Cambridge deals with the extremes of social identity, embodied by the Etonian arguing with my working-class Scouse friend during back to school week. But where does that leave me, someone from a rough northern town who went to school the wrong way? Am I lost in the midst of these extremes of identity?
“The university’s goal of diversifying is laudable, but its statistics don’t reflect what happens after students get in. “
In a way, these extremes are attributable to the university itself, in its desperate attempt to somehow fit you into their diversity stats. Just three days after this year’s A-level results arrived, my college had a shiny new infographic, in the piercing college blue, to let us know about the 31% of participants with at least one disadvantage indicator or the 21. , 6% of home entrants who “have home addresses that are in the bottom two quintiles of the multiple deprivation indexâ€. What a welcome, right? Their goal of diversification is laudable, but their stats fail to convey what happens once the students get in. In fact, they fail to even convey the truth of their diversity. By stretching for their stats to be good, they are including middle class students in their disadvantaged category – hiding the truth that many disadvantaged students still fail.
In my northern town, where the largest bus station in the UK is located and a considerable amount of deprivation, I felt very comfortable. Comfortably middle class. I was even laughed at for my accent which had a slight southern pull due to my parents. An oppression that I learned to put out in school the second a girl turned to tell me I looked “chic” – God forbid! It certainly didn’t sound like a “lower quintile†type of life.
Imagine my shock when I arrived in Cambridge, got settled in, sat down with friends, and found myself the poorest in the room. We didn’t all exactly have family bank statements, that would be woefully un-English. Instead, people exchanged stories about “St Paul’s boys†or summers spent in huge homes in Italy. They were harmless comments, but totally foreign to me. I did not know that Saint Paul was anything other than a saint who would lend his name to any old church, elementary school or town hall that wanted it. As for the summer house, motorhomes and budget hotels were generally our villa of choice for family vacations. So I sat quietly in these rooms. I contributed small moments of references, weaving a vacation on the French Riviera, in the hope that they would accept that we share a point of reference and not dig deeper. The reality was that I didn’t match their cultural IDs.
“I accepted the diversity statistics before arriving and listened eagerly to Oxbridge’s speech at my school telling us that we were as lucky as anyone to come in like anyone else. ‘other.”
My particular circle is small and university based, having been at the mercy of a first year spent in a pandemic. It is largely made up of private or high school students and has its usual London-centric sparkle. They were experiencing a different kind of privilege. My relatively well-off status was pretty much shattered in Cambridge by Lent. My friend’s suggestion that we all go to Dubai for next Christmas was the nail in the coffin – I was not as privileged as I had felt before.
I can trace much of my shock to false expectations sold to me by the institution itself. I accepted the diversity statistics before arriving and listened eagerly to the Oxbridge lecture at my school telling us that we were as lucky as anyone to come in like anyone from ‘other. The problem with stats and messages is that they don’t convey the whole story. The 73.4% of home entrants to public schools seem less impressive when one considers that the public sector represents 93.6% of the school population. It was a problem, but I also felt that I was never quite the person to whom diversity statistics were preached. I always felt too privileged to be a part of this particular group, they couldn’t talk about me – I have skied four times. If I was actually being preached to, then where was the campaign telling the most disadvantaged students that Cambridge was a place for them too?
This brings me to what is Cambridge’s ultimate problem: the need to fit everyone into a binary. Whether it’s a love of Victorian-type categorization or an attempt to neutralize individuality, it always seems necessary to put a box. This is, for obvious reasons, deeply wrong. People are individuals; they cannot always be categorized.
My problem appeared because I placed markers at both ends of the binary. My ski vacation versus my northern public school. I had a university desperate to brag about the diversity of its students, fitting me into the public sector section of computer graphics despite my privilege. However, I was surrounded by students whose binary didn’t quite match due to savoring gravy on my chips, or occasionally saying bah-th rather than bar-th – as is common in my part. So I stay stretched between the opposite ends – I don’t know where I stand. This uncertainty made me a little jealous of both the Scouser and the Etonian. At least they match the binary – and the binary is contagious.
