Insults and general idiocy force Edinburgh University to put anti-snobbery measures in place
Braying insults at other students is not smart and it's certainly not clever
What a time to be alive, when Edinburgh University has to tell its privately-educated students not to take the piss out of their state school-educated classmates.
Yes, the university’s authorities actually had to stop what they were doing and tell the student body, collectively, to be nice to one another.
Actually their advice is extremely sensible and could form a useful part of the curriculum.
“Don’t be a snob.”
Excellent place to start. Looking down on others is never a good look.
“When you meet new people, be curious about their interests and aspirations rather than their backgrounds.”
Yes. When Edinburgh students ask what school you went to it’s not to see if it was named after a saint, but the question can be just as pointed. In either case, don’t do it.
“Don’t assume that everyone’s life or family is like yours.”
Exactly. Not everyone goes to Waitrose to buy parmesan for both houses.
“Try to undo some of the unhelpful mythology about the relationship of wealth to intelligence or hard work.”
Preach, Edinburgh University, preach. To be honest, many of the students do this job organically, simply by bumbling around in gilets braying about their skiing holidays. But there’s no harm in spelling it out for those who got into a Russell Group university via coaching and crammers rather than by being the only kid in the scheme to do higher physics.
Why is this intervention necessary? Edinburgh University (and its wee cousin St Andrews) is a demographic outlier, a little pocket of Chelsea with a Scottish postcode. There, the children of the elite drive sports cars and have Aesop handwash in the flats their parents bought them. At Edinburgh, only 30% of the student body is Scottish. The others come from the rest of the UK and overseas.
Compare this to Glasgow, where 40% of students come from the west coast.
In the capital, the home-grown minority are sick of being mocked and derided. They’ve set up the Scottish Student Mobility Society, which has logged 200 incidents of students being insulted for their background. So far. These are not just from other students - turns out academic staff can be idiots too.
No such society existed when I started at the University of Edinburgh in 1981. I had barely met an English person until I attended my first English literature tutorial. The next day, at fine art, there were more of them.
My experience was pretty typical. I was 17, straight out of fifth year. (At a private school, albeit a pretty dreadful one.) I had read Macbeth, Crime and Punishment, some Norman MacCaig poems. Seen a weird production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the Citz.
Suddenly I was sitting beside people who were 19 or 20. With A levels. One guy in my tutorial had taught at a prep school for a year. Several of them had been to see Macbeth. At Stratford on Avon.
Not only did I have to read Paradise Lost, I had to discuss it with that lot. The tutor found my discomfort mildly hilarious and served sherry at our morning sessions.
Fine art was more of the same. As the Renaissance masterpieces flashed up on the screen, I struggled to spell the artists’ names. Not having any Italian, this was hit and miss.
(Full disclosure: the lectures were held in a cosy, dim lecture theatre at 5pm. I also struggled to stay awake.)
Everyone else in the room seemed to know these paintings and sculptures. Many had seen them in the Uffizi during their gap year. Not only could they spell them, they could talk about them authoritatively and put them in context.
Despite having, by Scottish standards, a privileged education, I could not. I was new to Piero della Francesca and overwhelmed by Milton. And I was not without cultural capital - my art teacher mother had dragged angry eight year old me around Asisi. My childhood included frescoes as well as books and classical music. Both older siblings went to university.
It was not exactly a disadvantaged background. Yet Edinburgh University was still a brutal shock.
Luckily I had the gumption to push through first year then change to a course where I felt more comfortable and didn’t have to drink at 10am.
Tellingly, when I went to discuss switching to politics, no one was in the least surprised. They told me that all their students were refugees from other disciplines, most of them Scots like me who had started off doing their best subject at school.
Basically, the authorities expected students like me to be miserable and out of their depth and either find a course where they fitted in or leave.
At the time I was so relieved that I didn’t question why they thought this was a smart way to proceed with vulnerable young people starting their higher education. Some things you only see in hindsight.
Not everyone managed this transition. My first year room-mate, another 17-year-old. this time from Inverurie, was studying French. She was drowning. I have to write an essay about Moliere, she said through homesick tears. What do I write about?
We got through that one but the whole university experience was so alien and uncomfortable that she decamped to Napier, then a college, for a secretarial course.
Once I moved to social sciences, the braying accents faded into the background and I found flatmates who had never been in Tatler. Phew.
It sounds as if today’s students have it much worse. Throughout my year of inadvertently studying privilege, no one was nasty to me. I was not called a soap dodger or mocked for my inability to spot phallic imagery in Caravaggio. Having a generic middle class Scottish accent probably helped. A base level of self-confidence and a strong personal style meant I could laugh at the pashminas and Barbour jackets rather than feel any pressure to join in.
I was so naive that I didn’t realise quite how different I was. I just accepted that my superposh flatmates put stiff white party invites on the mantelpiece and struggled to park the Morgan in George Square.
Somehow, I was neither impressed nor intimidated. I didn’t feel the need for a Scottish Student Mobility Society - if I had, I would have started one. Perhaps Thatcherism made the upper classes more tolerant of the presence of the lesser orders. Maybe they enjoyed watching us pull ourselves up by our bootstraps (or spluttering over our early morning sherry).
I didn’t think there was anything positive to be said about the political culture of the 1980s but at least the university did not have to issue official instructions on how not to be a dick.
Class.
The English cancer. Actually, worse than cancer, for it appears cures for cancer are being discovered as we speak.
No such cure for the cruel and pathetic disease that condemns a person just as soon as they open their mouth.
It is our undoing.
Currently a student at Edinburgh Uni, this culture is definitely hard to avoid. According to a lecturer it's also something a lot of the publicly schooled teachers are struggling with. Got told a couple months ago the university's policy regarding care-leavers was keeping "hard working" private school students down by a coursemate. It's baffling to come across.