The Dalyell Scholars stream encourages educational elitism
Emily Graetz writes.
In August 2020, a post on USyd Rants 2.0 opined that being a Dalyell Scholar was only worth it for the sense of superiority scholars gained over non-Dalyell students.
Text reads: “One of the perks (if not the only perk) of being a Dalyell Scholar is having a heightened sense of superiority over sub-98 ATAR troglodytes. My testosterone level jumps to a new high when I subtly hint at the dalyell units I have-it is like verbal masturbation. For that purpose alone I'd argue that Dalyell program is worth it. Why else did you sacrifice your childhood, adolescence , and struggle through Macchiavellian power grabs in high-school (like myself shoving the dux under the bus) if you don't get some delayed gratification and social acknowledgment for it?
Whilst the rant may have been satirical, with commenters joining in with the likes of “make sure you mention to your interviewer you were a Dalyell scholar so they can blow you off even further”, the post does speak to the way in which the program breeds a worrying degree of academic elitism.
Introduced in 2017 to offer a range of “enrichment opportunities that will extend… academic abilities and develop... leadership capabilities”, the program is only available to high achieving students. Entrants into the Dalyell scheme must boast a whopping 98+ ATAR or achieve a WAM of 80+ in their first year. There are exceptions for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and those who have experienced educational disadvantage or financial hardship, but the entry requirements are still markedly high.
Once in the program, students can expect access to a range of exclusive and largely interdisciplinary units such as “Leadership in STEMM” or “Disruption for Sustainable Futures”. There’s also mentoring opportunities and social events and at one time, a Dalyell staff member ran an informal book club.
I was a Dalyell scholar for the last two years of my Bachelor of Arts, and like most other Arts students in the program, I took “Great Books that Changed the World” and “Ideas and Movements that Changed the Worlds” as my 12 credit points subjects required to successfully complete the program. For me, these courses were - as the program promises - academically enriching. It was the first time I learnt alongside students in other disciplines, witnessed intense tutorial debates and the first time I felt that my opinions were important outside of my departmental home. I would often sit in wonder (and silent admiration) at what a final year philosophy student had to say about Nietzscheism or as a mathematics student argued with the tutor about Orwell and fascism in contemporary society.
I know that many other students don’t see the value in the program though. Having to take two extra subjects means less elective options which is especially restrictive as undergraduate degrees become less and less specialised. Some have said that the subjects are meaningless and devoid of disciplinary significance. I’d say that these are fair claims.
More worryingly, however, is that these units breed academic elitism. Course content (at least in the Arts units) relies heavily on Western ideals and perspectives and entry into the program is evidently highly exclusive. The fact that these worldly and highly intellectual tutorial conversations can sometimes feel like a circlejerk of the university’s most intelligent students boasting about which Greek philosophers they read over the Summer is certainly one aspect of the problem.
But I think this gratuitous self-indulgence is more a symptom of academic elitism rather than the source of it. Dalyell Scholars, by nature of the high achieving marks needed to enter, are made to think their opinions matter more than students with a WAM of less than 80. There is no reason why a student who doesn’t have ‘Dalyell level grades’ can’t engage in conversation about feminist philosophy or environmentalism. No reason why they wouldn’t be able to contribute to innovative ideas about sustainability in business or engineering. And yet, only a few voices of the most academically privileged students are being celebrated and given space to test out their ideas.
On top of this, WAMs and ATARs are only ever arbitrary measures of success. They typically only recognise the work of students that are already most likely to succeed in life, whether that be by nature of the environment they were raised in, the school they attended or the socioeconomic status of their parents. The same could be said of degrees like Law which are, in part, attractive because of their restrictedness.
Part of the problem is with measuring success via grades which don’t account for disadvantage, alternative ways of learning or even a student’s interest in the subject. To say that only students who have already achieved relative success within a traditional model of learning be offered all the opportunities for more success only serves to create an exclusionary and elitist academic environment.
And yet the very value of the Dalyell program lies in exclusivity, not education. I would like to call to abolish entry requirements and have them replaced with something more meaningful, like a letter of interest or a personal statement, for example. But I suspect that by and large, students are only interested in participating in the course because of the superiority it affords them, not because of any actual academic and educational opportunity.
Scholarship and high achiever streams like the Dalyell program certainly ought to do away with their exclusionary and inaccessible entry requirements. But whether they can exist without them is perhaps a good litmus test for whether they should exist at all.