The Great Dumb-Down is here

I have spent most of my adult life in elite universities; first as a student, then doing teaching and research. It now feels inevitable that I would live this way, but it wasn’t always so. I grew up lower middle class in Northwest England, my dad a teacher in a local high school, my mum a secretary for a company that sold screws. Despite us not being Catholic, I went to the local Catholic comprehensive, where I specialized in getting myself kicked out of RE lessons for challenging claims made by the teachers. (I mean, come on, it really isn’t the case that condoms don’t work because the Aids virus is “too small”.) Aged 15, my hobbies consisted of listening to punk rock, falling off skateboards, and smoking pot with my friends. If you’d asked my teachers to pick the child most likely to get