{"id":16648,"date":"2024-12-02T11:44:35","date_gmt":"2024-12-02T11:44:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=16648"},"modified":"2024-12-18T17:36:24","modified_gmt":"2024-12-18T17:36:24","slug":"snobbery-at-edinburgh-uni-what-a-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2024\/12\/snobbery-at-edinburgh-uni-what-a-surprise\/","title":{"rendered":"Snobbery at Edinburgh Uni: what a surprise!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Earlier this month the University of Edinburgh issued a request to its students from \u2018privileged backgrounds\u2019 not to be \u2018snobs\u2019 towards their peers from Scottish and working class backgrounds. Well, well \u2013 sounds like the closure of the poverty-related attainment gap might be taking a bruising at my alma mater.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now, of course, like many of those trusted friends who will read this, my reaction to someone being snobby towards someone from the Scottish working class would be to slap them very hard. That said, this all seems to have come to the University of Edinburgh as something of a surprise, when the reasons for it are blindingly obvious. It is, like a great many of the ills in Scotland at the moment, an unforeseen (but entirely predictable) outcome of Scottish Governmental policy. Sigh.<\/p>\n

I went to university a long time ago when things were better. I was in an unusual position in terms of my socioeconomic status. I was, quite definitely, of working class roots: here are my credentials. My grandfathers (I had three) were all at one time in their lives coal miners \u2013 Papa Joe was a miner in the General Strike; my grandmother was a domestic servant; my great aunt was a cleaner; my parents both left school at 15; my brother and I were the first generation to go to university. So\u2026working class\u2026but \u2013 problematically for the purposes of sociological analysis, also privately educated. Our parents wanted us to ascend to the professional classes, and so we did \u2013 I thus arrived at the University of Edinburgh with a uniformly working class heritage and a Heriot\u2019s accent (thank you, Miss Murray!)<\/p>\n

At the university, back in 1975, I made friends with other urban working class Scots, with middle class Scots, with the odd Scots toff (one later an Earl), with Americans, with a boy from Sierra Leone, with working class English girls and boys (one of whom was the first boy I loved, see forthcoming book); with middle class English people and with public school educated types (including a lovely wee Etonian who wouldn\u2019t have been rude to anybody ever). I had friends whose dads were miners, and friends with triple-barrelled names and, you know, they mixed. Now, I loved being at university, so my rose-tints are firmly in place, but I cannot, with my hand on my heart, ever remember anybody being deliberately snobby to anyone else or even being snobby about anybody else. I really, honestly and truly, can\u2019t. And if someone had been snobby, and had upset or offended some boy from Castlemilk or some girl from a mining village in Fife, then all of us, including my posh pals, well, we all would have slapped them. Indeed, my great friend from Cheltenham Ladies College, well, she would have been first in the queue and she would have packed quite a wallop.<\/p>\n

Change the social mix<\/h2>\n

Now we know society is just a lot more horrible now. Mrs Thatcher! Covid! Social media! Trump! Nastiness on both ends of the political spectrum! But what factors in particular may have caused the wholeheartedly embarrassing situation where the University of Edinburgh has to tell students off for being snobby? (Honestly, I am really angry as I write this!!!)<\/p>\n

Well, ladies and gentlemen, might it be something to do with the mix of students being admitted to the University of Edinburgh these days? Might it be in part because less than 25% of students there are Scottish? Who goes there now? Well, it always was popular with the English middle, upper middle and upper classes \u2013 there have always been posh, confident voices in the tutorials and lecture halls, but their presence served to deflate prejudice rather than exaggerate it. I\u2019m guessing that then maybe 20% of undergraduates were English, 10% from abroad, 70% Scots. Scots welcoming people from all over the world, including working class Scots growing in confidence as they welcomed others to a Scottish experience.<\/p>\n

Why so few Scots at Edinburgh now? On Saturday past, I judged a public speaking competition, and the kids were just great \u2013 inspiringly clever, thoughtful young people from all sorts of backgrounds. No doubt many of them would like to study at Edinburgh. But alas, most of them won\u2019t be able to because of the funding model which the universities bear.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Scottish students at Scottish universities pay no tuition fees! It\u2019s great! The Scottish Government pays them! Except of course, the Scottish Government DOESN\u2019T pay anything like the real amount per head, leaving universities like Edinburgh and St Andrews to recruit the vast majority of their students from the rest of the UK and from abroad. There are a huge number of Chinese students at Edinburgh, and let\u2019s be honest, that\u2019s because they pay 35k a year in tuition fees.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Government does pay more for some categories of Scottish students \u2013 students who are disadvantaged according to a list of categories. This, in my view, is a very good thing. But \u2013 if you want to do a competitive course at a top Scottish University, pressure on places, and on finances, means that the only Scottish students in these courses are these specially funded students, who then end up in the lecture theatres with large bunches of students from England, America and China, all wealthy enough to pay the considerable tuition fees. There isn\u2019t, it seems, a mix at all. Each group keeps to itself; I hear from the inside that the effect on teaching is disastrous. Where are the Cameron Wyllie\u2019s of yesteryear \u2013 upwardly mobile working class young people from Scotland? Well, they aren\u2019t doing English or Law or Economics etc etc at the University of Edinburgh anymore, because their parents aren\u2019t ALLOWED to pay fees, so they can\u2019t compete with the posh kids from down south.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So \u2013 and this will never happen, because the SNP government, encouraged by the Greens during their wee shot at governing (like a schoolboy driving a sports car on a Groupon voucher) are obsessed by universal benefits. If they instead let middle class parents tick a box saying \u2018will pay fees\u2019 and thus compete with students from England, the vast sums of money saved would enable more money to be spent supporting genuinely needy kids through maintenance grants, and would create a more equable, less fragmented, environment. And it might not be necessary for a university in the heart of Scotland\u2019s capital to be protecting the feelings of its young Scottish undergraduates, the minority in their midst.<\/p>\n

(I\u2019m still raging, by the way).\u00a0<\/p>\n

First published on the author\u2019s A House in Joppa blog<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Featured image: Old College Quad, via Theoden sA, own work, CC-BY-SA-3.0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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