So, just two more first round matches in this year's UC, the draws for both of them known. The second, a week on Monday, an all-Welsh affair between Aberystwyth and Bangor. The first, this Monday coming, a fourth Oxbridge match, with St John's for Oxford, and Downing for Cambridge.
St John's will be the fifth Oxford college to appear this series, while Downing will be the seventh Cambridge side. Now, I understand what Jim Gratrex meant when he said on LAM that there would be 'a lot more Cambridge teams than usual'.
Naturally, I flagged up how fair this was on LAM last week, and Dave Clark responded with the very good point about how fair it is that 12 of the 28 teams come from two universities.
This is a very good point, and one that has been around for decades, possibly since UC began back in '63. We all know about the infamous 'Trotsky' incident that got Manchester banned until the show moved to the BBC, but it is still a major point to this day.
I've seen many comments online remarking about how 'unfair' it is that Oxbridge are allowed multiple teams. I recall someone on Twitter saying this after Clare College Cambridge trounced Leeds a couple of years ago. And also there seems to be a lot more of a positive reaction when a non-Oxbridge team beats an Oxbridge team. Various matches from a few years ago come to mind, including Sheffield's narrow win over Magdalen College Oxford.
Also, it must be said that 12 Oxbridge teams is a bit much IMO. The average is about ten per series, five each side. It's not the first time we've had this many: we had twelve in the 2010-11 and 2011-12 series as well, and eleven in the Alex Guttenplan series of 2009-10. Having four Oxbridge matches though is, as Iain Weaver said when this happened before two years ago, a bit too much.
Cambridge having two more teams than Oxford might be seen as unfair too. However, it won't give them any advantage in any way. Three years ago, Magdalen were one of two Oxford teams in the second round, while Cambridge had six, and we all know how that series ended, don't we?
So, some claim that multiple Oxbridge teams is unfair. But, what is we did limit it down to just one each per series?
DanQuizzing remarked on LAM last week that, if Oxford and Cambridge sent one team each a year, either would win every year. He makes the very valid point that splitting them up into seperate colleges stops them pooling all their best players into one unbeatable team.
Some teams, of course, have very powerful individual players, and having all of them in one team would make them unstoppable. Imagine a joint Oxbridge team of Alex Guttenplan, Gail Trimble, and Will Cudmore and Kyle Haddad-Fonda from tha afore-mentioned Magdalen team. That team would be unbeatable, for sure.
By splitting up Oxbridge into multiple teams, they give others a fair chance against them. Of course, this also means fewer uni can send teams, which is a bit unfair.
It's also worth mentioning, however, that while Oxbridge are guaranteed about ten teams each per series, the University of London, which also has multiple colleges, has varied amounts of teams each year, with only one (SOAS) in the current series.
Of course, Durham, which also has multiple colleges, is only allowed one team a year, but they have a reason: their colleges are for accommodation purposes rather than to teach. London representation can vary. There have been a few teams over the years from independant unis/colleges in London (such as Imperial, which became independent in 2007, but they rarely appear.
Back in 2004, Iain Weaver wrote a very good article about how unis/colleges founded since '92 have been at a disadvantage on the show. I cannot think of any post '92 institutions on this year's series. I think this is the first time this has happened. (Of course, the Welsh teams were once part of the University of Wales, then became independent about ten years ago)
I guess this whole multiple Oxbridge teams affair is never
going to be fully resolved for as long as UC stays on air. People are
always going to have conflicting views on the subject, but then, the
same can be said for many issues of the day. That's what makes these
things so interesting to discuss, and to continue to be discussed.
As fair as it might be, it's worth pointing out that Manchester has dominated the series lately. Is it fair that they get the home advantage and indeed such extensive training as they do? Oxbridge may have a large number of teams but other teams do get a win through now and then and therefore you don't know who will win. And a team made of the top Oxford players would be scarily good. You could see them winning almost every time by some margin.
ReplyDeleteThe things is that Oxford and Manchester play independent quizbowl, and so their teams are way better than everyone else. They should just remove the rule limiting one team from Manchester and just allow teams from Oxford and Manchester until the rest of the country takes quizbowl more seriously.
ReplyDeleteYou're overestimating how similar University Challenge is to quizbowl. I've played both, and they're really quite different: UC emphasises speed way more than quizbowl does. Quizbowl tends to reward very obscure knowledge, whereas most starters in UC are gettable pretty quickly - so you have to make the connection incredibly quickly. Given that UC starters are also often less straightforward than quizbowl, it makes for a pretty different style of play.
ReplyDeleteThis is all borne out by my personal experience. I've played and beaten a couple of quizbowl teams who have won University Challenge, but I'm not at all sure the result would have been the same with UC style questions.
