The Curious Experience of Class
Conservative reactionaries have in the past 10 years or so made careers out of accusing college professors of indoctrinating students in radical leftist philosophies and politics. While riding the bus today, however, I began to wonder if perhaps it's not the professors but the experience itself of actually being a student which draws middle class kids to suddenly identify with Marx, et al. Often left unspoken in America, in favor of more idealistic reasons like the pursuit of knowledge, is the belief that a college education often serves as a ticket into middle class adulthood. I don't know if it's wholly unspoken, as certainly people who themselves struggled out of the lower classes or who are looking for a way out understand that a college education opens doors. Students from middle class families may not realize it, but without attending college they may not attain the level of economic comfort as their parents. College has always been this way and was explicitly so when the sole purpose of college was acculturation in middle and upper class tradtions, prior to the advent of the research university system.
Students from middle class families are often, as I and many of my friends were, almost forced out of the middle class when they leave home. Their parents can afford to feed and clothe them at home, but they can't pay their rent and everything else that comes with living away from home. While riding along some of the nicer apartments near campus, I realized that based upon my own apartment search this past year, it would be impossible for students to afford them on their own. Maybe even with a handful of roommates, it would be a stretch. It occurred to me then that if those apartments closer to campus are higher in rent than my own due to higher property values and also higher in rent due to more recent and hence fancier construction, then those students who inhabit them must be able to do so because they are from families on the higher end of the middle class spectrum if not in the upper class. I can barely afford my own, with all of its rowdy gang-bangers across the way and the roaches which appear near the end of every month, a few days before the scheduled spraying of the building, and I'm sure that I make considerably more than the average undergraduate who is working part-time at an hourly service job.
But to return to the matter at hand, it is only the middle class who must while attending college find a way to re-enter the very class from which they emerged. You can always tell who are the students and who are not on the bus. The formerly middle class students often try to maintain the image of prosperity, cultivated in them by their parents. Even the ones who revel in their "(conformity to images of) noncomformity" are cleaner, more alert than the tired sorts who plod onto the bus or who talk loudly about things which make everyone around them blush. Students from middle class families continually find themselves in contact with the sorts of people that suburbia, the haven of the middle class, shields them from. Living as the lower classes do, hanging out in their bars because the alcohol is cheap even if it is tasteless and watered down or riding the bus to work instead of jumping into a car, students from middle class families begin to feel an odd sort of solidarity, ignoring momentarily that they are currently engaged in a project of working themselves back up to the economic level of their parents.
Today was also the day of a large protest on campus by the union which represents the graduate students assistants that work on campus. I didn't go, mostly because I was teaching. In general, though, I'm somewhat ambivalent about the readiness of graduate students to adapt slogans in support of organized labor in support of their own efforts. I am, of course, supportive of their efforts to negotiate a better contract for us, but I suppose my disagreement lies with their form. Take for example the t-shirts they gave out beforehand: "Workers Unite" they read on the front. We are not workers by any stretch of the term. My brother works in a factory, and whenever I'm home I hear about what that work does to his body and hear his wife wish for him to find something else. Graduate students have no business co-opting images of labor not the rhetoric of the proletariat. All of us are striving for positions of power within the middle class, to be the gatekeepers of those who follow us. We are bourgeoisie in training. We do not work with our hands, with our bodies. My department, especially, is a luxury. We can teach and study language and literature precisely because we do not have to work with our hands and with our bodies.
Middle class students in general have no business co-opting the struggles of labor. I wish I had realized this as a younger man. Young kids who idealize the image of the radical never stop to consider, for example, who Che Guevara was outside of that famous photo of the stoic revolutionary looking ahead with the controlled rage of determination. They see only the wide-eyed medical student of the Motorcycle Diaries who could not believe the corruption and systematic exploitation he saw throughout South America. They do not see the man who sent out hit squads to kill those who deserted from his army. They do not see the man who was put in charge of interrogation and execution of those who opposed the revolution. They do not see that his means are just as horrific as those he opposed.
