Making the Most of Your University Experience

Congratulations to you all - despite coming from backgrounds lacking in economic and cultural capital, you’ve achieved academic success and have secured a place at a university that ranks highly in league-tables and is generally considered ‘elite’. University is access, and a degree from Durham could really help you in the future. But that doesn’t mean that people were right when they told you that these would be the best years of your life. For working class students such as ourselves, this tagline (like most marketing claims) is misleading.

At elite universities like Durham, there is a prevailing middle class culture which thrives on archaic traditions that assert a social structure in which working class people are excluded and silenced. Your Durham experience will likely be one of marginalisation within and isolation from a narrative of gowned formal dinners with high tables and serving staff, humiliating and oftentimes dangerous sports initiations, and a debating society whose argument for its own existence is sustained by a steady flow of champagne and an annual membership cost of some forty quid.

It’s easy to identify how the staple events of the Durham social scene are economically inaccessible to most working class students, even with the financial support of maintenance loans, scholarships, and grants. Do not feel ashamed for lacking the social and cultural capital necessary to thrive within hostile social groups with an unfamiliar culture that actively seeks to exclude us. It’s important to recognise that these institutions have been carefully designed as sacred spaces for the self-worship of the middle class, and for toxic competition amongst them. Communities are made on common ground.

Durham University’s Working-Class Students’ Association came into being to fill a communal need. We are a group of students with shared and diverse experiences of working class life and community. In each other we have found comfort and solidarity in an environment from which we have each felt either passively or aggressively excluded. You do not have to participate in the established narrative to make the most of your Durham experience. There are spaces in Durham forged by individuals such as ourselves where, in the margins of the mainstream, students do exactly as they please regardless of convention, expressed with passion and pride in their whole selves. We hope that WCSA will provide a space in which working class students will feel supported in experiencing Durham University unabashedly on their own terms, empowered to create their own communities, and to affect long-lasting change in ours. We’re rooting for you.

Neve Ovenden (2018), ed. Frank Simpson (2019)