A Cure for Academic Classism

You rarely see, for example, a faculty member from an Ivy League university alongside one from a community college on a Modern Language Association panel, regardless of any research interests they might share. That shows the dangerous classism that pervades academe, something I admittedly did not see for myself until I began teaching at a “second tier” institution.

That classism is dangerous not because those of us who are categorized as less elite may be slighted at conferences or by journals or seminar leaders. It is dangerous because it divides us — faculty members and students alike — at a moment when financing for higher education is eroding, when grants for professional development and research are shrinking, when even the largest and most prestigious universities are still cutting faculty positions.

It is critical for the well-being of the academy and the students we serve that faculty members find common ground and work together. One way to do that is to work together locally; that is, for institutions — public and private, large and small — in a given area to capitalize on their proximity and benefit from one another’s strengths. Hence my immodest proposal: Professors within a given region would swap jobs for a semester or a year with colleagues at institutions with different Carnegie ratings. —Lisa BothsonA Cure for Academic Classism (Chronicle)

Not very practical, but an interesting suggestion. I’ve blogged before about the life I might have had if certain job interviews had gone better or worse than they did, and I had ended up somewhere very different from where I am teaching now.

3 thoughts on “A Cure for Academic Classism

  1. I guess I misread what you were saying in that post. Still, that doesn’t take away much of the truth value of the idea of academic classism. If a large school was simply “different” we wouldn’t have so many small schools expanding and seeking university status.

  2. Thanks for your comment, Evan.

    My thoughts were about teaching at someplace “different” — not necessarily someplace “better”. I’m very happy at SHU, and deeply enjoy the kind of personal contacts that you mention, as well as all the other benefits of a small campus.

    These last few years have been an education for me. I never went to a small school, but I was educated at two big research schools. At U.Va. for a while there were two competing daily student papers, and every week a nationally-known speaker would be on campus giving a talk somewhere. During my four years at U.Va., Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Mike Dukakis, and someone whom I recognized years later from my old pictures as Bill Clinton all came to campus. Oh, and Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek).

    Is that sort of thing better than what SHU offers — small class sizes, lots of personal attention, student-centered teaching, etc? I did just fine at a big school, so I am very aware of how my professional life differs from the way the professors who educated me carried out their professional activities (those parts I knew about, anyway).

  3. One hundred and thirty-nine years later, the legacy of Karl Marx lives on.

    I don’t know if your comment was intending to do this, but it seems to affirm this idea of academic classism. That you would like to experience something more, perhaps measured by the post you linked to.

    One thing that happens in late capitalism, in Marxist theory, is the abandonment of hope for a kind of social pessimism. It’s funny how much evidence of that effect of competition has manifest as the environment becomes increasingly competitive.

    Why must we put people on a pedestal? There are families with parents working two jobs, children working much too early to be beneficial to their well-being, and even single-parent households.

    Personally, I like the small college environment, but with many colleges changing into university status (there were supposedly talks to change my hometown college to university status), it’s hard to tell if, by the time I get out of grad school, those small colleges will even be a reality.

    Classifying educational quality is such the function of late capitalism. The organizations that produce such figures can only base it on statistics, whereas education is so much more than statistics. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know I have gained much personal and intellectual growth from coming to a small college.

    Professors actually sit down with personal interest to discuss art, politics, music, or just about anything else here. In a large university, that would be near impossible. Large schools give the facts and pray to God the students know how to use them to build something. How can a student fresh out of our lovely “every child left behind” school system be expected to do that virtually on his/her own? ;c)

    What an advantage I could have over such students, but because this system of production is more interested in people being able to spew out the facts quickly, true understanding is less than acceptable and I am at a loss. Obviously, the practical matters more than the theoretical.

    It seems that I am living in a culture where we only ask “how do I do it/go there” rather than “why do I do it/go there.” But as we approach WWIII, the people who once scoffed at the people who know how to ask the right questions and bug the hell out of their professors will seek the employment of the same people they scoffed.

    Sorry, a little ranting there, but I see this academic classism in some people who are enrolled at Seton Hill, but think they could have done better. I nearly strangled one (thank God I have awesome powers of restraint). Nothing irritates me more than elitism. Grrr!

    I’m banking that this division and competition will dissolve with the mode of production and culture that gave it birth. I’m sure it’s not likely to happen in my lifetime, but I’ve been praying for it a pretty long time, that should count for something…

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