»2nd May 2008

The Final Insult

This isn't really the right place for this, but I don't have a general articles section at the moment. Anyway, one night a week or so ago whilst I was at the library (again), Mark sent me a text asking if I was interested in doing an article for the final issue of the paper. At last! A chance to finally get one over on the Interminable Prick (Ramzy). So, after talking with the sub editor of the Comment section, Maryam, I managed to knock out the following article and get it printed! It got edited down a bit for the actual issue, so my little message didn't get through as a result.
Still, I got my smug little face next to the article and Mark got to do one of his trademark illustrations for the article too. All in all, an unprecedented success. The Comment section is so often filled with over-opinionated idiots, the final issue had a real textbook example of the type which I might go into later. So I was cautious to try and come off as reasonable, and not someone who I myself would vocally criticise and belittle after reading the article. So, read on and enjoy.

Class Dismissed

For most people, their time at university is (or is supposed to be) a learning experience, both academic and personal. Unless you come from the most cosmopolitan of backgrounds you will have no doubt met many new and different types of people at university.
Considering this I thought back across my experiences and I soon began dwelling upon how my ideas on class have changed whilst at university, do I even know what class I am anymore? Knowing yourself is one thing, but class—if it means anything anymore—is something I find I have very little grasp of. You might call yourself middle class or working class but surely class is determined instead by how other people perceive you? Of course, I should think of myself as working class, my parents both worked in the leather and textile industry in West Yorkshire and I grew up in three-bedroom-semi-land. Underneath this superficial description it gets complicated, how is class affected by other factors such as education? Reaching a post-graduate level of education might suggest class mobility yet this was only made possible through the provision of a series of government grants and loans to provide access to higher education in the first place.
Attaining qualifications is one thing yet I feel I remain working class. My education before university was at a grammar school (the kind where you have to pass a test to get in but which is free and otherwise essentially identical to a state education) in my hometown. Zealously protective of its fairly unusual status—when nowadays a grammar school is more often a by-word for a private/public school—my secondary school infused me early on with a sense of what class means. You wouldn’t find many people from the local council estates attending my school, if anything you were in a minority if you actually lived within walking distance of the school as I did. As entry to the school was based on academic performance this made noticeable changes to the sorts of people who attended the school. Put it this way, out of nine hundred and fifty students, there were no more than thirty who qualified for free dinners, myself one of them. There was a certain shame in having to go to pick up the free dinner tickets knowing that it marked you out as having ‘poor parents’. This didn’t stop me fitting in with people at school but it created a dull sense of being different, that is, being different for being good academically yet also being poor. It is worth noting that I say ‘poor’ as opposed to the more accurate yet cumbersome ‘of a low socio-economic status’ or however these things are described by politicians.
This difference was made more acute at university, particular so I feel at Leeds because of the higher academic level the university insists upon. Though there were no more free dinner registers to clearly mark people out, I found differences to be far more profound. Shopping at Waitrose instead of Morrisons, ‘travelling’ during a gap year instead of ‘getting a job’, the very idea of a gap year comes with the requirement of having the necessary funding to support it. Without entering into class envy, how much of the university experience itself is founded on (middle) class trends? When I talk about the ‘university system’ I am of course referring to my own experiences of university. Speaking to friends from college who went to former polytechnics, there was agreement on how markedly different our experiences were. The new metropolitan universities unfortunately exist as a kind of second division in the university league, reiterating the division between a working class education and a middle class education.


Officially better than my retarded Paint scribblings that usually accompany these things. Great work, Mark.

For my bachelors, I qualified for a scholarship grant made available for students from poor backgrounds. During my second year in 2006, through the scholarships office I was invited to a Q&A with the then newly appointed Bill Rammel, Minister for Higher Education. At this meeting I was surprised by the similarities the existed between the experiences of the other recipients of the scholarship and myself. There was a sense that we were in a small minority amongst a student body which remained predominantly middle class. There was also a consensus that even with the scholarship, finance was still a critical and determining factor in both accessing higher education and in choosing to continue in it. I was fortunate enough to be able to roll underneath the falling stone door of tuition fees with just enough time to grab my fedora however the introduction of such fees and the ever unchanging inadequacy of even the full student loan can only mean that the highest echelons of university remain the preserve of those who can afford.
So anyway, back to considerations of class. With a common experience of university amongst people I have met with similar backgrounds to my own what conclusions can I make from this? The link between class and education is both strong and wide reaching. At Leeds I have felt on the one hand a sense of being different—that I’m somehow bucking the trend by just being here—and secondly dismay that there are so few others from similar backgrounds to myself. This feeling of separation is the by-product of a university system which is dominated by the middle class at the highest levels whilst new universities still exist in a hinterland between their old polytechnic status and their new status as ‘traditional’ academic-oriented universities.
Whilst the sense of middle-class-ness remains, so too will remain a lack of cohesiveness in the student community. University shouldn’t be about class tourism, either seeing how the rich people live, or seeing how the poor people live. What needs addressing is why there are so few ‘poor’ people at university in the first place. It is sad that this sense of otherness at Leeds has been so profound, and that education at the highest levels seems to be the preserve of the more affluent. When it comes to education, it should be for all, and as a consequence it should be free.

____ ____________.


Extar, over, out.

Death of Mother Earth, never a rebirth. Evolution's end, never will it mend, NEVER!