People moaning about University Challenge don't get the program

In 1975 David Aaronovitch and his Manchester comrades performed their rather unorthodox protest against Oxbridge’s overrepresentation in University Challenge, limiting the answers they gave to only a small list of Communist revolutionaries.

Nearly 50 years later, the debate has matured little.

Every Oxbridge victory still comes with a flurry of calls to scrap or cap college applications to the show, all the while ignoring the fact that these victories have become fewer and further between. Indeed, the last time Oxbridge tasted victory was in 2018.

The latest set of gripes come from Frank Coffield, a retried UCL professor. In a letter of complaint sent to the BBC, Coffield claims that the ability for Oxbridge colleges to submit their own teams biases the contest towards Oxbridge and both perpetuates elitism and is a breach of impartiality.

Coffield’s implication that Cambridge and Oxford ought to submit unified teams like other universities would only make matters far worse. Making Oxbridge teams select from a smaller pool of students is a handicap, not an advantage. As has been pointed out on twitter, having university-wide teams has given Oxbridge an enormous advantage in other quiz competitions. There’s no reason to suspect that this would be any different if Coffield’s advice was followed.

Practical concerns aside, I don’t think these detractors really understand the show or its draw. Placing punitive caps on Oxbridge teams makes about as much sense as capping the number of American athletes that enter the Olympics. Yes, people watch the show to test their own general knowledge. But they also watch it to see characters like Eric Monkman or Bobby Seagull. They watch it for the moments of esoteric brilliance such as when Caius, Loveday correctly answered Paxman mid-question with “Hapax Legomenon”.

The freaks and geeks capable of such feats, while obviously not found exclusively in Oxbridge, are there in a much greater concentration. It seems odd, if not quite unfair, to move away from Oxbridge just as this concentration is becoming more diverse and less elitist. Over the past five years, Oxbridge has made great strides to widen its intake, with state school intake jumping about 10 percent at both Oxford and Cambridge between 2015 and 2020.

And so here’s my radical proposal: increase the number of Oxbridge colleges taking part in the program. Give us more freaks, give us more geeks. Let us be entertained. But also make them compete with each other. After all, if you want to stop a monopoly, you should start by fragmenting it.