Has PPE become Oxford's black sheep?
The university's bespoke degree in philosophy, politics and economics used to be regarded as an elite qualification but is now being blamed for political malaise
The University of Oxford is astonishingly old. We know that there was teaching going on in the town in 1096, which is taken as an indicative foundation date, but it is likely that the scholarly activity was reasonably well-established. There was some form of religious house in the town by the 8th century, or possibly towards the end of the 7th, founded by Frithuswith (commonly Frideswide, Old English Friðuswīþ), daughter of Dida, a Mercian sub-king, and it is in this monastery, of which Frideswide was the first abbess, that Oxford’s tradition of intellectual life probably began. So it is not too much of a stretch to say that the spirit of the university, its animus and perhaps anima, date back to the misty years of Anglo-Saxon England, which, when one considers that England’s third university was not founded till the 1820s or 1830s (depending on which claimant you support). Oxford was by then a millennium old.
It has also dominated our political life at least since leadership fell almost entirely to graduates in the 18th and 19th centuries. The canonical list of prime ministers, beginning with Robert Walpole, runs to 57 individuals (54 men and 3 women), and their educational backgrounds are striking. Thirty, just over half, attended Oxford, of whom 13 were members of Christ Church, traditionally the most socially grand if not the most intellectual of colleges, while only 14 went to all of the colleges of the University of Cambridge. (Those of you with good mental arithmetic will realise that this leaves slender pickings for the rest of the country’s educational establishments: in fact, apart from three graduates each from the ancient Scottish universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, no other institution of higher learning has ever got a look-in.)
In recent years, though, one degree in particular has come to prominence as unusually prevalent, distinctive by nature and—so some people will argue—damaging to the way in which we do politics: the three-year undergraduate course in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), sometimes referred to as “Modern Greats” (I will come back to this with scorn). The degree was first offered in 1920, and over the last few years has only admitted around 250 students each year, in a university of 25,000, yet its graduates seem disproportionately successful and eminent in politics, the media and public policy, their grip not loosening with the inroads made by other universities into the workplace over the last 102 years.
(Note: I have drawn considerably on an excellent Guardian long read by Andy Beckett in 2017 and acknowledge that debt fully and freely, but I want to take the argument a little further, and perhaps add some of my sharper, perhaps more provocative, opinions. Mr Beckett, it should be said, read modern history at Balliol. Some might think that gives him a dog which, if it is not in the fight, occasionally snaps and snarls from the sidelines.)
In the spirit of full disclosure, I spent a year at Oxford. From 1994 to 1995, I read Literae humaniores, what everyone else calls classics, at Christ Church (I was not admitted for my social grandness). I could write a book about my experiences, but I struggled with the extremely heavy linguistic burden of reading literature in ancient Greek, not helped by starting with Homer’s Iliad, written not in the Attic Greek of most ancient works but in a form which is mainly Ionic, with influences of Aeolian and a few hallmarks of Arcadocypriot. The difference between Homer’s Greek and “standard” Attic Greek is much less than that, say, between modern English and the language of Chaucer, but it is an additional layer of complexity. Anyway, to cut a long story short—too late, you cry!—I packed up my tent at the end of Trinity term 1995 and withdrew, finding my way eventually to the University of St Andrews where I read history instead and got my MA and MLitt. That said, it is a feature of Oxford that they put as much emphasis on your matriculation on arrival as on your graduation at the end, and Christ Church still regards me as an old member; I try to share this feeling and do occasionally stay in college when I’m in Oxford and still wear my college ties (I have four: long story). Where you think this puts my dog in relation to the fight is up to you.
So what is PPE? Well, to an extent it is exactly what it purports to be: a degree which takes in the three related but separate disciplines of philosophy, politics and economics. Oxford promotes it as a highly flexible programme of study, and undergraduates reaching the end of their first year can choose to specialise in two of the three branches, as most do, or, for the intellectually ambitious and expansive, continue all three. The university also stresses the breadth of subjects which students can include under the PPE label: sociology, international relations, logic, ethics, macroeconomics and quantitative methods are all possible topics, and each student has a high degree of autonomy in selecting the combination of courses which make up his or her degree. One might reasonably say, then, that no two PPE degrees are the same.