Now, this isn't to say that the social injustices proclaimed by the radical left are not without merit. Nor that the current market for universities professors isn't accelerating to a point at which many graduate students will never complete their transition to the positions supposedly guaranteed by their education. However, I just don't think it's fair for the middle class to co-opt the struggle of labor. To do is to ignore their conditions entirely. We don't come home covered in filth.
Students from middle class families are often, as I and many of my friends were, almost forced out of the middle class when they leave home. Their parents can afford to feed and clothe them at home, but they can't pay their rent and everything else that comes with living away from home. While riding along some of the nicer apartments near campus, I realized that based upon my own apartment search this past year, it would be impossible for students to afford them on their own. Maybe even with a handful of roommates, it would be a stretch. It occurred to me then that if those apartments closer to campus are higher in rent than my own due to higher property values and also higher in rent due to more recent and hence fancier construction, then those students who inhabit them must be able to do so because they are from families on the higher end of the middle class spectrum if not in the upper class. I can barely afford my own, with all of its rowdy gang-bangers across the way and the roaches which appear near the end of every month, a few days before the scheduled spraying of the building, and I'm sure that I make considerably more than the average undergraduate who is working part-time at an hourly service job.
But to return to the matter at hand, it is only the middle class who must while attending college find a way to re-enter the very class from which they emerged. You can always tell who are the students and who are not on the bus. The formerly middle class students often try to maintain the image of prosperity, cultivated in them by their parents. Even the ones who revel in their "(conformity to images of) noncomformity" are cleaner, more alert than the tired sorts who plod onto the bus or who talk loudly about things which make everyone around them blush. Students from middle class families continually find themselves in contact with the sorts of people that suburbia, the haven of the middle class, shields them from. Living as the lower classes do, hanging out in their bars because the alcohol is cheap even if it is tasteless and watered down or riding the bus to work instead of jumping into a car, students from middle class families begin to feel an odd sort of solidarity, ignoring momentarily that they are currently engaged in a project of working themselves back up to the economic level of their parents.
Today was also the day of a large protest on campus by the union which represents the graduate students assistants that work on campus. I didn't go, mostly because I was teaching. In general, though, I'm somewhat ambivalent about the readiness of graduate students to adapt slogans in support of organized labor in support of their own efforts. I am, of course, supportive of their efforts to negotiate a better contract for us, but I suppose my disagreement lies with their form. Take for example the t-shirts they gave out beforehand: "Workers Unite" they read on the front. We are not workers by any stretch of the term. My brother works in a factory, and whenever I'm home I hear about what that work does to his body and hear his wife wish for him to find something else. Graduate students have no business co-opting images of labor not the rhetoric of the proletariat. All of us are striving for positions of power within the middle class, to be the gatekeepers of those who follow us. We are bourgeoisie in training. We do not work with our hands, with our bodies. My department, especially, is a luxury. We can teach and study language and literature precisely because we do not have to work with our hands and with our bodies.
Middle class students in general have no business co-opting the struggles of labor. I wish I had realized this as a younger man. Young kids who idealize the image of the radical never stop to consider, for example, who Che Guevara was outside of that famous photo of the stoic revolutionary looking ahead with the controlled rage of determination. They see only the wide-eyed medical student of the Motorcycle Diaries who could not believe the corruption and systematic exploitation he saw throughout South America. They do not see the man who sent out hit squads to kill those who deserted from his army. They do not see the man who was put in charge of interrogation and execution of those who opposed the revolution. They do not see that his means are just as horrific as those he opposed.
Now, this isn't to say that the social injustices proclaimed by the radical left are not without merit. Nor that the current market for universities professors isn't accelerating to a point at which many graduate students will never complete their transition to the positions supposedly guaranteed by their education. However, I just don't think it's fair for the middle class to co-opt the struggle of labor. To do is to ignore their conditions entirely. We don't come home covered in filth.