I belong, therefore I am
I’D RATHER GO TO CAMBRIDGE THAN TO QUEENS! To the tune of ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes’, forty drunken Brasenose students spill out of the college bar onto High Street on a mission to Filth. On a typical Thursday night in my first year, I had no qualms about joining in at the top of my voice, probably sporting (that is, wearing • actual sport has nothing to do with it) some fetching black and yellow socks with a denim mini-skirt.
Other favourites included ‘You’re my Brasenose, my lovely Brasenose, you make me happy when skies are grey...’ and ‘I love you Brasenose, and if it’s quite alright, I need you Brasenose to warm a lonely night...’ Now, from the smug and dizzying heights of finalist maturity, I can look back and say: oh, the shame.! And before you look down your nose at the Nose, condemning such blatant chauvinism and shameless abuse of the poor colleges under attack, stop and think.
Yes, manifest college pride is in decline, but there are very few of us who can claim never to have slated an entire college or four on the basis of groundless stereotypes, a single thrashing on the sports field or proximity to Turl Street.
One look at Oxford during term time • with students strutting around like proud peacocks on heat, clad in college hoodies, socks, scarves, Tshirts, pants (yes they exist) and other stash • is enough to prove that college pride is alive and, at least visually and verbally, kicking. Back in my ‘youth’, the thought of abstaining from college banter never entered my mind. And neither should it have.
For there’s nothing particularly malicious or unusual about intercollege rivalry in Oxford; on the contrary, since the beginning of time it has seemed natural for in-groups to celebrate their superiority over, well, pretty much everyone else. In 1906, Sumner affirmed that positive sentiments towards the ingroup, namely pride, loyalty, and perceived superiority, are directly correlated with contempt, hatred, and hostility towards out-groups.
By way of illustration, ‘I enjoy being a member of Brasenose and wish other colleges the best of luck too’ just doesn’t have the same ring as ‘F*** THE HALL.’ (i.e. Teddy) The roots of college rivalries often pre-date the hoody era by hundreds of years. During the town-gown riots, Lincoln indirectly caused the death of a Brasenose student and now annually offer us free beer by way of apology.
The feud was admirably brought up to date last year when Lincoln put Brasenose up for sale on eBay. Greyfriars is still fuming over the fact that Christchurch is built from some of the stones from its original buildings, and the longstanding hostility between Pembroke and Christchurch is based on the (dubious) tale of the former painting a Christchurch cow pink.
If Sumner was right and all this rivalry is a natural and inevitable consequence of in-group formation, it seems we’re just making social psychologists happy. But more recent studies in the field suggest otherwise. In 1954, Allport proposed that ingroup preference precedes attitudes to specific out-groups.
There is a sense of in-group identity and superiority over out-groups in general • for us that means the rest of the university • but prejudice towards specific outgroups is not a necessary outcome of college devotion. As Brewer put it in 1999, ‘in-group love can be compatible with a range of attitudes towards corresponding out-groups, including mild positivity, indifference, disdain, or hatred.
Brewer’s theory is based on students, who are described as having ‘complex, cross-cutting social identities’. Here, while a handful of students from every college have never set foot on ‘foreign soil’, most us of are open-minded and sociable enough to have friends from as far afield as LMH.
And though it’s understandable that we have strongest ties with the college in which we live, eat and work, why do we feel the need to lay into other colleges rather than just celebrate our own? Brewer identifies various reasons. First, scarcity. Say the flu pandemic hits and there are only enough vaccines for 300 Oxford students, I know I for one would hand them around my college friends first, preferring to watch All Souls become all bones rather than cope with bodies cluttering my own JCR.
But thankfully scarcity of anything, bar obscure books only found in Worcester library, is not a problem in Oxford. Conclusion: we have no need to compete with other colleges just to stay alive. Secondly, common goals have the potential to cause inter-group conflict. But again, we don’t see our degree results as dependent on all other colleges failing miserably in theirs. 2:1s are not material goods which will run out if St. Johns reaches the top of the Norrington Table once again.
Finally, perceived similaritydissimilarity could have been responsible for Daisy the cow’s new pink coat: if Pembroke felt united in their desire to spread the pink love, and if they saw Christchurch as dissimilar in terms of scarf colour • and perhaps wealth, fame and politics • it could explain the contention between them.
This is the most likely explanation, but with colleges attracting an increasingly varied range of new recruits • I know an Irishman at Jesus • any strong sense of similarity is surely established only after matriculation. So, worshipping the quad under your feet is fine and indeed unavoidable. But doing it at the expense of other colleges is not only needless and pretty sad, it’s also • in the world of social psychology • so passé.
20th Apr 2006