Stop the Varsity adversity

**Whether you’re a competing athlete or not, the annual Varsity sports tournament is a great opportunity to take pride in your university. Who wouldn’t welcome a healthy degree of competition? **

It does a great deal to foster a more coherent sense of community as students take their chance to get behind Team Warwick. However, amongst the necessary hype and fighting talk it is seems rather easy to blur the line between well-intentioned, good-natured banter, and unsavoury, offensive put-downs.

As a season ticket holding football fan, I am well acquainted with sports rivalries and the feelings they arouse in supporters. Tribal instincts and a mob mentality can easily take over inside a football stadium, and in the heat of the moment it is all too easy to stray from, say, taunting Liverpool fans about their club’s underwhelming achievements in recent years, to accusing every ‘Scouser’ of being a benefit cheating criminal.

One of these is acceptable, the other is absolutely not. Whilst there is nothing wrong with camaraderie and friendly teasing, indeed sport would lose a lot of its attraction without it, the line has to be toed very carefully. This seems to be something with which an alarming number of Warwick students are experiencing some difficulty.

Team Warwick has a 22-year unblemished record in the Varsity event, and one would assume that this fact would provide more than sufficient ammunition for the inevitable boasting and taunting. However, it seems, unfortunately, that sporting prowess is not enough for many of us to brag about. Take for example this tag-line found in The Tab Warwick; ‘remember, we go somewhere they don’t: university’.

{{ quote 23.9% of Warwick students in the year 2010 were privately educated, compared with 7% of the UK population, and a mere 2.9% of those studying at Coventry }}

The aim of this tournament is to promote a healthy level of competition and rivalry between our institutions. It is not an opportunity for us ‘intelligent people’ (a self-righteous label sported by the Ladies’ Hockey Club) to sneer at our neighbours in what signifies a complacent and offensive superiority complex.

According to the _Guardian_, 23.9% of Warwick students in the year 2010 were privately educated, compared with 7% of the UK population, and a mere 2.9% of those studying at Coventry. This makes the kinds of comments mentioned above even more repugnant and vile, as there is an undeniable element of elitism at work.

With university applications down 8.7% last year compared to 2011 figures, evidently the 80% cut in the Higher Education budget and the resultant hike in tuition fees have had a regressive effect on access to universities. With this in mind, it is hardly likely that the demographic of Warwick students will be becoming any less disproportionately over-privileged in the immediate future. We ought to be finding common ground with Coventry students over these issues, not using a festival of sport as an opportunity to take cheap shots at them from our ivory tower.

If you are not sufficiently appalled, please note [one final comment from James Stevens](http://warwick.tab.co.uk/2013/01/29/cov-lay-down-varsity-marker/), the morally vacuous and thoroughly nasty writer at the _Tab Warwick_ who saw fit to insult our neighbours with this frankly unforgivable remark. Commenting on the Varsity promo video released a couple of weeks ago by Coventry, (admittedly less than intimidating), Stevens writes; “if ever there was a strong case for eugenics, it’s the specimens in this video.”

I can only apologise to Coventry University on behalf of the 99.9% of Warwick students with a conscience. I hope that our sporting representatives will conduct themselves in the appropriate manner, exhibiting due sportsmanship and respect, and I wish both sides the best of luck.