The University of St Andrews, founded in 1413 and the third-oldest university in the English-speaking world, has issued a house style guide that directs staff and students away from its traditional year-group names. Bejant and bejantine for first-years, semi-bejant for second-years, tertian for third-years, and magistrand for final-year students are no longer to be used in ordinary web and written content. The stated reason is that the terms "may be unfamiliar to students, applicants, international audiences and screen reader users." If they appear at all, they must be explained in plain English on first use. The same guide prefers the 24-hour clock for material aimed at international readers.
These names are not obscure archival curiosities. They form part of the living texture of an institution that markets its red gowns, academic families, Raisin Weekend, May Dip, and pier walk. The way a student wears the scarlet gown still signals year of study. The university's own orientation materials and glossary continue to record the traditional usage even as the style guide discourages it in routine communications. St Andrews has long traded on the fact that it is not interchangeable with other campuses. International students, who make up roughly 45 percent of the student body and come from more than 120 countries, are drawn in part by that distinctiveness.
The administrative logic is straightforward and self-defeating. Because a large share of fee-paying students arrives from outside the United Kingdom, the distinctive local terminology is treated as an obstacle rather than an asset. The solution is to flatten the language toward the generic: "first-year student," "second-year student," so that no one is briefly puzzled. The same impulse has appeared at Oxford, where staff have been advised to avoid idioms such as "learn the ropes" and "find your feet" on the grounds that they may confuse international readers. In both cases the institution that sells immersion in a particular academic culture begins to edit that culture for the convenience of the newest arrivals.
UK universities remain publicly funded institutions. St Andrews receives teaching grants, research support, and the broader apparatus of student finance that ultimately rests on the taxpayer. The same public underwrites an institution that then treats Scottish academic terminology, ordinary English idioms, and the 12-hour clock as optional or undesirable. The social contract is inverted: the public supplies the resources, the administration removes the markers of continuity that the public's culture produced, and the result is justified as inclusion. Inclusion, in this instance, means minimising the chance that an international applicant or screen-reader user encounters a word that requires a single explanatory phrase.
The practical effect is gradual homogenisation. Distinctive practices survive mainly in ceremonial contexts or on pages that still need to explain the red gown. Everyday communications converge on the language of any other large university. The brand that attracted the international cohort is sanded down in the name of serving that cohort. Once the eccentricities are sufficiently reduced, the remaining claim to difference rests more heavily on rankings, facilities, and location, attributes that other institutions can also offer. The style guide does not abolish the traditions overnight. It places them behind an explanatory barrier and signals that they are not the default language of the place.
Administrators appear to treat tradition as a marketing overlay that can be adjusted without cost. In practice it is closer to the product. Students who choose St Andrews over more generic alternatives are selecting, among other things, the accumulated oddities of a 600-year-old Scottish university. A guide that systematically prefers the plain and international over the local and historical treats those oddities as a problem to be managed rather than a reason for the institution's continued existence. The same pattern, erase the particular, substitute the bureaucratic, cite inclusion, continue to draw public funds, has already appeared at other ancient universities. The result is not greater clarity so much as a thinner version of the thing that was being sold.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/woke-madness-st-andrews-university-tradition-style-guide-foreign-students