Dear Freshers,
A clammy, hollow-eyed welcome to UCL. For those of you who’re here only because your Oxbridge interviewer hated the sight of your face or couldn’t stand your mindless drivel, make yourselves at home.
You’re only in the 13th-best uni in the country, just behind hallowed greats like Sheffield and Loughborough. Quite the consolation prize, if I do say so myself.
As you know, these are very frightening times, with many, many scary things going on in the world – war, authoritarianism, ecological collapse, the continued existence of King’s – but perhaps the most hair-raising of them all is snotty uni kids getting sucked into cults of chanting, parading around with cardboard signs, pitching tents on campuses and generally shitting themselves in public. It’s almost as though they think politics can be practised through collective action, those naïve little bastards.
Which is why at UCL, we do things differently. From the depths of my damp, administrative gizzard I’ve pulled out a little programme for you all, something I like to call Disagreeing Well.
To put it in a language your shrunken, poster-addled brains can understand, think of it like Woke 3.0: keep the pronouns and the rainbow lanyards, but replace all that empathy-and-inclusion nonsense with one simple principle – anyone who’d rather see you and your fellow undesirables wiped off the face of the Earth is allowed to slowly turn you inside out like a wet sock and shove a ramrod through your navel. All in the name of intellectual diversity, of course, and with absolutely no pushback whatsoever.
Once they’re done, don’t forget to flash a warm smile and thank them for the opportunity for civil debate. Maybe even give them the customary reacharound.
So enjoy these first weeks, young debt-larvae. Go to Scala or Koko. Make out with someone called Felix or Barnaby in a molly-fuelled haze. Blow your bartending pay on your new cocaine habit. But always remember: your job here at UCL is to be a Disagreer first and foremost, and being a Disagreer requires conviction, humility, and consenting to be publicly mulched on campus at a moment’s notice without ruining my wine reception.
Strap in tight. It’s gonna be a good, unlubricated three years.
Addendum: Billy Fresher responds...
Dear Schmichael,
It’s me again, Billy Fresher: big shot journalist, eternal first-year and, as of this week, UCL’s most promising young Disagreer.
I was having my weekly breakdown in Pret (the one near UCL) when your email notification caught my eye, and upon reading your welcome message, I was intrigued and decided to put what you said into practice.
Earlier today I attended the inaugural meeting of the UCL Homophobes For Free Speech Society. As a gay man myself, I went in with an open mind, ready for a sincere debate.
Not ten minutes in, everyone started calling me a degenerate and telling me I didn’t have the right to exist. Normally by this point I’d have started crying or live-tweeting or whatever, but this time, something changed. They weren’t ignoring me. They weren’t laughing at me. They were taking me as a serious threat to their perceived social order. I felt seen. I felt alive.
It was then that I realised Disagreeing Well only asks of one small thing for minorities like myself: if people are gonna shit on you regardless, might as well learn to enjoy it. By the time I left, degradation no longer felt like oppression. I left the meeting room satisfied with having grasped a new learning outcome.
All this is why I believe I should be UCL’s next Disagreeing Well Ambassador. I am obedient. I am employable. I know how to convert attacks on my personhood into a transferable skill. There’s now a burning itch in my soul that can only be quelled by people telling me I’m subhuman in academic debates.
Please consider my humble application, and I look forward to your response.
Billy Fresher
Big Shot Journalist, Free Speech Ally, Approved Minority