Edinburgh University student tabloid ‘The Edinburgh Tab’, and their comments on TikTok have raised significant concerns around the treatment of local students. Comments that “god intended” there to be no Scottish students at the uni prompted the UoE’s Scottish Social Mobility Society to call out “deep rooted classism” and “exclusion” faced by domestic students. I spoke to local students and other northerners to see if a similar culture exists at Newcastle, and my findings were shocking.
Emily, a 19-year-old Politics and History student from South Tyneside, told me that “when I first moved in with my flatmates in first year, they refused to speak to me because they didn’t understand the way I spoke” and discussed her fear of speaking up in seminars due to her accent. “I think that it’s harder for local students to make friends, because there’s such a big difference between us and them, whether you want there to be or not”, she said. “People from the North East feel isolated and alienated”.
They refused to speak to me because they didn’t understand the way I spoke
Michael, a Marketing student, also 19, from Wallsend took a different, yet similar approach. He told me that knowing his way around the city was socially beneficial to him at first, but that retaining friends afterwards was a struggle. “Being a local doesn’t exclude me from social gatherings, it’s more that people sometimes fail to realise that locals have their own way of life and it shouldn’t change”. He argued that Newcastle was failing to offer itself as an attractive university for locals – “it seems many of us are pushed aside for the benefit of being a high prestige Russell Group University” – a damning indictment indeed.
On the other hand, Jess, from Liverpool, had a more positive outlook. Discussing her positive experience in ‘Deep North’ – a module about northern and Northumbrian literature, she argued that the university should offer more northern-centric modules across a wider range of courses such as politics. However, she did stress that “there is a very clear wealth and cultural divide, and perhaps that’s why I’m friends with only northerners”, evidencing that even students who don’t feel as stigmatised by their northern identity can sometimes feel distant from their southern counterparts.
Overall, it is clear from the voices of the students I spoke to that there is a creeping hostility to northern identity in student culture, not just in Edinburgh but also Newcastle. It seems that locals and other northerners can feel isolated from their peers, and should be shown the respect they deserve, from both the university and from fellow students.