To the topic at hand, though - I really wish people would stop discussing this. Yes, Oxbridge get a lot of teams. This is both an advantage (more teams = more chances of winning) and a disadvantage (more teams = lower concentration of good players). Since Oxbridge teams don't always win (and, indeed, are usually reduced to two or three by the quarter finals), the disadvantages of playing as separate colleges seem to be quite high. I get the impression that the selection process does try to be as meritocratic as possible, so consider: would it be fairer to exclude perfectly good Oxbridge teams just because there happens to be more good Oxbridge teams than usual that year? I don't think so.
Not to imply that a combined Oxford team wouldn't be formidable indeed. Of course playing quizbowl helps for UC - anything that improves your general knowledge does - I just think the correlation isn't as straightforward as it seems at first glance.
DeleteMy alma mater is Bangor, so I'm hardly unbiased in this, but I really dislike the argument that separate Oxford/Cambridge college teams give other universities a fairer chance - it's predicated on the completely ridiculous assumption that combined teams would be somehow unstoppable. This patronising suggestion itself smacks of snobbery to me - the idea that no other university could possibly hope to compete with a combined Oxford or Cambridge team.
ReplyDeleteSure, such combined teams would be formidable opponents. But, as James points out above, Manchester has dominated the series in recent years, winning the series more often than the combined results of Cambridge or Oxford colleges in the last ten years or so. There are always Oxbridge teams in the Quarters/Semis at the moment, but this is what you'd expect as they make up over a third of the contestants. Institutions like UCL, Durham and Imperial have frequently been strong contenders, consistently making at least the quarter finals in many series. Plus, you can never rule out a strong team of mature students/postgrads from any university. I expect combined Oxford & Cambridge teams would indeed be strong contenders to win each time and would expect to reach the quarters at the very least, but I don't think they'd by any means be guaranteed to win and I don't think they'd do the series any harm even if they did win frequently. Even if they were guaranteed finalists each year, at the very least there'd be two contenders!
The argument that Oxford/Cambridge would always win also seems to assume that winning is the only thing that matters in UC. The final is only one match of nearly 40 in a series - people get a lot of pleasure from seeing their university do *well*, whether that means winning the final, getting a long way into the series or even just not losing by too embarrassing a margin. From this perspective, it is under the *current* system that Oxbridge dominate: of the 37 matches broadcast in the 2012-13 series, an Oxford or Cambridge college featured in 21. That's nearly 2/3; this series the proportion will certainly reach 2/3 as more were included to start with and so many have made it through the first round. If they could only enter one team each it would at the very most mean 15 Oxbridge matches and that's assuming the incredibly unlikely event of both teams making the final having lost their first rounds and a quarter final and having not met each other before the final (and potentially knocking one another out). More realistically you'd see about 9-10 Oxbridge matches.
It's also unfair on individual people who don't go to Oxbridge. Your odds of getting on University Challenge are at least 5x higher if you go to Oxford or Cambridge than if you go to another university that gets on it every year, simply because there are so many more teams. The odds compared to the typical student are even higher because most students don't go to universities that get on the program regularly, plus the pool of candidates for each college team is much smaller as the biggest colleges have at most 1,500-odd students. It's impossible to say but I'd guess your odds of getting on the program are at least 20, maybe as much as 100 times higher if you go to Oxbridge than elsewhere.
DeleteThere are no objective grounds on which one can justify Oxbridge's special treatment. The "Teaching is done at college level" argument is completely spurious as this is equally true of many other institutions accross the UK e.g. Trinity Laban Conservatoire, the University of South East Wales, Trinity Saint David and doubtless many other institutions across the UK, yet I'm sure nobody would bat an eyelid if these were made to compete as single teams (Trinity Laban did in 2012-13). I was bemused during Durham's first match in 2012 when Paxo claimed how Durham weren't allowed to enter separate college teams because teaching was done at college level, when in the *previous episode* he'd explained how the Trinity School of Dance and the Laban whatsitcalled are "completely federal and self-contained institutions" or something to that effect. Hell, Bangor's schools of education and sport science are located on a different campus to the rest of the university, one which was an independent institution until the 1990s - does that mean they should be allowed to enter a separate team?!
The only other institutions to which the same opportunity of entering separate college teams was extended were/are the Universities of Wales and London; but these were/are genuinely federal institutions to which you have always had to apply separately (in the case of the UoW its sites were in some cases 150 miles apart). Case in point: when the University of Wales dissolved, nobody noticed or particularly cared much.
The fact that Oxford and Cambridge are continually allowed to put forward multiple teams for the program is simply because that's the way it's always been. Whenever I try to explain UC to foreigners they're always completely baffled by this aspect of the series, and I genuinely do feel it reflects badly on the show and on UK attitudes to education in general - we seem to still be locked into this "Oxbridge-or-bust" Old Boys mentality.
