St Andrews likes to think of itself as small, friendly, and oddly egalitarian. When everyone lives within walking distance of each other, it’s easy to believe that difference doesn’t really matter here – that we’re all having the same experience, just with slightly different flats and slightly different coffee orders.
But if you listen closely to how students talk – not in lectures, but in kitchens, group chats, and passing comments made “as a joke” – a hierarchy quickly appears. One that isn’t written down anywhere, but is constantly reinforced through language. This is what I’ve come to think of as conversational classism: the way class distinctions are normalised, excused, and passed on through humour.
Take the “badlands.” Back when I ran Out ‘n About’s Instagram, I redrew the map of St Andrews to reflect the habits and attitudes of the students: I circled Sallies, Hope Street and Balgove Larder and labelled them “America,” I labelled the three main streets as “in the top tax bracket,” and I corralled everyone who lived above Lamond Drive as “people who shop at tesco but say they shop at Aldi” and everyone below as “people who actually shop at Aldi.” Those were the ones I got away with. When I pitched the latter Aldi-goer label as “calling this the Badlands is inherently classist,” my American colleague rejected it. Why? Because they said that they called it the Badlands, and couldn’t see a problem with it.
It’s a shame to have to say that the nickname of “Badlands” has done nothing but fester as the new students arrive in St Andrews. In a recent post by St Andrews Onion (an almost wholly fantastic page), a fake news title reads “Badlands to be demolished because nothing ever happens there.” It’s funny on the surface, but it works precisely because the stereotype is already doing the work underneath.
What we learn, perhaps in my over-wokenness, is that lucidity when centred on socioeconomic standings is almost always harmful when joked about by those who are not obviously part of the community (…Onion face reveal when?…). One can sweep the discrimination that underlies the “badlands” under the rug under the guise of the grey buildings and the absence of the commuting crowds, but what does it actually denote? The locals who live there? The (primarily state-school educated, Scottish) students who have been priced out of the main streets? Those who shop at Aldi and Morrisons over Balgove Larder? There’s a thin line between labelling a place “bad” and its inhabitants “bad” too; the irony is that these jokes are often made by those for whom place has always been a choice, not a financial constraint.
We can take that very same ludic play and apply it to the attitudes towards Dundee. I’d be willing to bet that most private-school-educated or American students have never set foot in Dundee (apart from during their Kate Kennedy interview), yet those groups are often the very ones who look down on those who live there. Joke’s on them, I suppose; Dundee has a pretty great Wetherspoons.
When taken at face value, the very reasons students reside in the so-called “badlands” are the ones who joke most about it. With, of course, very little help from the university itself, St Andrews fails to support the Scottish students who, statistically, are the only ones who stay in Scotland post-grad and actually contribute significantly to the Scottish economy. Free tuition is one thing, but when hosts of the student body can pay upwards of a grand in rent (utilities-less), a maintenance loan that barely covers half your rent means that living on the three streets is a distant dream.
And it doesn’t end with housing. Many of the events that make up the so-called “St Andrews experience” – invite-only balls, fashion show tickets, society tables, Invades races – are simply out of budget for huge numbers of students, or made even more expensive by the resale market (e.g., Fright Night tickets being sold second-hand for £75). Conversational classism helps smooth over that exclusion, reframing it as a lack of interest, effort, or “fit,” rather than money. When participation depends on disposable income, exclusion becomes routine rather than remarkable.
Conversational classism helps smooth over that exclusion. It reframes absence as apathy, financial constraint as disinterest, and structural barriers as a failure to “fit.” Those who can’t afford to show up are spoken about as if they simply chose not to – a linguistic sleight of hand that keeps inequality comfortably out of sight.
However, this article isn’t about cancelling jokes or taking the fun out of student life. Humour matters. But when jokes consistently punch in the same direction, they stop being harmless. They teach people – quietly – where they belong and what they should expect.
St Andrews doesn’t need to stop laughing at itself. But it might need to think a little harder about who gets to laugh without it costing them anything.
Sincerely,