University admission is too important a matter to be arranged — shall we say fixed? — by interviews conducted by dons. This is my opinion and it happens also to be that of Simon Hughes, the Government’s advocate for access to universities.

As reported last week in The Times, Mr Hughes believes that academics at Oxford and Cambridge should not interview prospective students and leave the task to admissions officers.

He says interviews by tutors give them a chance to “bond” on an intellectual level with candidates in a way that is unfair to other candidates with whom they might not strike up the same rapport.

He told The Times: “All the advice I have received . . . is clearly recommending that there should not be interviews by people that [sic] are going to be doing the teaching and that if there are interviews they should be by an admissions team professionally qualified to do the selection process and do admissions. And they should be absolutely removed from the people who do the teaching.”

The proposal was attacked at once by those who might be expected to attack it. I mean those with an interest in maintaining the status quo.

Tim Hands, the Master of Magdalen College School and spokesman for the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, said: “I cannot see how this will be greeted by anything other than an outcry. We are against political interference in academic admissions.”

Dr Hands was certainly right in predicting nothing but an outcry. Since Mr Hughes’s views were reported last Thursday, there have been a number of letters on the subject in The Times’s correspondence pages. Every one has criticised him. Can it really be the case that the Editor has received no letters supporting Mr Hughes? After all it can hardly be said that his views are revolutionary.

Here, for instance, is the opinion of Alan Ryan, given in the Guardian as long ago as May 2000 when he was a highly respected Warden of New College, Oxford.

“Unless interviewers are carefully trained,” he said, “they are suckers for charm and liveliness. The process gives the students impolitely described by one researcher as ‘middle-class bullsh**ters’ a flying start.

“Tutors like interviews because they can see whom they are going to teach next year, but interviews are a much worse way of detecting ability than written evidence.”

At around the same time — the time of the Laura Spence affair, as it happens — I expressed in this column my own opinion on the subject of interviews.

I cannot do better today than repeat what I wrote: “Laura Spence’s case has, of course, placed the spotlight on the area which under Oxford’s procedures plays a crucial role in a candidate’s success or otherwise — the interview.

“In the late 20s, when the diarist-to-be James Lees-Milne presented himself for inspection at Magdalen, he had been warned that he was to meet, in the august person of the President, Sir Herbert Warren, Britain’s ‘most blatant social snob’. His mother equipped him with a list of titled members past and present and told him: ‘You must pretend they are your relations. He will never find out.’ Lees-Milne followed her advice — and was in.

“Nothing like this could happen now. And yet a slight feeling of unease came over me as I read in last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph Daniel Johnson’s description of how he — a state school pupil like Laura — overcame the ‘old-fashioned and intimidating’ interview to gain a place at Magdalen. But then, unlike Laura, he happened to have a father and grandfather who had both been there — oh, and knew a friendly beak from nearby Eton College who let him sit in on his Oxbridge class.

“I take a further point from Mr Johnson’s revelation that his interview was not made easier through his having been plied with port the night before as a prelude to a homosexual seduction (unsuccessful) by the graduate student assigned to ‘look after’ him.

“Though I would not dream of suggesting that those interviewing Mr Johnson could have taken a fancy to him, too, the possibility exists — for women as well as men — that an improper consideration such as personal attractiveness could have some influence on the interviewers.”

What I was thinking of here, of course, was a different type of “bonding” from that described by Mr Hughes.

Finally, a very curious feature of The Times’s report on Mr Hughes’s views was buried at the very bottom. It was the information that Cambridge (and my italics follow) “no longer made admissions decisions based on interview and the critical factor was achievement in A levels or other public examinations”.

Now why should Oxford want to be so different?