Trinity elitism and the gender imbalance
TWENTY years ago, I was a first-year student at Trinity, wide-eyed with wonder and delighted with myself that I’d finally left behind the stresses of the Leaving Cert and won a place at university on the course I’d dreamed of.
But transplanted from the safe, familiar confines of a suburban secondary school, I rapidly discovered that I had no idea what was going on. For a start, as new arrivals we were not first-years, but junior freshmen, and it was not autumn term but Michaelmas, whatever that was, and calling the institution itself a ‘university’ marked you out as being the know-nothing newcomer that you actually were.
It was ‘college’, to anyone who knew what they were talking about.
There were secret societies and professors who swooped into lecture theatres in dramatic black gowns and people playing cricket – cricket! – on the grass outside the Pav.
It all seemed lifted straight from the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel, a world away from the Celtic Tiger roaring past outside the gates on Nassau Street.
Its very serenity was what made it so appealing: right here in the centre of the city was this magical campus filled with priceless manuscripts and beautiful buildings and you were bloody lucky to be studying there in the first place.
But those same qualities could end up making you feel a bit rubbish: it was easy to feel not bright enough, not posh enough, not sophisticated enough, when surrounded by all of this tradition and ancient learning. So it was with mixed feelings that I saw this week the college is to drop the term ‘freshman’ in favour of the gender-neutral term ‘fresh’ or ‘fresher’.
The board of the college said the change reflected the fundamental equality of all students, and that it was a ‘concrete expression’ of the university’s commitment to gender equality. Gender equality is always welcome, but the term itself apparently dates back to the mid-16th century when it meant “newcomer” or “novice”. And it was first used to denote a university first-year all the way back in the 1590s. So should Trinity really be so keen to ditch its history? Language evolves over time, of course, but it’s strange that an institution for whom heritage and tradition is so important would want to chip away at that. But on the other hand, a little less stuffiness around the place wouldn’t go amiss.
If the college really wanted to embrace a modern, inclusive atmosphere, it could try a bit harder to fix its gender imbalance: of its 88 chair professors – the most senior type – only 22 are women, according to the university’s student newspaper, and it’s never had a female provost. And that’s before you even consider the enduring disparity between pupils from working-class areas and their peers from more affluent areas. Unfortunately, the elitism of universities like Trinity goes way beyond labels.