Pitt Club membership can’t buy you a personality
Bella Cross
Whilst the University’s drinking society has claimed in recent years that it has moved away from its exclusionary past, Bella Cross argues it will always remain elitist and perpetuate a class divide.
The decision to watch ‘The Riot Club’, a film inspired by the Bullingdon Club, Oxford’s equivalent of the Pitt Club, before coming to Cambridge, in hindsight probably didn’t set me up with particularly high expectations of some of the types of people I would soon be interacting with. Not only does the Pitt Club facilitate the movie’s onscreen exclusivity, violence and nastiness in real life, but it doesn’t have Sam Claflin to put a pretty face on it.
Students often buy into the idea of the “mystery” surrounding it. There is nothing mysterious about the hedonism of very drunk, sweaty students in suits completing various unpleasant tasks to supposedly earn their way into a group. Despite claims that they’re widening the pool of participants, the club remains an institution designed with the purpose of formal exclusion, filled with people that use large sums of money to make up for their lack of social skills.
We’ve all seen the particularly nauseating Bullingdon Club photo featuring two former Conservative Prime Ministers, David Cameron and Boris Johnson. It's a particularly pertinent example of the concentration of power in this country, and the success of these exclusive institutions in perpetuating such a concentration of power. Likewise, the Pitt Club claims the reigning monarch of England as a member and our ex-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. In the past, at least, the Pitt Club and its network of the wealthy had a serious impact on society.
Although it claims to have moved away from its overtly classist, racist, and misogynistic roots by “allowing” in women, albeit only in 2017, BAME students, and students from outside of the previous selection requirement of attendance at one of the few elite boarding schools, the club is still a hotbed of discrimination. We are so often told this lie that inclusion is always a form of progress, but here, that inclusion demands you engage in the same grim culture, and embrace the disdain and exclusion of others deemed unworthy from the very same diverse backgrounds.
But we also know this attempt to sanitise their image does not match up with reality. There remain layers of exclusivity, for example the male only group within the Pitt Club. This group prides itself on such layered exclusion, with its proudest members refusing to join the Pitt; they only participate in this more ‘elite’ group and its rituals, such as drinking animal blood. I think this can be pertinently summarised by the infamous Shrek quote, “ogres have layers” - so does a sleazy, elitist drinking society. As ever, life imitates art, although the parallel may be a bit unfair to Shrek.
Invitation and attendance as a student from a marginalised background comes at the cost of not just complicity, but actually subjecting yourself to discrimination once you’re inside the walls of the club. There are plenty of horror stories floating in the Cambridge imaginary of this discrimination, and I have plenty of my own. Before I removed myself from the existential doom that is Camfess and Grudgebridge, my Facebook consistently saw complaints and the calling out of the abhorrent behaviour and comments of drinking society members, including this video taken before C-Sunday.
The disdain for outsiders is demonstrated further by their attitude to those serving them: workers at the club have also spoken out about the abuse they have faced. For those of us who have jobs in the service industry, watching the attitude of other students towards workers is a stark reminder of how the facade of politeness is just that. It's an odd experience knowing that even when members are on their best behaviour and you’re subjected to the full throttle of their “charm” - or sleaze - you’re always aware that outside of the context of the university, you would be treated as poorly as the waiting staff.
As we heard from the ‘insider’, you just need to be able to ‘make interesting conversation’ – but about what? Surprise, surprise, the same utterly tedious conversation about school connections, horse riding, and skiing holidays, that are only interesting precisely because they’re about experiences unavailable to most students. These vague notions of being interesting, or having ‘good chat’, are completely transparent. Acceptability is therefore based on inherently inaccessible things and students are either excluded and made to feel insecure for their inability to relate, or affirmed and welcomed in. Although less explicit, the class filter remains as efficient at its job.
Of course, as an opportunity for networking with very rich people that will likely be situated in positions of power in the future, I don’t blame students from working class and minority backgrounds who go along. I do blame the institution for perpetuating a system that forces these students to engage with asinine posh culture just to attempt to gain some footing with the butt end of the rich.
And worse, those for whom entry would have always been possible often use inclusivity to continue to justify their participation, or claim they “just want to try it”. I have no time of day for them. For everyone deemed unworthy, we don’t get, nor do we particularly want, the opportunity to play-act the Victorian class system. No one should have the class status and power over other students to keep class privilege alive, but the reality is that they do. However innocent the intentions, with every person who goes to “try” it out, this system is perpetuated.
The Pitt Club, therefore, isn’t just a drinking society. It stands as a symbol of hierarchy and exclusion that has material consequences today. I’m not one for bashing people’s interests, or to hierarchise people based on what's cool, but frankly the Pitt Club is just lame. And it’s a deeply unpleasant place. Usually, I think it’s just best to ignore people who believe they are more important and interesting than they actually are, but when they may one day end up in the cabinet, in head offices, in the media and in other sectors, we should do more than just laugh at them, but call out the classism that underpins it. There is no way to reform an institution set up with the goal of exclusion. And unfortunately for those that participate, a few £50 dinners can’t actually buy you an interesting personality!