With six of the top 100 universities in the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings 2014, London has a strong claim to be the greatest university city of them all. And that, argues Munira Mirza, the city¡¯s deputy mayor for education and culture, feeds directly into the intellectual life of the capital, where there is ¡°more of a publicly engaged academic culture than in other cities of the world, partly because of the high concentration¡±.

Although her main focus is on pre-18 education, Mirza is ¡°interested in the cultural importance of universities and takes part in the discussions in this building [City Hall] about them¡±. She brings to the task both a deep belief in the ability of higher education to change lives and a certain irritation with what she sees as the ¡°coercive consensus¡± found within the academy on some topics.

The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Mirza comes from the first generation in her family to go to university and won a place to read English at Mansfield College, Oxford. There she had ¡°an amazing, mind-expanding time and learned a lot about the world, about history, about the deficiencies of my earlier education. I remember other people in a Shakespeare seminar talking about the plays they had seen in Stratford, when I¡¯d only been to one production of Shakespeare at the Oldham Coliseum with my school.¡±

Mirza has spoken before about the ¡°right-on¡± tutor who made a point of having a poster of The Simpsons on his wall, and she has little time for the notion that ¡°there¡¯s something inherently elitist about a canon¡± or indeed disciplines such as art history. If those who study it at university are, ¡°stereotypically, middle-class white women¡±, that says nothing about the subject itself but simply that ¡°it¡¯s just not taught in state schools. You are narrowing the pool of people who are interested in it.¡±

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Her own experience feeds into her approach to widening access. Mirza got a place at Oxford in the final year that the university had a separate entrance exam. ¡°It was seen as elitist,¡± she recalls, ¡°although it relied basically on blind marking ¨C I think it was a real shame they got rid of it.¡±

Maintain integrity

Indeed, this strikes her as ¡°emblematic of the mistaken way we think about access in this country¡­There has been a tendency to think that universities can fix the general problems of education by essentially lowering the threshold to get in¡­I think that¡¯s a mistake.

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¡°Universities have to maintain their integrity, be places of scholarly learning ¨C what we need to do is improve the education system so that more people coming out at the end are capable and confident about going to university.¡±

Although she acknowledges that this is a long-term solution, Mirza believes that ¡°universities are part of that solution¡­The model that they get involved in lower levels of education is something we have promoted quite a lot, in science and languages as well as the arts. We launched the London Schools Excellence Fund, worth ?24 million, [and it¡¯s] about raising standards of teaching in core academic subjects in schools. We are funding a hundred projects, many [involving] schools in partnership with universities.¡±

She points, for example, to the London Centre for Languages and Cultures led by Pembroke College, Oxford and housed at William Morris sixth-form college in Hammersmith, which began operating in January. This initiative builds on the success of the East End Classics Centre that Pembroke set up at BSix Brooke House sixth-form college in Hackney. The new centre should, she says, ¡°create a hub that lots of schools in the surrounding area will benefit from¡±.

Meanwhile, Imperial College London is expanding its outreach programme in the sciences, while King¡¯s College London is helping to improve maths teaching through a specialist school and Queen Mary University of London is working to tackle IT skills shortages among schoolteachers.

Although she is enthusiastic about London¡¯s cosmopolitan diversity, Mirza is critical of cultural and educational policies that she says ¡°stereotype people into boxes with a prejudice that the kind of thing they would be interested in is what¡¯s familiar to them.

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¡°There are places where, if you¡¯re teaching Bangladeshi kids, the assumption is that they wouldn¡¯t be interested in Shakespeare, they would want to know about Bangladeshi culture ¨C and that is the worst kind of racist and parochial outlook.¡±

Such views have led Mirza to take a certain distance from ¡°the kind of coercive consensus¡± she thinks is sometimes found within universities.

She worked as development director for the thinktank Policy Exchange, and took a PhD in cultural policy at the University of Kent, which she completed in 2009.

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Mirza did her viva ¡°on the day I was offered a job here as cultural adviser to Boris Johnson. There was a very interesting moment when I was talking to my external examiners and they asked me: ¡®If you were in charge of cultural policy in London, what would you do differently?¡¯ After the viva was over, I told them I¡¯d just accepted the job!¡±

Multicultural scrutiny

While at Policy Exchange, Mirza was lead author of a 2007 report, Living Apart Together: British Muslims and the Paradox of Multiculturalism, that claimed that ¡°Government policies to improve engagement with Muslims make things worse. By treating Muslims as a homogeneous group, the Government fails to see the diversity of opinions amongst Muslims, so they feel more ignored and excluded.¡±

This argument was obviously controversial, but Mirza reports a ¡°quite vicious¡± response from academics who focused on ¡°quibbling with the technicalities of the research¡±. There was also ¡°an assumption that, because it was published by a thinktank, it was therefore driven by ideological motives and there was nothing in it that was substantial, whereas we in the universities are much more objective¡±.

It is here that Mirza detects ¡°a kind of coercive consensus around some of the debates in higher education around issues such as multiculturalism.

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¡°There isn¡¯t much appetite to criticise it as a policy or to entertain the notion that some of these ideas have had damaging effects. I think there¡¯s a degree of self-censorship. I don¡¯t think you get the critical level of discussion and debate [about multiculturalism] in the university sector that you do in the press and media. I think there¡¯s more intelligent public conversation outside than there is inside.¡±

matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com