On Class in Class

Alright.  Yes, am talking more about class in the professoriate than in the classroom (or about the socioeconomics of my students).  But "On Class in Class" seemed the best title on offer.  Very classy, no?  Pun intended.

I am fortunate.  I have a tenure-track job.  Despite spending far too long in grad school (or at least far longer than I intended), I finished my Ph.D. without incurring any debt.  Nor do I have any college loans to pay off.  Thanks to the research of Dr. Karen Kelsky (consultant to academic job-seekers), it is clear that many grad students - including in the humanities - are diving deeply into debt in the hopes of landing the ever-more-elusive tenure-track job.  I was raised in a comfortably middle class family that valued education (though "practical" fields like business, law, and medicine were valued more highly than the humanities).  As a historian, I am well aware that humanities degrees (bachelor through the doctorate) were long the province of the already economically comfortable.  Engineering and the sciences were initially swamped with upwardly-mobile members of society from 1900 or so (or after the GI Bill, when college education was made far more accessible in the US), practical fields of study for practically-minded people who saw attending university primarily as a way to improve one's socioeconomic prospects.  It seems only in the past half-century that doctorates in the humanities - and with them entree to the humanities professoriate - were attainable to scions of the working class, first-generation Americans, and first-generation college graduates.  Members of the American upper-crust dominated the big-name roster at least as recently as a generation ago.  Such folk could scoff at the idea of needing to make a living from one's salary ('That's what the family trust fund is for, my boy").  If humanities graduate programs contract in the near future, among the casualties will likely be students who do not have significant familial resources to draw on, leading to a re-patricianizing of liberal arts faculty.  As doctoral candidate Kate Bahn argued recently, if social mobility is a positive good, "academia should be amplifying that goal, not working against it.  That means that students and faculty should represent society as a whole, not just a cross-section of scholars lucky enough to come from certain stock."

(Roman Senators, aka Patricians)

Lest I be accused of Patrician navel-gazing and elitist lamentation-ing about the fate of the humanities, recent studies indicate that the "War on Poverty" inaugurated by LBJ a half-century ago has not been won.  Far from it.  And its not just because of "lazy" poor people - particularly racial minorities - who are not being entrepreneurial enough to go out and get the work work where it is waiting to be got.  Its because teamwork and fair-play has been superceded by the Gordon Gecko or "Wolf" of Wall Street.  The "Me" generation that helped elect Ronald Reagan needs to look back - or be succeeded by a new generation - to the "We" generation (Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation") that grew up during the Great Depression, banded together to fight World War II, and reaped the rewards of government investment in society during the 1950s.  If we do not pull together, we will be pulled apart.

Parting Shot

Your obedient servant,

The History Major