Hugh Pope

Random selection popped up again in a favourite weekend read, the London Review of Books, where a reader in the 7 September 2023 edition raised a non-political application of lotteries that is dear to my heart: the allocation of elite university places.

Reacting to an article on affirmative policies in top U.S. academies like Harvard University, Donald Gillies from London suggested that lotteries would be the best way to solve the question of who gets chosen by such institutions, including the University of Oxford and Cambridge in the UK. He noted correctly that the system works well for medical training in the Netherlands.

It reminded me of a page from my late Dad Maurice Pope’s posthumous book The Keys to Democracy: sortition as a new model for citizen power. Beyond advocating a return to the random selection of political decision-makers, as in ancient Athens, he proposes a radical version of sortition for universities too. A former professor himself, he points out how choosing candidates randomly from among those who meet the minimum qualifications for each department could have a revitalising impact on academic life as a whole.

“Sortition could provide a cure for the snobbery associated with universities. According to the current doctrine of meritocracy, though it is not usually spelled out so plainly, the thirty best physics students of the year go to Cambridge or Leiden or MIT or wherever the most prestigious centre in the country is. The other students are more or less officially labelled as second-best, third-best or fourth-best, as the case may be. The farther down the line the students are, the more inferior the university will be and the lower their sense of self-esteem may fall. They will be classified by society not only as academically but also as socially inferior for having attended an inferior university. Luckily it does not work out quite like this. The doctrine is frustrated in practice both by ignorance among potential students as to which the best university is supposed to be and by inefficient selection and examination procedures on the part of the professors, which means that the best students often miss the best university. Nobody therefore has cause for despair. But if the meritocratic theory of centres of excellence were actually to work, it would be insupportable. In order to encourage the students and the faculties in the reputedly inferior universities, some other way of allocating places would have to be invented. The only fair procedure would be by lottery, the students who qualified for a university place being apportioned at random. An immediate effect might be a lowering of top standards, but only might be, since genius does not always work as examiners and bureaucrats think it ought to. Another effect, equally immediate, would be a raising of morale in all university faculties bar one and a raising of the general standard among graduates.” [p. 171]

My own experience as one of those lucky enough to get into Oxford makes me agree. My getting in was already pretty random: I was no more or less clever than hundreds of other applicants who were turned away. (I don’t mean the brilliant scholars, just the ordinary students!) My subject was pretty eccentric ­– by my fourth year I was the only one in the whole university studying Persian with Arabic – but in the teaching of mainstream courses I couldn’t see much difference in outcome between Oxford and other good universities. The erratic essay/tutorial system may be one reason that Oxford graduates are notorious for what might be politely described as bluffing. Otherwise, I fail to see why I deserved what turned out to be a lifelong golden key in the perceptions of possible employers and other counterparts.

As my father says, choosing places by lottery would remove both any undeserved sense of entitlement for getting in and also any stigma for not having been accepted. He doesn’t mention this, but as a Cambridge scholar and Greek poetry prize-winner, I guess he would agree with me to let universities continue to give scholarships to people they really wanted.

You can get a flavour my Dad’s radical view of the potential of random selection in his additional suggestion for a sortition-based system that would show which sports club is truly the best.

“Randomisation … is an antidote to specialisation and to discrimination and has a part to play wherever these exceed their proper boundaries. Suppose, for example, that there was public concern over sport in schools and uni- versities becoming more and more professionalised. Sermons against the hiring of coaches, the granting of athletic scholarships and the increasing gap between pupils and players are not likely to be effective. But if it was genuinely desired to have a system in which all pupils could participate equally, then randomisation could provide it. If it were the rule that teams should be chosen by lot from among all players of the sport, then the school or college would have to give them all equal encouragement and equal training. Matches, instead of showing which institution had the best coach or the best wing-forward or the best coxswain, would show the one in which the general level of the sport was highest.” [p. 170]