There are lots of angry reactions to Lucy Mangan’s Guardian article about how she prefers to be called Miss rather than Ms.
Certain conservatives took this the wrong way – they should read this article and then sod off. The real point, and one of which I highly approve, is one of some women choosing to use ‘Miss’ in the way men use ‘Mr’, unaffected by marital status. Since ‘Ms’ is quite an ugly term, this is no bad thing – although I’m going to continue referring to all women as ‘Ms’ on the (thankfully few) occasions when I have to use titles until this reclamation becomes more widespread.
Ms Mangan has another good article this week based around the Oxbridge elitism fuss – making the very obvious point that Oxbridge doesn’t discriminate against students from poor backgrounds, but that more or less the entire pre-university education system does.
There was a good article on these lines in the LRB (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n21/coll01_.html)
"is absurd to think that universities can unilaterally correct for the effects of a class-divided society. Of course the figures showing how much greater are the chances of children of the professional classes going to university than children of manual workers reveal a scandalous situation. But the scandal is not about university admissions: it is about the effect of social class in determining life-chances; the corresponding figures about, say, mortality are a much worse scandal."
from the Mangan elitism article:
Cambridge doesn’t seem to arouse the same levels of hostility, but that’s because, by a providential jink that probably causes tutorial staff still to sacrifice a member of the rowing team on the King’s College chapel altar each year, Laura Spence decided she would prefer dreaming spires to freezing fenland
It’s not actually true; it’s because Cambridge does much better than Oxford on all the relevant metrics these days.
I also do think that there’s something irredeemably stinky about including someone’s undergraduate university in and of itself as a decision factor. I know a lot of decent economists running programs at terrible universities, and while the run of the mill of their students are bloody awful, they do actually turn up some outright gems once in a while. One of the cleverest financial analysts I know did a part-time degree at London Guildhall; these days he knows more about his field than almost anyone else and it really does stick in the craw to think that he would get the F-O from Oxford.
And this is the whole problem; the article could have been written in almost exactly the same terms about a university which operated a formal legacy system like what the Americans do. Or even one which reserved some of its places for whites only. It’s not the fact or rigour of the selectivity that’s the problem; it’s the implict or explicit addition of scoring criteria which have nothing to do with the selection problem that’s meant to be solved.
The Oxford policy was to automatically reject science-to-medicine conversion students if they came from crap universities, had crap references, and didn’t have firsts (whereas someone from KCL with a 2:1 and dodgy references would get an opportunity to justify why they deserved a place despite these, and then probably be rejected anyway because competition for medicine courses is so fierce). This is not the same as blanketly rejecting all students from crap universities.
Equally, freelance private sector work in medicine is generally frowned upon unless you’ve already acquired a doctorate. The same is not true in economics, and I’d be surprised were Oxford’s economics M Phil course not to take private sector analytical experience into account.
I didn’t take it the wrong way. I entirely agree with its conclusion. That Guardian letters page really is priceless, by the way. Whyever did Clark County, Ohio swing to Bush in November?
I’d like to ask those feminists who express their feelings of superiority about being childless spinsters if it ever occurred to them that the reason they are so "disappointed" by the generation that followed them is that while they were doing their thing women of their age who didn’t share their convictions were *reproducing and raising* that very generation?
dsquared, are you saying that in the circumstances you describe, where one studied as an undergraduate can matter more than where one got a MA or PhD?
Can I comment on the Ms/Miss/Mrs thing? It seems to me that it is all down to people’s (‘women’s’ I suppose), perception of themselves. To me, ‘Miss’ has always seemed to imply youth, inexperience and vulnerability. So from about 18 or 19 I decided to be a ‘Ms’.
I got married two years ago and I am using variations of my maiden name, my married name and a very unwieldy hyphenation of the two, which I suppose will at some point resolve itself in to a lowest common demoninator. But I find I have no issues at all with being called ‘Mrs’.
Wierd.
For me therefore, it’s about other people’s perceptions of my maturity, not about people’s perceptions of me being someone else’s possession. I suspect that this is the same for a lot of people who don’t like to be called ‘Mrs’. Only they have different hang-ups to me :-).