Edinburgh university

Edinburgh has a snobbery problem – against the English

When I was at Edinburgh University a decade ago, a girl with a thick Surrey accent stopped me as I walked back to my room in halls. ‘Rah, have you been to the reeling society?’ she asked. ‘What makes you think that?’ I replied. ‘You’ve acquired a slight limp.’ ‘It’s the cerebral palsy, luv.’ They’re very forward, these English, I thought. Last week, Peter Mathieson, principal of the University of Edinburgh, claimed that Scots students were facing snobbery from the English. An alumnus, Dr Neil Milliken, had asked what Edinburgh was doing about ‘racial discrimination and class ridicule by self-perceived superior English incomes against native students’. He sounds jolly. Mathieson

A culture of fear has taken over at Edinburgh university

It is undeniable that the University of Edinburgh is the jewel in the crown of Scotland’s higher education system. Among its alumni are some of the most resounding names in world history. It remains today a galvanic intellectual force. In the QS World University Rankings 2022, Edinburgh was sixteenth; a single point behind Yale and ahead of Columbia, Princeton and Johns Hopkins. Edinburgh’s closest Scottish rival, Glasgow, lies 57 places behind it. These are truly magnificent achievements for a public university based in a country of just over five million people. Yet all is not well at Edinburgh. For a year it has attracted bad headlines both in the UK