PPE was created as a measure of modernisation in the turmoil and innovation after the First World War. Think of England then: society had been shaken to its core, many of its assumptions and old certainties irreparably shattered by the conflict, but the architecture of the state remained old-fashioned. The Church of England’s writ still ran in Wales, for example, to the chagrin of the Nonconfirmist population; all of Ireland remained (in theory) under the control of the Crown, with a lord lieutenant and his chief secretary carrying out government from Dublin Castle (though all of this would change at the very end of the year when the Government of Ireland Act 1920 gained Royal Assent in December); in Oxford it was only at the beginning of the 1920-21 academic year that women were allowed to matriculate as undergraduates and take degrees with the same rights as men. Across the Irish Sea, Trinity College, Dublin, had admitted women in 1904 but it was almost exclusively a Protestant university, not by exclusion on the part of the college authorities but because the hierarchy of the Catholic Church frowned on attendance (and in 1944 Lenten Regulations ruled that any Catholic who matriculated without specific permission was guilty of a mortal sin).
Oxford was just beginning to admit women but it remained a very traditional institution (or, more descriptively, given the collegiate system and its fierce independence, a federation of institutions). There were 25 full colleges at that point (of which four were female-only) from University College, the oldest, to St Hilda’s, the youngest, created in 1893. It was that year too, 1920, that new undergraduates were for the first time not required to know ancient Greek to pass one of the matriculation examinations, Responsions, known as the “Little Go” or “Smalls” (yes, for all courses; some Scottish universities required O-level Latin for matriculation in any subject until the 1960s, to my mother’s delight and my father’s dismay). The regius professor of Hebrew was still required to be a Church of England cleric, being since 1630 also a canon of Christ Church, as did the regius professor of divinity, and it was within living memory that fellows had been required to be in holy orders and observe celibacy.
There were some other innovations as well as the full admission of women; the first students reading for doctorates which made an “original contribution to knowledge”, examined by viva voce (literally “by the living voice”, actually by oral examination) had enrolled in 1917 and were soon to be awarded their DPhils (Oxford typically chose that abbreviation rather than the more common PhD); the university was filling up again after the War, partly with scholars who had served in the armed forces and had a very different outlook from callow freshers straight from school; and, although not of Oxford’s doing, the US students arriving during 1920 could no longer purchase alcohol at home, with the passage of the Volstead Act and the onset of Prohibition.
The argument is that PPE graduates proliferate. Who are they? Four of the current cabinet graduated with the degree, including the prime minister and the chancellor of the exchequer, as did four members of the shadow cabinet. That’s a hefty proportion for a single course from a single university. One could also point in recent politics to Liz Truss, David Cameron, Yvette Cooper, William Hague, Peter Mandelson, Rory Stewart, David Miliband, Andrew Tyrie, Stephen Twigg, David Willetts, Jacqui Smith, Damian Green, Dame Angela and Maria Eagle, Dame Meg Hillier and Damian Hinds. It would be cruel to say that if one threw a brick in the House of Commons division lobby, one would hit a PPE graduate; I must, regretfully, advise against trying.
It is not simply front-line politicians. Other proud graduates in PPE in the media, for example, include David Dimbleby, Robert Peston, Jackie Ashley, Seumas Milne, Michael Crick, Michael Cockerell, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Nick Cohen, Stephanie Flanders, Simon Jack and Ian Katz. I could go on for a long time. (I should perhaps whisper this last name, but Richard Moore, the current C or chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, also read PPE.)
Taking the broader cultural field, we find the academic mark of Cain on Will Self, Monica Ali, Michael Dobbs, Tony Hall, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Kinsella (real name Madeleine Wickham), Vikram Seth and Hugh Quarshie. Business and finance will give you Shriti Vadera, Rupert Murdoch, Chris Anderson, Antony Jenkins, Bob Sternfels, Dido Harding and Guy Hands.
Equally (and I won’t labour this point much longer), you can look abroad to international students who read PPE, and find Tony Abbott, Imran Khan, Pete Buttigieg, Aung San Suu Kyi, Euclid Tsakalotos and the late Benazir Bhutto, to take a random selection. Even Malala Yousafzai read PPE.
My point, which I think I have made rather heavily, is that this is an absurdly starry list of graduates from one course for which around 250 people matriculate each academic year. It is not only disproportionate: it starts to look positively masonic. One can only be relieved that there are no prominent Rothschilds on the list.
