Apparently, the admissions board at Imperial College, London did their bit to fight crime and uphold the public's trust in the medical profession, when they withdrew 18 year old applicant Majid Ahmed's offer of a place to study medicine, after he admitted to a spent criminal conviction from three years previously.
I must write to them and say thanks. Possibly a fruit basket? Or muffins? No, fruit because muffins, a doctor would tell me, aren't part of one's five a day.
Sorry, back to the point before I descend into hair-pulling and calling the members of said admissions board 'smellyheads' and other juvenile phrases.
The title of this piece asks: what has Mr Ahmed got in common with British national treasure, Stephen Fry? The answer is, they both had criminal convictions before applying to university. In
Mr Fry's case, it was credit card fraud. After serving a three month prison sentence, Fry was allowed to return to school and subsequently went onto gain a place at Cambridge University. The rest, of course, is British comedy history.
Is it an overreaction to compare this young man's current plight with Stephen Fry? One could argue that they are both isolated cases and that, if you looked longer, there are plenty more examples of people being turned away from jobs, university, positions of responsibility due to their criminal past. It is just a fact of life. This may be true. However, I pick out Stephen Fry, paradoxically, because he is a celebrity and because, it is possible that he would not be where he is today if Cambridge University had turned him away.
Nor am I saying that young Mr Ahmed is necessarily going to turn out to be the man who singlehandedly cures cancer. However, given that he has, in his own words, worked with disabilities charities and helped raise £11,000 to help poor children attend a summer camp in Wales and taking into account the good references from charity workers and doctors he has worked with, why not give him the chance?
The counter-arguments I have heard include : the fact that he is entering into a heavily oversubscribed profession, that he should have mentioned his conviction on his original UCAS form and that, ultimately places should go to other students who haven't commited a criminal offence. The author of a post on the Telegraph website says that if a doctor committed burglary, he would be struck off. Yes he would. If a doctor also happened to find himself in the position where he was systematically killing his patients, he would likewise be struck off...and Harold Shipman seemed like such a nice chap in the beginning.
The point here is that he's not a doctor yet and Imperial College, in taking the moral high ground and upholding what they see as the public trust in 'the integrity and probity' of doctors everywhere (quote from BBC news website), seemed to have missed the point that your average criminal mastermind doesn't usually confess to a criminal background. Mr Ahmed was later advised to write a letter confessing to his conviction. I remember my own UCAS application to university all too well and, at the time, there are plenty of teachers, parents and handbooks telling you what to write and what not to write in an application. This was a boy of 18 who probably got lots of contrasting advice. Imagine how much younger he was when he committed that burglary. People make mistakes but, especially at university, they change. I like to think for the better. Yes, he committed a criminal offence, but in a world where much worse is done on the streets of the UK every day, a young man who has tried his best to come back from a four month community service referral deserves a chance to reform.
Oh, and I thought of another example to conclude. Leslie Grantham, a.k.a. Dirty Den from Eastenders, got the part in 1985 in spite of a sixteen year prison sentence for murder. And the Beeb didn't let him go until nineteen years later when he was caught exposing himself on a webcam.
Next Week on 'Where Are The World's Priorities?'
....
No comments:
Post a Comment