IN COURT 67 OF the Royal Courts of Justice in London last week Oxford University and the style of the English establishment were subjected to unaccustomed scrutiny. The case against Oxford was plain to see. The university was accused of treating Nadeem Ahmed so perversely when it deemed he had failed an exam that an unprecedented intervention by the judiciary in its affairs was in order. Ahmed, as you may have guessed, is a British Asian and his second and equally unprecedented charge that Oxford is a racist institution will be heard by the County Court in a few weeks.
The establishment style was harder to pin down. You caught it in the circumlocutions of the pack of university lawyers and a faint, musty smell in the air. Both suggested that Oxford remains a self-protecting world where students were expected to fall on their swords without a murmur, where nudges and hints were preferred to precise, open standards, Transparency would allow the public to look in and pass impertinent judgments. Better, far better, to keep the waters muddy and the procedures obscure.
Amateurism has its champions. But the informed approach is an absolute disaster when accusations of racism are made. A simple question - did Nadeem Ahmed pass or fail? - which any other academic institution could resolve without breaking sweat, has become the subject of two court hearings.
Ahmed is neat and rather donnish. He did not strike me as a professional victim willing to cover his failings with bellows of 'racists'. Quite the reverse. In the months before his case came to court he had displayed a deplorable unwillingness to shoot his mouth off to Observer columnists desperate for a story, as I learned the hard way.
He went to Oxford to study the tranquil Sufi philosophy of the Islamic kingdoms of medieval Spain. His experience was anything but calming. The supervisor of his post-graduate degree was Fritz Zimmermann from the School of Oriental Studies. They did not get on.
In 1999 Ahmed and his fellow students were told to sit an exam in Arabic. A white woman who had no training in Arabic before she had begun the course sailed through. Ahmed who studied Arabic at the University of London and whose tutor there described him as a proficient pupil, failed.
According to Ahmed's evidence, Zimmermann told him afterwards: "Why are you so interested in academia, is it the glamour? You are not cut out for academia. You have a basic problem with languages. Seriously, are you dyslexic? You give the impression of being an uneducated person." When Ahmed replied that he had tried to produce a stylish rather than a literal translation, he alleges Zimmermann countered: "well, that is just your problem. Where the text is clear-cut and simple, you wish to turn your behind around and fart on it with your obscurity." These fighting words concluded with Zimmermann saying that Ahmed should leave Oxford. Yet, peculiarly, he could not order him to go because his 'exam' his student had sat, and on which his academic ambitions rested, was not an exam.
I'll explain as best I can. Normal exams are set by a rigorous and independent exam board. The papers are not marked by a pupil's teachers - accusations of bias would fly if they were - but by external examiners. None of these conditions applied in the School of Oriental Studies. The exam was set by Zimmermann and marked by Zimmermann. It wasn't an exam but an informal test. Ahmed couldn't be expelled for failing it.
Zimmermann and the university deny all accusations of racism vehemently and I've no way of knowing whether Ahmed is a victim or an academic incompetent. But Oxford accepts that the 'exam' was flawed because it was 'not independent' and 'not double-marked'. The university adds that a second 'exam' Ahmed took after he protested was also flawed. In this instance, Ahmed wasn't just presented with a translation but had to answer supplementary questions on Arabic grammar which his fellow students had been spared.
The scholar found himself in a weird position. The School of Oriental Studies said it wanted to see the back of him, but couldn't force him to leave. Ahmed was called to meetings in pubs and asked to be a good chap and disappear. In these circumstances, most graduates go. There is no point in studying under dons who don't want to teach you. Ahmed, however, decided to stay and fight for the right to be taught. "I know I will have a miserable time if I win," he told me. "But I want to make sure that no Asian or black student at Oxford goes through what I have gone through."
Ahmed searched for allies. The university had no ethnic minority officers for Asian students with a grievance, so he appealed to Tom Paulin, who teaches at his college. Readers who have seen Paulin explode on BBC2 when asked to comment on the latest saccharine film or Britart banality may think there is not a force on easrth that can stand in his way when a rage is upon him (with the possible exception of a battle-ready nuclear sub). Paulin made over 100 phone calls but got nowhere. No-one wanted to listen.
Paulin says he is 'deeply concerned' and I can understand why. If Ahmed wins in the High Court, a ruling is expected tomorrow, or succeeds in substantiating his racism charge, Oxford will look like a dysfunctional relic. Discrimination is at its worst in industries - journalism is one - which don't advertise jobs but rely on informal recommendations and word of mouth. Pupils may soon learn that Oxford apes the informality of the worst employers.
A victory for Ahmed would also encourage Ministers to turn what is left of their socialist scorn on Oxford and Cambridge. Gordon Brown may have got his facts hopelessly wrong during the Laura Spence affair, but his broad argument was undeniable. The 7 per cent of pupils who go to private schools make up one third of all students who get three As at A-level but receive 50 per cent of Oxbridge places.
There are, of course, many in both universities who are desperate to connect their colleges to the rest of society but they may be fighting a losing battle. Applications from state schools fell this year. Oxbridge academics complain that it is getting harder to persuade working- and middle-class students to apply to universities where they believe they will be belittled by plausible but dimwitted snobs. Ahmed says he is fighting for the black and Asian Oxford students of the future. They could be few in number.