Moving from one ‘white’ country to another – easy, right?
Having lived in Malawi and South Africa, I thought moving to Scotland would be easy. As a middle-class Canadian, moving to another Western culture didn’t require any pre-departure or inter-cultural training. Admittedly, one of my major concerns was grappling with a thick Scottish accent, but I’d survived minibuses in major southern African cities. Moving from one ‘white’ country to another – easy, right? Eight months later, I’m more aware of my Canadian identity than ever before.
The University of St. Andrews has a notorious reputation for letting in very few students from lower socioeconomic classes. In a country that boasts seven social classes, St. Andrews recruited 13 people – out of 7,370 undergraduates – from “deprived” backgrounds in 2010. Many conversations with classmates contain casual (and explicit) questions about what your parents do, or where you went to school. Imagine undertaking a masters and discussing where you went to high school—some of us don’t have brains that rewind that far back!
Class issues permeate Canadian post-secondary education much more and differently than in St. Andrews
You don’t have to look far to see St. Andrew’s lack of diversity (and not just because the town only has 3 main streets). The town is dotted with clones sporting the St. Andrews uniform: Hunter Wellingtons and Barbour jackets. St. Andrews has an impressive collection of eclectic passport holders for such a homogenous fashion culture. While I would never conclude that I had a “classless” post-secondary experience in Canada, I do think the way class issues permeate Canadian post-secondary education is very different than in St. Andrews. Perhaps because in Canada we have an embedded sense of ‘political correctness’ that we don’t explicitly demarcate social lines based on class. Of course, that’s dangerous in its own right because class discrimination is obscured and rarely discussed.
A diversity is much more than the country you come from!
In St. Andrews, class is much more present — it’s a marker of pride, and an acceptable conversation topic. If you fall on the “wrong” side of the class divide, you certainly wouldn’t have the funds to sustain yourself on the St. Andrews ball and fashion circuit for long. And you likely wouldn’t sport the standard St. Andrews uniform. Sure, St. Andrews draws in students from different parts of the world, but a diverse campus is much more than the country you come from. This is where St. Andrews’ admissions is missing the point. Recruiting from a transnational capital class doesn’t add substantive or meaningful diversity. It only feeds into a false sense of prestige and reputation that sustains privilege, reducing education into a brand.
This article was originally published at Uni(di)versity.