Damned if you do, damned if you don't

Academe, Jul/Aug 2003 by Christopher, Renny

How do working-class students end up at working-class colleges and universities? An inside account of the California state system unearths the class structure of higher education.

More working-class students are entering universities-mainly because the restructuring of the American economy has made a college degree an entry-level requirement for mid- and low-level jobs, the kind that call for manipulating information rather than steel or concrete. Despite these changing job demands, however, the class structure of the United States has remained largely static: many of the students entering the university will, even with their H.A.'s, remain part of the working class.

Elite universities continue to turn out the future upper-middle class, while regional universities, whose students are commonly the first in their families to attend college, educate the degreed working class. Doth types of institutions disserve working-class students: in elite colleges and universities, such students face class prejudice and discrimination; in regional institutions, they receive an inferior education, which ensures that they will remain in lower-level jobs. These two forms of oppression-classism in elite universities and undereducation in regional institutions-work together to preserve the existing class structure, even while allowing a few individuals, like me, to work their way "upward" at the price of deculturation.

Yet many people continue to believe in the fairness of education and the equality of opportunity. Humanities scholar Denjamin DeMott writes in his 1990 book, The Imperial Middle: Why American Can't Think Straight About Class:

[W]hat matters . . . is the exceptional breadth of agreement on fairness and evenhandedness as school norms. Certainty that career prospects are related to school performance cuts across social classes from old money to new money through the poverty line; so, too, does trust in the impartially grading teacher, and assurance of the weight of personal choice. . . . [T]he educational process overall is seen as both clean and potent, capable of creating a degree of equality through its own impartiality, capable also of guaranteeing all children-regardless of their parents' success or failure in life-some chance of self-propelled upward movement.

DeMott refers to K-12 education, but since World War II the perception he describes has spread to higher education, especially in terms of what he calls "belief in school the equalizer." I used to ask my students at the California State University campus where I taught, which is about a two-hour drive from Stanford University, who would have the more prestigious degree and therefore more opportunities, them or a Stanford graduate. Their response was usually knowing laughter; Stanford, after all, is the West Coast Ivy League. What they don't know is that there's just as sharp a line between Cal State and the University of California, and that it's not just a difference of prestige, but also of intellectual skills learned.

In his Utopian and hopeful article, "Returning to Class: Creating Opportunities for Multicultural Reform at Majority Second-Tier Schools," published in 2001 in College English, English professor John Alberti explores the possibility of multicultural transformations in such institutions. He makes a lovely understatement when he writes that "the term 'first-generation' itself potentially obscures the class implications of being such a student in order to minimize the potentially radical significance of these differences, differences that signify a level of conflict and change beyond the capacity of most traditional institutional structures to handle."

Forced Adjustment

I emerged from my own experiences as a first-generation student at, first, an elite liberal-arts college where I received a B.A. and, then, an elite university where I received a Ph.D., effectively educated yet shell-shocked. In between, I did an M.A. at a state school. For a long time (until I ended up a professor at a state school), I thought my experience there, where the intense pressure of classism did not oppress me, but where little highwire education was going on, was an anomaly. But that "anomaly" was actually the norm.

Note that I said I was "effectively educated" in elite schools, not "well educated." I chose my terms carefully, because part of my education included learning contempt for my family and the culture I came from, eradicating the dialect I grew up speaking, and learning values of hierarchy, ambition, individualism, and intellectual snobbery-what many would call "pride in intellectual achievement." I now characterize the years I spent working to unlearn my precollege self as my miseducation. But this miseducation came interlaced with useful skills-skills of rhetoric, of analysis-that my own students at the state university are not gaining.

So my question is, Is it possible to get the high-level skills without the classism that permeates elite institutions? In his essay in the 1995 volume, This Fine Place So Far From Home, Irvin Peckham, director of first-year writing at Louisiana State University, comments that although "the educational institution professes to promote egalitarianism, to offer equal chances to all, it is implicated in a social structure that marginalizes difference." Is there a way for the universities and colleges to lead the way to social reform that would eliminate classism?1