Class and the Academy

I spent some time this weekend doing some recruiting for our small (but hopefully on the verge of growth) graduate program. This meant that I traveled to a smallish town where there was a gathering of students and faculty from around the state engaged in variety of activities designed to showcase the student talent and work. I volunteered to act as a judge of sorts for this event to be able to selfishly promote our program.

I was again struck by the differences among the needs and interests that concern faculty from different kinds of academic settings. As I chatted with folks from regional and local 2 and 4 year institutions from around the state, I found myself transported into a discursive community where the rules and norms were somewhat different from my daily academic world. The conversation starters at cocktail parties at university functions that have served me well, "What are you currently working on? What is your current project?" , had little place here. More salient were anecdotes about classroom behavior and themes of how to deal with particular students. Of course, these are definitely concerns everywhere, it was just notable the difference in the force of investment in these questions. Moments in my classes that are troublesome but quickly forgotten (tardiness, late work, inattentiveness to assignment parameters, etc.), take on an entirely different level of significance when one's professional world revolves around those moments, within the litany of repetition of the same course, that provide difference and variety, even when it is of the disruptive sort.

I was reminded throughout the day how potentially soul-killing the load of adjuncts and instructors is in jobs that offer little to no variety in the courses that one teaches. One of the themes during conversation when folks found out what school I was from, was a wave of nostalgia for graduate school and the mourning of the loss of the creativity that this environment produced. People talked about remembering how excited they were about reading and learning and playing with ideas (both in their research and pedagogy). An excitement that they certainly recall, but have little time to cultivate in the daily grind of teaching, grading, commuting, committee work, and meeting after meeting.

I also got a little angry. Angry because a system that encourages people (as adjunct at least) to pick up as many as 7 (yes, I have a friend who was teaching 7 sections of the same course in order to make ends meet. After all, just because you are adjuncting doesn't mean that Sallie Mae stops calling for you to pay for your education that was just as expensive as the person who has the 2/2 R1 job...) courses a semester is bad for teachers and bad for the students (this is not news, of course). I also got angry because of the class politics. I come from a relatively blue-collar and working class family. The fact that I wanted to continue my education to the level that I have was considered strange (at best) in my extended (though not immediate) family. It was also considered a choice that I would need to bear the financial burden of. In graduate school and as a asst. professor, I feel the legacy of that working class background all the time. I think that despite my enormous loan debt, I have a really cushy job. When I hear myself and colleagues complaining about having to walk too far from their parking lot, or that they don't have enough copying privileges, or that the burden of grading is too much to bear, I remember my dad getting woken up by a phone call bringing him back to the plant to fight a fire after working a 12 hour day and I feel guilty about my complaint. I suppose this kind of comparison is problematic in a number of ways, but it helps to put my daily life into perspective and to keep me grounded.

My class awareness also makes me starkly attune to the class hierarchy in the academy (which is the point I sort of got lost from in my dad-fire-fighting-nostalgia moment). There is an almost hidden culture of class bias. I see this in the ways that graduate students are advised (the ones seeking the R1 job get special attention over those who are going to "teaching" schools), in the conversations that happen at some conferences and meetings (like the special character of the way that pedagogy gets valued---as other to or as a supplement of scholarship), in the small amount of resources provided to faculty at some "teaching" institutions to feed their intellectual life.

I don't honestly know what my point is anymore in this post (too much rambling), except that I came out of this weekend ashamed of my privilege and pissed off about the undercurrent of class bias in our system...