Walter Benn Michaels — Blog

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.

Jamie AroosiOctober 5, 2018Brett Kavanaugh, Academia, Walter Benn Michaels, Inequality, Neoliberalism, Working-Class, Faculty Comment

Happy 200th Birthday, Karl Marx!!!

With a book on Marx coming out soon, as well as on that other rebel who shares today as his birthday, Søren Kierkegaard, I thought I'd share some personal reflections on my own discovery of Marx. I never much liked him. Other philosophers I did, and often quite immediately. I loved Plato and Nietzsche from the very start, and I still do. I fell for Hobbes, and was thrilled by Rousseau. Freud, Arendt, Foucault, all struck a chord, not to mention my enduring love of Camus. And I could go on and on. Even Aristotle, who never much excited me, really got me going when I visited his logic a bit later in life. But Marx? Nothing. I didn't dislike him, and I even wanted to like him, as I generally want to like everyone I read. But he never got much of a response from me.

Jamie AroosiMay 5, 2018Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Marshall Berman, Working-Class, Faculty, Academia, Walter Benn MichaelsComment