusive education seem to be unaware of their own paternalistic and elitist assumptions. They really seem to believe that a competent grasp of the English language is beyond those who are not part of the north European white male elite. Hull University expresses this narrow-minded sensibility when it says it will ‘challenge the status quo’ by dropping the requirement for a high level of technical proficiency in written and spoken English in some subjects, on the grounds that this requirement is unreasonable.

Doing away with a common standard in higher education is celebrated by Hull on the basis that it will ‘encourage students to develop a more authentic academic voice, a voice that can communicate complex ideas with rigour and integrity – that celebrates, rather than obscures their particular background or characteristics’.

These are weasel words. They frame the lowering of standards as a valiant effort to help students develop a more ‘authentic’ voice. But abandoning rigour, precision and verbal clarity is very unlikely to promote any kind of authentic academic values. Instead it will promote the social-engineering objective of ‘inclusion’.

As I argued in my 2004 book, Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?, the well-meaning policy of inclusion in higher education has turned into a con. I first raised this problem back in May 2001, when I wrote a piece for The Sunday Times in which I raised my concerns about the direction of higher education. One of my concerns was the fact that a student could spend an entire year at university without reading a whole book.

The day after that piece was published, I received an angry email from a senior university manager who accused me of ‘deliberately’ confusing the issue. I expected him to accuse me of fabricating my claim that students could go a whole year without reading a book, but that was not the focus of his ire. He did not dispute my claim at all. Rather, he was upset at my assumption that books should have a privileged status in higher education! ‘The tone of the article was to suggest that you can dismiss as undemanding any programme in which students do not read “whole books”’, he complained. It seemed that, in his view, the book had become an elitist optional extra for undergraduates.

Back then, the attempt to lower academic standards under the guise of promoting inclusion was still at an early stage. But even then, inclusion was viewed by many administrators and academic campaigners as an end in itself. Since their preoccupation was with inclusion, rather than with the quality of university education, they never asked the simple question: ‘Inclusion into what? Access to what?’ They dodged this question because, at some level, they knew they were bringing students into a regime of education that was inferior to the academic experience of the past.

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From Spiked, here.