‘Let the Right Ones In!’: Widening Participation, Academic Writing and the Standards Debate in Higher Education

Abstract

This article challenges the frequently expressed concern that widening participation has contributed to a general ‘dumbing down’ of higher education in English universities. In particular, it explores the implications of a long-standing ‘moral panic’ about the poor quality of students' academic writing, particularly in the post-1992 ‘new’ universities, which have been raised in various academic reports and countless media articles. A vampire metaphor is used throughout the article to highlight ways in which assumptions about these falling standards in undergraduates' academic writing feed on the foundations of a long-standing, albeit implicit, distrust of the growth in the sector on elitist, ideological grounds. The article investigates how academic writing practices, whilst difficult to define, nonetheless wield a ‘disciplinary power’ over lecturers and students. This includes a discussion about how a situated, New Literacy Studies approach to academic writing development challenges the view that students' academic writing standards are falling. The article suggests that all universities have a responsibility to acknowledge and develop the different literacies that students, especially widening participation students, bring with them to university.