Our university lacks any sense of history

Despite the University of Warwick being one of the youngest universities in the country (est. 1965, for those of you unwilling to explore Wikipedia), it has fast become one of the leading research institutions in the United Kingdom and the world, an achievement that undoubtedly distinguishes it as one of the most reputable and exemplary institutions of the post-war era. Developments across all academic departments and facilities have been described as ‘world leading’, and Warwick students are frequently highlighted for their employability.

Naturally, you would have to have had your head buried in a bucket of sand for the entirety of your time at Warwick to be unaware of this basic information, as the University intranet site habitually reminds us students of just how bloody amazing the University is. However, despite its illustrious reputation, there seems to be something lacking: a sense of tradition and sentimentality.

It seems strange to make such a conservative criticism of a place as young as Warwick. I mean, how traditional could a place that’s only 47 years old be? Indeed, many ‘traditions’ do exist at the University, but only in isolated capacities within particular societies; Varsity matches, Team Tours, Initiation Ceremonies and ‘Pub Jog’ all, to a certain extent, have their own histories and rituals which could be construed as part of the University’s heritage.

Plenty of other ‘micro-traditions’ such as these exist, which is where I think the problem lies. As a whole, the Warwick student body is divided by these exclusivities, and subsequently no overarching traditions transcend such divisions to unite us as a communal whole.
You’ll forgive me for the somewhat stuffy diction, but it’s true: we are a very disparate student community. Beyond the confines of clubs and societies, nothing exists to create a sense of togetherness among us, or a sense of ‘Warwickhood’, as it were.

I don’t know if this unease with the absence of traditions is a remnant of my boarding school days (cue tumbleweed, crickets and raised eyebrows, if you like) resurfacing and telling me that we should all assemble every morning for chapel or reluctantly hobble round the cross country course once a year to drum up a sense of camaraderie, but I think such events have their merits (if you remove the ‘authoritarian regime’ element from them, anyway).

But I don’t feel in any way ashamed to say that I’ve developed a sense of attachment to these things since I’ve left school, and I think that’s where my point resides. Despite Warwick’s outstanding reputation for churning out pedigree students, there’s nothing I can truly envisage missing about the University itself.

My friends, the education and the student ethos will naturally be cherished, but those things come part and parcel with attending any university. Apart from these things, Warwick fails to offer any particular experience or traditional practice that saliently rests in one’s mind as being exclusively ‘Warwick’ in character that we students can gather under and share the experience of.

Yet strangely, I feel we should take comfort in this lack of conventional traditions, seeing their absence as a signifier of our freedom to do whatever we like, act however we wish and, more importantly, invent our own traditions for later generations to practice.

If there is one thing that really unites the student body, it is an acute awareness of the genuine principles that the original students of the 60s upheld with gallant optimism when the university was founded: a sense of political activism. On top of the mundane activities such as the desperate shuffle for the U1 or struggling to un-stick your feet from the floor in the Copper Rooms, the sense of revolutionary fervour is the only thing that could be considered truly part of the Warwick experience.

Whether it’s merely a symptom of being young or an actively cultivated practice among Warwick students, our capacity for mobilising ideas of such assorted origins and orientations is what really unites us as a community.

Our rejection of contrived traditions and practices in favour of organic ideological flexibility is, it may be said, the only real tradition we have; one that, ironically, thrives on change and instability instead of constancy and stasis.