I realize this post might be arcane to those of you who do not work in the academic field, but bear with me here, since I think it touches on some general social class issues in this country.
One interesting thing I've noticed about academics is that while almost all of them drive sensible cars, live in modest homes, and buy their clothing off the rack (at least in the humanities), there are still some subtle and very powerful class markers at play. I got thinking about this back in May while visiting Chicago, my friend Chris D. and talked about how oblivious our advisors and committee members could be to our economic situations, and got talking about how some academics are "to the manor born": they grew up in academic families, or at least among the well-educated upper bourgeoisie in places that hold cultural cachet. (i.e., not Nebraska) Having an academic job requires navigating its culture, which is awfully tough. While we don't make a lot of money relative to others with advanced education, members our profession still attach a lot of importance to the accoutrements of the high class life. This has made academic culture hard for me to navigate at times; I grew up in the rural petite bourgeoisie, i.e. eating casseroles instead of cavier. Without further ado, here are some questions that can help you find out which camp you belong in.
You might be a declasse academic if:
You or any of your family members has ever had a job where you "washed up" after coming home from work.
(Thanks to Brian I. for this one. I'm amazed at the number of people in my profession who've never had to get their hands dirty outside of gardening.)
You actually worked jobs during the summer in grad school to support yourself.
(I can't believe the number of profs who expect their students to magically conjure money to support themselves while researching in the summer.)
Before you went to grad school the only categories you knew for wine were "red" or "white."
You have never used the word "summer" as a verb (as in "we summered in the Hamptons this year").
Members of your family were drafted during Vietnam and couldn't get out of it. (Like a lot of other guys, my relatives didn't want to go, but they didn't have a choice.)
Getting a Ph.D. makes you the most educated member of your family.
Growing up you took family vacations by car (not plane) to locations in the US (not Europe or elsewhere if you took vacations at all.)
You or your family members wear or have worn "trucker caps," overalls, or cowboy boots not as ironic fashion statements but for purely practical reasons.
Your family pressured you NOT to go to the Ivy League for college.
People in your social circle growing up viewed New York City as a sink of iniquity, not the shining center of the universe.
Your idea of a good restaurant is a place that has "good food and a lot of it for a reasonable price."
You drank Pabst Blue Ribbon before it became a hipster beer. (I have to admit, I totally jumped on the hipster bandwagon with this one.)
You don't utter asinine phrases like "I don't think I know any Republicans." (I actually heard this said before the 2004 election and wanted to put my head through the wall. No wonder the Left got thumped for so long! So many on our side saw conservatives in zoological terms.)
You live in a Midwestern college town like Champaign-Urbana and you don't constantly complain about how it isn't New York or San Francisco.
You don't drop your Alma Mater's name into conversations.
You've never had a conversation comparing the relative merits of private boarding schools in the northeast. (I was around some people doing this on the first day of my master's degree program, that's when I began to realize that I was entering into a different world.)
That's all I can think of for now, and of course not all apply to everyone. Feel free to add your own.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
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7 comments:
May I add "coveralls emblazoned with a patch bearing the wearer's name" to the list of fashion items....
And a celebration of a family member graduating from a school of higher learning and landing a job---at a hair salon! (beauty school, that is)
Jen
Add this one too:
If you're so lucky to get one article published, someone in your family asks with a raised eyebrow: "And how much did they pay you for this?" Nada!
-M
Or, how about this one: at family gatherings, your brother-in-law (well into the case of PBRs) laughs hilariously and screams "The Professor!" whenever you drop or trip over something.
Or: You've been called "cheap" by your critical theorist colleagues because even though they make their living theorizing about social stratification, they can't recognize "broke and poor" when it's sitting right there on the bar stool next to theirs.
Dr. Tebbe,
Brilliant! This is going to be a long, impassioned (and maybe visceral) 'ditto.' All of those actually apply to me. I would add, unfortunatley in my case, that one more condition was that there were more novels with raised letters on the cover than actual literary content in my home. In a way, this forced me to be autodidactic, so maybe it wasn't that bad.
I recently confronted the reality that you speak of when discussing the police with a very good friend of mine. To make a long conversation concise, she basically considered anyone who did police work to be an amoral, power hungry, racist loving their jobs as class oppressors... Quite interesting to me because growing up in the Birmingham area, most of the police were working class, African American, and hardly menacing fascists. The greater point is, despite the fact she is closing in on a PhD, because the environment she grew up in she never actually had to engage people of that social class, thus engendering within her a preadolescent, uncomplicated binary view of the world. Paradoxically, those who seek the recognition as intellectuals are anti-intellectual.
I've dealt with this in various forms. Perhaps I was just paranoid, but during my first years of grad school at the UI, I think I caught a lot of my colleagues attempting to use me as their foil - the unlettered, philistine southerner serving to define the intellectual of the East Coast. But this, in the end, wasn't so bad either - even if it was due to my own inferioty crisis, it made me more willing to read and engage theory that my colleagues referenced but, as it became obvious later on, had clearly never actually understood or even read. Knowledge for them is a fetish, a fashion, thus the flood of clicheed statements concerning, for example the Enlightenment (seriously, the next time you run into a PhD student or even a young faculty member bandwaggon-jumping on the pomo critique of the Enlightenment, ask them if they have ever read Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, ect. Then ask them if they have actually sat down and read Adorno and can explain his critique... I can't say it will suprise you, but it will dissapoint you). But thats the American academy - empty commodity fetishism for products in the "market place of ideas." So its no wonder that bourgeois attitudes and culture are performed to this extent - it defines their intellectual values.
A very disgruntled Pug
You think farts are funny.
I didn't get tenure, thanks to these issues... Once, after a meeting, a colleague came up to me and said, "Do you say, Tim and me, for political reasons"? I keep forgetting to talk right...
Another marker, because I am from the South, is the giggling when I say, "ya'll.' Also, I was raised thinking I would get a good job, not pursue a career... We went on only one true vacation, as a kid, usually we went to see family...
We also can't forget the class/cultural gulf that separates the research extensive and intensive schools and just about everyone else... A community college may as well be in a separate universe...
Funny! Until recently, my primary professional world has been the legal realm, and that may account for why I haven't seen so much of this. The great southern trial lawyer who talks slow, says "y'all" but wins brilliantly is not only a sterotype, there are plenty of just such lawyers who are real, brilliant, and southern-as-grits. Of course, most of my contact has been in American Bar Association committees or similar organizations, and most of the attorneys who have spent time volunteering in those organizations have met enough sharp southern lawyers that they've abandoned the "dumb hick" stereotype.
I have also been recently introduced to the world of elite boarding schools through my work with a colleague at Culver Academy (also not on the East Coast!). Very interesting world with its own set of challenges.
Thanks for the smile!
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