Feedback from an Oxbridge college that takes 65 per cent of its intake from private schools suggested that an important criticism of state-school candidates was that they stuck to their arguments.

This is not I think as mysterious as IT makes out. The idea is that tutorials are places where your arguments will be challenged; you will frequently have to modify them on the basis of the challenges presented (it’s possible your tutor may know something you don’t, or may have encountered not only your argument but also a range of pertinent counter-arguments many times before). Of course there will also be occasions when the challenge can be rebutted; a good argument can be defended, and augmented by the lines of defence one takes in response to unforeseen retorts. The imputation here is that some candidates simply stick to the arguments they came in with, neither modifying nor strengthening them in response to the contingencies of debate. This is taken as an indication that they are not well-equipped to learn in an adversarial context (they perhaps need to have their confidence reinforced, to be lead affirmatively from the weaker argument to the stronger rather than directly confronted with the presumed deficiencies of what they have presented and required to improvise their way out of trouble).

What’s involved here is an implied ethos of debate. It’s assumed that sticking to an argument shows a failure of imagination, a lack of deftness in the arena of adversarial pseudo-combat that is imagined to hone the minds of those who engage in it. It may in fact be the stunned response of someone who can’t believe the person they’re sharing their thoughts with is being so rude and unhelpful. Why won’t they listen, instead of nitpicking or trying to side-track me away from what I was attempting to say?

I never had a problem with this myself at Oxford; I’ve always been obnoxious, combatative, eager to stick my oar in and generally spoiling for a fight. But there was a tendency for students from state schools to assume a quite different ethos, one of mutual encouragement and patient attention-giving, which strongly disparages this kind of faux-pugilism as arrogant and show-offy, the sort of behaviour that silences less confident voices and inexorably narrows the scope of the conversation. This can be quite strongly gendered, of course: masculine virile banter versus feminine emotional sharing. The class stereotypes in turn draw on gender stereotypes, as tends to be the case.

I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of the adversarial ethos, on condition that those who uphold the opposing ethos recognise that it, too, is contingent on a whole bunch of highly socially coded etiquette rules - rules that embody an assumption of weakness and inferiority as surely as those of the Oxbridge tutorial embody an assumption of impregnable superiority. There is more than one way to be boring and unpleasant to be around; people who insist that their asinine opinions be respected, and permitted a full and extended airing in front of an uncritically supportive audience, are in their cramped little passive-aggressive way just as much of a pain in the neck as up-themselves would-be intellectual gunslingers playing silly point-scoring games against each other.

In the context of “the argument about confidence”, the point here is that the adversarial discursive ethos assumes self-assured participants whose amour propre will not be fatally wounded if their arguments take a knock or two; it characterises those who remain too closely identified with their arguments - who stick to them as if clinging on to a cherished childhood memory - as insecure crybabies. One should pause here to remark that this is, generally speaking, the height of self-deluding ideological vanity: the propensity of Oxbridge dons for taking mortal personal offense in the course of highly rarefied debates is as legendary as the childish malice by which the consequent feuds are often characterised.

The ethos of mutual support, respect and attention-giving assumes participants whose ability to articulate their thoughts is impaired, or not yet fully developed; because its primary focus is on giving such participants the opportunity to speak and be heard, it tends to deprecate sustained, competent articulation as selfish monopolisation of the forum (bounded by an inexorable scarcity of “air-time”) it is striving to establish. One must learn to speak in a way that enables others, also, to be heard; but this may mean that one is effectively obliged to suppress any utterance that cannot readily be taken up by those assumed others, any discursive move that might raise the pitch of the discussion out of what is taken to be their limited reach. Here again it should be noted that the incompetent other invoked here is a fantasmatic other - “those who do not share our advantages”. A discussion that proceeded on the assumption of real equality between its participants would not be so hobbled.