The argument for the damaging effect of PPE has been made for some time. To summarise, it is that it encourages the synthesis of information rather than the formation of deep and researched judgement; that it trains its graduates in a rather superficial knowledge of a broad range of subjects, not allowing them to plunge more deeply and more satisfyingly into some of the fascinating and relevant areas of study the degree encompasses, and that the manner it fosters and develops is one of glib argumentation, backed up by fluency of language and the ability to bluff rather than profound understanding. I leave readers to look back at the names of graduates and see if they regard this as an accurate charge.
I think there is truth in this. To borrow from Beckett’s Guardian essay, David Willetts (Christ Church) admitted “As a minister, you do sometimes think that British political life is an endless recreation of the PPE essay crisis”. There are certainly signs in modern politics of the preference to a rapidly devised, almost lashed-together, but superficially plausible policy which sometimes begins to wobble and fall apart under sharp scrutiny. It could be argued, for example, that Rishi Sunak’s “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme during the pandemic, whereby the government gave financial assistance to the hospitality industry to encourage the public to dine in restaurants, cafés and pubs, seemed to give the sector a desperately needed boost, but its sting in the tail, which was perhaps not anticipated because the necessary consideration was not put into it, was a rise in new Covid-19 cases of between eight and 17 per cent, and the boost in profitability for hospitality was not sustained.
As someone who originally began studying (actual) Greats (PPE was dubbed “Modern Greats” in its early days as it was hoped to be the modern successor to Lit hum, also called Greats), and ended up as an historian, I would love to pin the blame for a superficiality and hollowness in modern politics on PPE. I am more than willing to concede that the degree may give its graduates an unrealistic belief in their expertise across a broad field of disciplines: they can talk on equal terms with economists, financiers and bankers; they are steeped in political history and tradition; and they have a rigorous grounding in philosophy and the development of ideas, so can discuss their ideology with suppleness and expertise. That would, indeed, be an erroneous belief. What they do have is a degree of knowledge and learning which lifts them above the average, but not the specialism which can put them on a par with genuine experts.
I think there are two factors which outweigh the peculiarities of the PPE degree in contributing to the culture we have today. The first is—and this does pain me to admit—that the broader Oxford education, across certainly arts subjects, may breed habits which are not always good in political leaders. To pick up David Willetts’s reference to the “essay crisis”, the most serious offender in this regard recently was undoubtedly Boris Johnson. The former prime minister thrived on a veneer of learning, an ability to speak fluently and attractively, and a skill at constructing a superficially plausible argument on the hoof. He disliked hard work, and was reputed not to be as diligent as he might have been at reading his heavy weight of paperwork which every premier has to endure, and had exactly the right, and therefore the wrong, qualities to squeak through situations without being found out. He was the ultimate essay crisis prime minister, but he was not a PPE graduate; Johnson was awarded a 2:1 in classics (and how he hated that Cameron had won a first in, yes, PPE).
Life as an Oxford undergraduate is relentless. You are often writing two essays a week (so 16 over the balance of a term), leaving scant time for deep thought or detailed research. I don’t regard my experience as typical, as I was unsuccessful, but it is easy to start with an argument, or a phrase, or an insight, and then construct an essay around it, buttressed by selective facts and quotations. You must also be able to defend and explain your work fluently, as you will often read them aloud in tutorials, which can consist of half a dozen people or, as sometimes happened to me, a one-on-one encounter with your tutor, who may well be, this being Oxford, a world expert in his (admittedly narrow) field. I was taught initially by Professor Richard Rutherford, a kind but slightly awkward Scotsman who was a renowned Homeric scholar. That was a demanding experience and a steep learning curve, but it is easy to see how at least some of the wrong lessons could be learned.
As you proceed through your degree, then, life comes at you fast. Subjects are absorbed by the short-term memory, thrashed out and then discarded; it may only be if you undertake a dissertation that you have the opportunity to spread your intellectual wings and chew over a topic at greater length and with more leisurely contemplation. Was it so different elsewhere, St Andrews in my case? Well, different enough: essays were longer and less frequent, tutorials and seminars less intense and less focused on presentational skills, the ability to read into a subject greater. I do not for a moment argue that St Andrews gave me a better undergraduate education than Oxford would have done, but it inculcated different skills and habits in me.
