The Last Working-Class Professor

A colleague recently posted about the role that student debt plays in perpetuating class inequalities in education, which essentially creates an insurmountable obstacle preventing almost all people from attending the type of elite institutions from which our ruling class emerges. In other words, student debt is a mechanism for preserving elite rule. Brett Kavanaugh isn't the sharpest tool in the box (not to mention that other Yale alum, George W. Bush), but the high cost and prohibitive debt load ensure that they can continue to monopolize the resources and benefits of these institutions, while claiming them to be meritocratic. As Kavanaugh mentioned, he "earned" his seat on the Supreme Court, even though the fact that there will soon be two Supreme Court justices from his prep school seems to indicate a different story.

But this point aside, it prompted me to respond that we're now seeing the last generation of working-class faculty members die off. I was lucky enough to study with some of them, which was possible because they all had the opportunity of pursuing an excellent education that later materialized into a faculty job. But these faculty members are typically in their seventies at the youngest, and often older. And what this demonstrates is merely that for a very brief moment in this country's history, education was much more accessible than it is now. But while the student debt crisis is somewhat recent, the fact that it would be extremely hard to find a working-class faculty member who is under 70 years old (or maybe 60 or 65) demonstrates that this is hardly a new problem. Outside of a decade or two of relative accessibility back in the 50s or 60s (for class barriers, at least, if not necessarily race and gender ones), the entire history of higher education in this country is the history of class barriers. Rather than a tool of social mobility, education has served as a tool of class hierarchy.

And this is clear in the classroom, and perhaps even clearer in the scholarship we produce. We sometimes talk about the neo-liberalism of the academy, but we don't always talk about how we perpetuate it. We might lament the pressures of publish or perish, but we also adopt it almost uncritically as our own metric for judgement. Granted, we sometimes talk about one another's work in a qualitative fashion, but this generally only occurs within the confines of our narrow field of expertise. Outside of that, and partially because none of us have the time to read outside our particular area, we pretty much uncritically adopt a quantitative metric.

Now, we do often tell ourselves that this quantitative metric reflects qualitative value, such as when we speak about the role of the peer review process. But in the same breath, we're also quick to point out the many failings in this process, such as its tendency to narrow the range of inquiry while rewarding familiar material over originality. So, we're critical to a point—but that point also happens to be the point at which our decisions and actions begin. In other words, our criticism of "the system" remains a private criticism that we voice to one another and that we even publish about, but in our public actions as committee members or editors or reviewers this criticism rarely holds.

A while back, I wrote a long post about Marx, and how part of what he taught me pertained to the difficulty of eradicating class based inequalities as opposed to those based on other criterion. I don't mean this as a way of reopening the old debates between class and identity, which are hopefully mostly over. I'm committed to both forms of injustice, and I do think you can't really think about one without thinking about the other. But that said, the ranks of faculty have become more diverse in terms of gender, for instance, while becoming less "diverse" (to the point of non-existence) when it comes to class. And that we've been so attentive to one problem while completely silent about the other seems to say something.

The solution to identity based injustices is usually imagined as entailing a greater inclusion of identities. However, (and I owe a nod to Walter Benn Michaels) the solution to class based injustices requires the elimination of class. So, we have two different kinds of problems with two very different types of solutions. And the solution to the former problem can occur without solving the latter problem. In fact, as academia is slowly demonstrating (and I don't mean to make light of the pervasive sexism and racism that remain), inclusion and neoliberalism can be quite happy together. More simply, we can eliminate all working-class faculty members, as we have done, while making strides towards the also important task of increasing identity-based diversity.

But the reason I felt like writing is not to pit different kinds of injustices against one another, which is truly the last thing I would want to do. Instead, I wanted to write in order to point out the fact that no one is talking about this. It doesn't at all register for us. But if we treated class like an identity, we would be up in arms about the complete elimination of an identity group from our ranks. And it literally is happening as we're speaking. But no one has noticed. And we haven't noticed, I suspect (at least in part), because of how thoroughly many of us actually do support neoliberalism. Perhaps we lament the income inequality in the general public, but when it comes to our own ranks, we don't see the workings of economic processes that allow us to keep our own class positions, but instead, we see the dispassionate workings of our own meritocracy.

And perhaps this has to do with the fact that giving up our class privilege would require a sacrifice we aren't willing to make?