Class condemnation could be the last acceptable prejudice in Scotland

A worse advert for the institution, it is difficult to conceive. Every higher ­education institution in this country has a widening access strategy.

But how can you meaningfully widen access to the educational ­opportunities you offer, when the next ­generation of potential students are being told they should brace themselves for scorn, snobbery and abuse from some of the swaggering little pukes who’re already there?

Earlier this year, some Edinburgh ­students established the Scottish ­Social Mobility Society. They’re promoting an admirably grown-up and positive ­message. Through events, workshops, and ­campaigns, they aim to “educate and raise awareness about the importance of social mobility and ­diversity, shedding light on the unique challenges faced by Scottish ­students and particularly those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds” studying at the institution.

They’ve already logged 200 examples of the social prejudices students sometimes encounter from their peers and even some university staff, suggesting that snobbery is not only alive and well, but is in some ­circles the last acceptable prejudice.

'Microaggressions'

The university includes some well-intentioned advice for its more ­privileged ­undergrads on avoiding class-based ­“microaggressions,” including “when you meet new people be curious about their interests and aspirations rather than their background,” “don’t assume that everyone’s life or family is like yours” and encourages them to “try to undo some of the unhelpful mythology about the relationship of wealth to intelligence or hard work” rather than doubling down on self-serving social stereotypes.

At Edinburgh, only 26% of the student body is Scottish. The others come from the rest of the UK and at postgraduate level, overwhelmingly from overseas.

Edinburgh sits around the middle of the pack in terms of the percentage of its Scottish students from the most impoverished postcodes, but in numerical terms, these students ­constitute a tiny percentage of overall student numbers. The ­proportion of ­privately educated kids attending the ­institution remains extremely high, ­making up 40% of the student body.

Reading the coverage this week took me back to the early 2000s. I arrived at the institution just over 20 years ago to start my law degree. Then as now it seems, the class dynamic felt stark.

I remember he used to stoat around ­Pollok Halls in Edinburgh in an ­immaculate three-piece suit, rotating daily, pow Brylcreamed, cravat pinned in place with a pearl. This might strike you as a suspiciously time-consuming ­costume for the average 19-year-old to gravitate towards  but against the ­backdrop of bleary-eyed bodies held together only by hoodies and jeans, the boy stood out. The only thing he was missing was Rupert the Teddybear. In summer, there might have been an unironic straw boater in his wardrobe too.

Because of the astonishing ostentation of his daily get up, he became the object of considerable attention and speculation in the dining hall. Which was presumably the point. Some took him for some kind of frightfully grand aristocrat. I tended to assume the opposite.

Extremely posh people don’t try so hard. They don’t need the clothes to prove it. Like Jacob ­Rees-Mogg, costuming up like this is a tell given by the aspirational middle classes, thinking they are fitting in with their new well-heeled friends, while sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb in their ­borrowed clothes.

Yahs outnumbered

Around this conspicuous Brideshead Revisited cliché, there gravitated what looked and sounded like the cast of Four Weddings And A Funeral. In ­numerical terms, the Yahs were comfortably ­outnumbered by everyone else – but the sheer volume which accompanied them wherever they went gave them an outsize social presence on campus.

They were particularly unavoidable for students in the arts and ­humanities. ­Confidence is also a question of ­distributive justice – who has it, who doesn’t, and who bears the burdens and social consequences for the lack of it. It took one of my friends from a small East Lothian town the better part of three and a half years to work out that he was smarter and had much more to say than the opinionated voices which dominated his English and history seminars.

Through his eyes, I came to understand the social obstacle course he was trying to navigate a little more clearly – but our friendship began with me adding to his feeling of alienation. I remember when we first met at a party in a flat off the Meadows.

He earnestly asked me “What do you read?” This ought to have been a solid icebreaker. I should have just told him what I studied without snark. But I didn’t. Instead, I made fun of what I took to be pomposity on his part, an Oxbridge ­affectation, perhaps picked up from ­University Challenge.

He shrunk into himself, I remember, at that. He’d used this formulation because he figured it was the right thing to say, a shibboleth that showed he belonged – and I’d slagged him off for it. I still regret ­saying it, because the lesson it taught him was – in this alien and uncomfortable environment, you can’t win. The ­social rules keep changing, mocked for being ­a pleb or mocked for being affected, ­somehow getting it wrong every time.

Reading reactions to last week’s story, I’m struck by the continuity in the tales former students tell about their experiences of Edinburgh’s class dynamic.

Talking to a younger colleague who studied there a decade after me, they spoke about very similar experiences. Reaching Edinburgh was the first time in their life they’d ever been asked “what school did you go to?” – as if the answer could be remotely illuminating – and peers with a powerful but baffling interest in what their parents did for a living.

Rural background

In the first part of my life, I grew up on a farming estate in rural mid-Argyll. As a society, it was on one level hugely stratified. The landowner employed almost everyone, owned their houses, and could effectively expel families from the ­community if he sacked them.

He had a lady wife with a Barbour jacket, floral headscarf and a dog called Tuppence, who would talk to you about the weather, and having commented on the recent cold snap or stormy weather, had entirely exhausted her conversation.

As a wee girl, my sister conceived the ­notion that Lady Lithgow’s full-time job was roaming about the estate picking up roadkill – as every time she saw the woman, she was holding some kind of game bird blasted out of the sky by her husband or his friends.

Never underestimate the ­biting observational logic of children.

But this stratified society also had ­significant egalitarian dimensions to it. Everyone knew everyone else. We all attended the same school primary school. There was none of that social segmentation which often divides up urban communities.

To adapt the title of Darren McGarvey’s latest book, the interesting thing was – there wasn’t much of a social distance between us, but any objective analysis of the material circumstances in which the community lived is completely unintelligible in the absence of an analysis rooted in class, capital and power.

I didn’t realise that at the time. I left this environment, more or less persuaded that talking about class was an entirely reactionary thing to do, and in an underdeveloped way, suspected that obsessing about social class and its signifiers was primarily an English cultural preoccupation. I know better now.

In dealing with anyone, egalitarianism is an important value. Emphasising our common humanity is often a good thing. But refusing to talk about class at all means you simply don’t understand what’s happening in the world and why it keeps happening.

This story should also be a reminder that widening access isn’t just about what grades we ask for to let you into a course, but the culture and atmosphere institutions foster. Belonging matters.

If we want students to cultivate an open and receptive mind, they need to be ­relaxed and confident enough to turn what can be a frozen, stilted encounter in the seminar room into a real, authentic conversation.

To teach people and teach them well, you need to put people at their ease, confident that no kind of social shame will be unleashed on them if they say something gauche or naïve.

If your overwhelming feeling at university is one of social isolation, if you endlessly encounter people in your classrooms who are unlike you, who seem rooted in social experiences you do not share – then you’ve no community to hold you up when times get bad, no team to rally round you when your studies grow tough, rootlessly drifting through the institution – and sometimes rootlessly drifting out of it.