Oxford, then, may be a contributory factor. That is especially true given the preponderance of Oxford graduates in current politics. The House of Commons is now overwhelmingly a graduate workplace, with 85 per cent of MPs having attended university; Oxford is the most common university, and a fifth of MPs went to Oxford or Cambridge, compared to one per cent of the graduate population as a whole. Conservative MPs are more likely than Labour MPs to have gone to Oxford. Readers might be relieved that Oxford and Cambridge are no longer directly represented in Parliament (from 1603 until 1950 each university returned two MPs elected by the graduate community; in fairness, London University, the University of Wales, Queen’s University, Belfast, the Combined English Universities and the Combined Scottish Universities were also represented, though that does not exactly equate to a fair distribution even of the votes of graduates).
I think there is a wider issue, however, which is common to all universities but particularly noticeable in the cases of Oxford and Cambridge because of the numerical predominance of their graduates. This is a long-standing bugbear of mine, which I had partly written off as one of my irrational prejudices, but the more I think about it, the more I realise it may contain both truth and relevance.
Having a first degree in a subject does not make you an expert.
That is the most dangerous assumption at work in British politics. There are a lot of people who will translate their possession of a degree into a kind of underlying profession: “I’m a sociologist”, or “I’m a philosopher”, or “I’m an historian”. Well, no you’re not. You have a degree in the discipline, which is no mean thing, and a good degree in a good course at a good university is a considerable achievement and a useful qualification. But it is merely a step along the road, it is a preparatory stage, it is a foundation.
Look. I am a huge champion of the experience of higher education when it well delivered (though I think we send too many young people to university, because they may not benefit more from that than another form of training or education, and because not everyone is of an academic bent, and because going to university is not, or certainly should not be, the be-all and end-all of a young person’s life). However, I also firmly believe that the actual academic work that students do—I can only speak for the humanities, as I have never studied science beyond GCSE level and have no capacity even to imagine what the higher study of science is like—is somewhere down the list of important activities for undergraduates. A lot of new graduates undergo the experience, which can be deflating and discouraging, of realising that their degree loses its currency quickly. If you pursue a vocational career, as a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher, then of course it will give you a thread of knowledge which you pull forward and strengthen by plaiting with the information and skills you go on to acquire. For others, though, the degree is just a passport, a way of gaining entry to a good job, a proof of your standing as an able and intelligent human being.
But we overestimate degrees at our peril. It is not that you learn nothing: as a history student, aside from the framework of events and dates and personalities and theories which made up my degree, I learned critical thought, analysis, argumentation, the ability to marshal facts into a case, the ability to absorb information and weigh it carefully and contextually. I learned to write well and convincingly, and, to an extent, I learned to interact with other people, both my peers and also those older, wiser and more experienced than me.
Graduates are not the finished product, that is what I’m trying to say, and we err if we think that they are. It may be that PPE graduates are especially guilty of this: they think, perhaps, that they have been given more than a rudimentary tool box, they have been given an apprenticeship in these important disciplines, philosophy, politics and economics, and they need develop no more, they need simply apply their freshly graduated minds to any problems they encounter and they will be able to bring speedy and elegant resolution. But that is not the case. We never stop learning, or rather, we never lose our capacity to learn, however old a dog we might think ourselves to be. A first degree will give you some useful tools and they will stand you in good stead, but there is so much more you need to learn and will enjoy learning.
That, I think, is the kernel of my argument. We expect too much from degrees, and regard them too highly as sources of subject expertise. If we do that, we overestimate the abilities of those who hold them, and we will inevitably be disappointed in the failure which often follows. We need to change the way we regard our politicians’ training, and they need to adjust their own self-perceptions.
Is PPE an unusually pernicious qualification? Sure, why not. Let’s have a pop at “Modern Greats”. It could probably stand to be taken down a peg. But that is a distraction, a peripheral issue. It can be used as an exemplar of the wider problem of which it is a particularly prominent example. But the weakness in our political leadership is much deeper. Our aspirant statesmen learn too narrowly and too shallowly, and overestimate the information that they have absorbed. That leads them to neglect the idea of further learning, of what other careers call “continuing professional development”. Addressing those more profound issues must, I fear, wait for another day and another essay.