One of the practical results of David Cameron's victory in the Conservative leadership election contest is that the shadow minister for higher education is now Boris Johnson. 

Keen to put to rest the argument that the Conservative party is now more caring than it used to be, Johnson has used his personal website to accuse some British universities of accepting too many black students. Responding to a Guardian article pointing out that black students are grossly under-represented at Oxford, Cambridge and the other elite Russell Group of universities, Johnson writes, "It is obviously a bad thing if blacks are in some way being deterred from or in other ways failing to get their fair share of places at top universities. But what about places where blacks are proportionally over-represented? Should we be worried about them, too? ... There is a kind of self-selecting system of apartheid going on in British universities."

The original article to which Johnson was responding can be read here.

Back in the 1990s, I used to be a student at one of the Russell Group universities, and I remember the black students there waging a long and unsuccessful battle to get the university to admit that the way it organised its recruitment had the direct effect of excluding potential black and working-class students. The same university had a lower proportion of comprehensive pupils in 1995 than it had had in 1970. This year, for the first time, it accepted that there is a problem with its recruitment, and slowly and defensively it has begun the process of reform.

In this context, it is worth reminding ourselves of some basic truths. I'll quote staff statistics because I deal with them daily, and because the way universities treat their lecturers, who are employed (presumably) for life, has an impact on their treatment of their students who will remain (presumably) for three years.

The official pay gap between white and black lecturers is 13 percent. The real pay gap is considerably higher, because this figure only counts full-time lecturers, ignoring the very large numbers of black lecturers employed on part-time, temporary contracts, and the relatively small numbers of white lecturers on insecure contracts.

White lecturers have a 1 in 10 chance of being professors: there are 130,000 lecturers and 13,000 professors. Black lecturers have a 1 in 250 chance of being professors.

Not to put it too finely, if universities treat so many of their black staff in a racist fashion, then is it any surprise that black students stay away?

Everyone who has any experience of the university where I studied, its student campaigns, or equality politics, would know that when Johnson talks of apartheid in British universities he means the opposite of the truth: to blame black students (presumably for failing to apply) and to let the university administrators off the hook.