Dame Professor Mary Beard has said that the University of Cambridge is smarter now than in previous years after rugby players were “excluded” from the uni.
The renowned classicist said the university, where she taught for more than 40 years, is better now because “there aren’t any of those thick white rugger buggers” left.
The 70-year-old explained her views that Cambridge had been “transformed for the better” because they have been “excluded” from the university.
Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on a panel titled Universities Under Fire, which explored the problems with Britain’s higher education system, she said: “When you say: ‘Why are there so few third-class degrees at Cambridge?’ I can tell you it’s because those thickos have been removed.”
She added: “Most of my career, I have taught at Cambridge. It isn’t as leafy as you think. It’s not as privileged. But I can see it is a particular place to teach.”
She added that over her career, the university had become “transformed”, stating: “The improvement I saw in higher education in my lifetime of teaching is something that I feel that I can celebrate. I went to Cambridge as an undergraduate in the early 1970s and it was [a] white, posh, male enclave.
“10% of students were women and there was very little diversity of any sort. I left and the place has been transformed for the better.”
She went on: “There weren’t any of those thick white rugger buggers that I used to teach in 1982. They have been excluded.”
The term “rugger bugger,” as defined in the Cambridge Dictionary, is a man who plays rugby, and “especially behaves in a loud and unpleasant way”.
The former professor also shone a light on the rising trend of cancel culture within British university campuses and denied being “terribly woke”.
She said: “I’ve spent a lifetime on campuses and I haven’t lived in fear that I was going to be cancelled. I have said some things that maybe I would regret later, but I haven’t been going around looking over my shoulder.
“Happily, universities have become much less monocultural than they were before.
“The problem is free speech is an even harder issue in areas where we have so many diverse and different backgrounds. I think with some terrible exceptions, things are not going too badly.”
Appearing alongside Professor Beard at the panel were Professor Matthew Goodwin, a former lecturer and author of “Bad Education: Why Our Universities Are Broken and How We Can Fix Them”; Julian Dunkerton, a businessman and co-founder of Superdry; and Charlotte Ivers, a columnist for The Sunday Times.