On average, male students are awarded twice as many Firsts.But does it matter? For certain kinds of employment it does, and foremost among them is academe itself. To be considered for postgraduate work, especially at doctoral level, a First is almost a sine qua non. Except that academics are privy to the internal valuations made daily within disciplines about departments and scholars, and assess graduates of particular places accordingly – in politics and law, say, a 2:1 from certain universities is deemed as good as a First elsewhere.Graduate recruiters in the private sector use a variety of markers, of which degree class is only one. The professional bodies, among them the Law Society and the Engineering Council, seem happy enough with differences in grading. Employers and professionals know which departments and universities are good, and degree class matters less.Professor Alan Smithers, of Brunel University, says: “It’s better to let each department and each institution find its own level.

We must give up the pretence that a degree is a degree is a degree.”But grade inflation can be costly if students are forced to seek postgraduate qualifications because their undergraduate degree is not distinct enough, says Professor Gareth Williams, of the London University Institute of Education: “If those who study hard end up with the same degree as those who don’t, we may end up with the American situation, where everyone has to go on and get a master’s degree”. Academic Jewish studies in Britain have undergone something of a boom in recent years. A directory of Jewish studies academics at British universities, published in 1995 by the British Association of Jewish Studies, included 249 names, with no fewer than 48 institutions represented. More than 100 undergraduates are pursuing formal degree programmes in Jewish studies in any given year. The UK was seen as something of a backwater for Jewish studies – there are 100 endowed chairs in the United States and still barely a handful here – so this growth is both surprising and encouraging.

But, being driven mostly by private donors – which cash-strapped universities have welcomed – it has proceeded haphazardly. Academics and sponsors alike are now stepping back to ask fundamental questions about where UK Jewish studies are going, and what purposes they fulfil. And the answers often show opposing conceptions.
One of the key questions is: what role do Jewish studies play in fostering the Jewish identity of young Jews? A comparable question asked of Chinese or Middle Eastern studies is barely conceivable, and yet it is central to Jewish studies because many donors, and many academics too, believe that maintaining Jewish identity should be a primary purpose of teaching and study in this area.The issue is made more acute because of the perceived crisis of continuity in the Jewish community. If higher Jewish studies are effective in helping young Jews to maintain their Jewish distinctiveness, there is an argument that more communal resources should be devoted to them.But not only is there a lack of research evidence that Jewish studies have a positive impact on this; some also argue that promoting Jewish studies on this basis is a mistake.

For one thing, probably most Jewish studies students are not Jewish. If the identity objective were allowed to drive the growth in Jewish studies, it could result in ghettoisation of the subject as a whole. As Dr David Cesarani, professor of Jewish history at Southampton University, points out, Jewish studies must achieve the highest academic standards, attract academic staff with the highest academic and research qualifications and be seen as a modern, cutting-edge subject, central to the understanding of European civilisation.The growth of the subject, which is occurring in other European countries too, takes place against a background of increasing interest in contemporary Judaism. Children all over the country have lit candles for the Jewish festival of Chanukah, as they have for the Hindus’ Diwali, as part of their primary school religious education.