Some good points raised there Adam.
DeleteI suppose we're always going to get arguments for both multiple teams and one each. Whatever the original reasoning for allowing multiple Oxbridge teams was, we'll probably never know.
I think I should clear up the "teaching at college level" business. In Cambridge, teaching for students /doing the same course/ is organised separately at college level (or at least, some of it is - lectures are university-wide, supervisions are college-specific). I think that's the key point - correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems like other universities might have self-contained institutions for particular subjects, but all students studying that subject will have teaching organised through a single institution.
DeleteOf course, I agree that this distinction is pretty technical and exists largely to allow Oxbridge colleges to enter individually. But I think it more or less stands up to scrutiny. As I understand it, colleges in Durham (for example) are essentially halls of residence (though perhaps more independent than halls at other universities), and academic matters are administered centrally by the university.
As I say, though, all this assumes that allowing Oxbridge to compete individually is a bad thing. On the balance, I think this is true. I know it sounds incredibly elitist if I say that a combined Oxford team would win nearly every time, but hear me out. First, I do mean Oxford and not Oxbridge; I don't claim that Oxbridge students are better at quizzes because they go to Oxbridge. That would be absurd. Instead, it's about how Oxford approach quizzing. Notice how in the 1990s/early 2000s a bigger diversity of teams managed to win (Durham, Imperial, LSE, etc.) whereas since about the mid 2000s it's been largely Oxbridge colleges and Manchester. I think this can be attributed to the rise in popularity of quizzing at Oxford - the Oxford University Quiz Society is incredibly committed, has loads of members, and trains regularly. As far as I'm aware, no other university in the UK has that level of commitment (with the possible of exception of Manchester, though even there it seems more of a University Challenge oriented thing and less about quizzing in general). Oxford has won nearly all of the British Student Quiz Championships so far, for example, and also every single Varsity match against Cambridge. Basically, I'm claiming that Oxford would win every time not because of Oxbridge elitism but because I have first-hand experience of how seriously Oxford take quizzing. (I may also be slightly bitter because despite my best efforts I can't make anyone in Cambridge care; by the same token, you can't just say "well other universities can do that too". They can, but so far none seem to have done.)
That is somewhat tangential, I admit; it's the sort of thing that could easily change in the next couple of years. But at the moment, that's how I see it.
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DeleteI've never seen anyone make the point that it's not about winning, though, and I think it's a good point. However, I think against that you have to balance the fact that a) producers do seem to try their best to reduce the number of Oxbridge teams in later rounds by having a lot of Oxbridge matches in rounds one and two (there are rarely more than three Oxbridge teams in the quarter finals) and b) in addition to wanting their team to do well, I think people who watch UC also really, really like seeing non-Oxbridge teams beat an Oxbridge team. With combined Oxbridge teams, that would happen much more rarely (and might reinforce existing stereotypes about innate Oxbridge superiority to boot).
I suspect the question the producers ask themselves is whether having Oxbridge colleges compete individually makes for a better show. For whatever reason, they seem to have decided that that's the case. I think it might be interesting to trial a series with combined Oxbridge teams, but I doubt that's going to happen.
Wow, that was longer than I expected. Basically - I agree that Oxbridge competing as separate colleges isn't ideal, but I'm not convinced that having combined teams instead would be better. Maybe some intermediate solution would be best, like capping the number of Oxbridge teams at a much lower number? But that would potentially be unfair - if an Oxbridge team is good enough to make the show, why should it be denied simply because there are already enough other Oxbridge team? It's complicated, and I doubt any solution would resolve all the issues.
Finally, I do go to Cambridge, so feel free to ignore everything I've just said - though I'm not British, and like to think I'm free of some of the entrenched instincts people seem to have about all things Oxbridge.
Oh christ. I'm vaguely embarrassed to have written that much on the topic. Sorry.
DeleteAs far as I know the University of South East Wales still offer the same courses at different campuses (what used to be Newport Uni and what used to be Glamorgan Uni) but I may be wrong, and it's probably the intention to eventually merge to the extent that each subject is taught on one site (otherwise what's the point of the merger?).
DeleteBut I think the "teaching is done at college level" is nothing more than a retrospective attempt to justify the status quo (and to get Durham to shut up) - I'd never heard the argument being made before last year. The show is 50 years old, after all - they allowed separate teams in 1963 because it was considered appropriate to do so back then, when the academic world was even more oxbridge-centric than it is today. I suspect it was about giving the show a "refined and respectable" sort of atmosphere - something which nowdays smacks of elitism, like most traditions which you could never see people establishing today.