A CENTURY OF PPE: A MODERN GREAT? CHARLIE WEST
A hundred years ago this Michaelmas, the first students of Philosophy, Politics and Economics arrived in Oxford. The choice of Oxford to offer this course was a controversial one. Called “Modern Greats” for a while, the idea behind the degree was to offer a more practical version of Classics for the sake of training Civil Servants to run the country and the Empire. A hundred years later, and it certainly feels as though this has come to fruition. But how should we view PPE? Is it a good, rigorous course that helps produce some of Britain’s and the world’s finest politicians, journalists, civil servants and economists, or is it an over-valued one-way ticket to power? Before this article starts in earnest, I think it’s worth saying that I do not study PPE, or anything remotely related to it. I study Spanish and Italian, which means the most famous graduates of my faculty are Susie Dent and Nigella Lawson. Admittedly, both of these are icons, but it hardly compares to Prime Ministers and top political journalists. I hope, however, that this distance I have from the dizzying heights of Oxford’s most (in)famous degree will allow for some perspective.
dominate, the committees of OUCA, OULC, the Union, the student papers, and often JCRs.
The prevalence of PPE within public life is, of course, part of a wider issue of the massive role that Oxford graduates more generally have at the top of the country’s most important organizations. In Johnson’s current Cabinet, for example, there are two PPE-ists, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, out of the seven Oxford graduates, while four out of the nine Oxonians in Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet studied the subject: Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Ed Miliband, and Anneliese Dodds. So, while the PPE-ists are not as dominant as they were, say, between 2010 and 2015, they still make up a sizable minority of the Oxford-educated front benches.
As mentioned, the list of people who studied PPE is formidable: Prime Ministers Ted Heath, Harold Wilson and David Cameron, Leaders of the Opposition Ed Miliband, Michael Foot and Hugh Gaitskell, journalists David Dimbleby, Ian Katz, Robert Peston and Nick Robinson, and countless Civil Servants. The original aim, it can be said, has been met then: wherever you look in public life, there’s a PPE-ist. Oxford itself is a microcosm of this, with PPE-ists dominating, or attempting to 16
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Reeves https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Ed_Miliband https://mobile.twitter.com/nicktorfaen https://www. oxfordstudent.com/2018/05/06/anneliese-dodds-oxfords-labour-mp/
