Monthly Archives: March 2005

 
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Breaking through the class ceiling

Working-class academics question the Academy’s diversity.


(Illustration by David Benque)

Cold, drenched, and hanging from a telephone pole on a rainy March day 16 years ago, Cathy Mulder decided she’d had enough.

Mulder had been with the telephone company for 11 years and was active in the union.  This was her sixth year as a cable splicer, a dangerous but well-paying position she landed after filing numerous gender discrimination complaints.

“I found myself hanging from a pole and decided I could do more for workers than getting soaked,” says Mulder, a 46-year-old labor studies professor with a straight-shooting Jersey accent. A year after the revelation on the pole, the Teaneck, New Jersey native quit her job and went back to school full-time. Two years later, she graduated summa cum laude from Stockton State College with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

Spurred on by her Stockton State professors, Mulder went on to do something she never thought she would do: She enrolled at Temple University and started pursuing a Ph.D. After two years at Temple, she took a terminal master’s and transferred to the University of Massachusetts to finish her doctorate. She has passed her comprehensive exams and is now completing her dissertation.

While race and gender diversity among university faculty and graduate students has increased substantially in recent decades, class diversity has lagged behind, making stories like Mulder’s less than typical. Many working-class academics say it is still unusual to find a Ph.D. colleague who is not the child of a doctor, lawyer, corporate executive or other middle-class professional. Working-class Ph.D.’s have written papers, dissertations, and even books about feeling out of place and misunderstood in the ivory tower.

Since for most fields, graduate school is the only route to becoming a professor, class bias within doctoral programs must necessarily translate into a bias in faculty hiring. But trying to get a statistical handle on that bias is nearly impossible. None of the organizations contacted for this article — the National Center for Education Statistics, The College Board, and UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) — could provide statistics on the class backgrounds of graduate students. Information on faculty class backgrounds is also tough to find. However, the studies that do exist indicate, as expected, a strong middle-class bias among the nation’s professoriate.

When Seymour Lipset and Everett Ladd analyzed the results of the 1969 Carnegie Commission on Higher Education Faculty Survey in their 1979 paper “The Changing Social Origins of American Academics,” they found that roughly 60 percent of the fathers of the over 60,000 survey respondents came from professional, managerial, and business backgrounds, while only 25 percent were “of working-class origin.”
Looking at faculty makeup in the 15 years following the Lipset and Ladd study, researchers Joseph Stetar and Martin Finkelstein reported in 1997 that the percentage of faculty from professional and managerial-class families had scarcely changed between 1969 and 1984, although the class demographics of university students changed “significantly” during that time to include more students from low-income families.

In 2001, Kenneth Oldfield, an emeritus professor of public administration at the University of Illinois at Springfield, and Richard Conant from the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, conducted a small-scale survey of the faculty at a Big Ten university. Over half of the 567 professors who responded said they had parents who were doctors, lawyers, or other professionals. Less than 2 percent of the respondents said their parents had jobs in the lowest 20 percent of the socioeconomic scale, in fields like farm work or dry cleaning.

What education destroys

Many people who identify themselves as working-class cite a family history of jobs involving manual labor, service work, and rock-bottom pay. Some, like Mulder, have earned a good living working with their hands. However, the social status of a well-paid manual laborer can be quite different from that of a well-paid white-collar worker.  

Growing up, Mulder used to accompany her father, a plumber, to his weekend jobs. She says that although he earned as much or more than many of the people in the suburb where she grew up, she was “treated differently” because she was a plumber’s daughter.

For Mulder, being working class is about more than money. It is about knowing how to “get your hands dirty,” something she thinks many Ph.D.’s have little experience doing.

Carolyn Law is an editor with fellow working-class academic, C. L. Barney Dews, of This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, a book that features narratives of scholars from working-class and poor backgrounds. She observes, “For poor and working-class people, access to higher education is all about class.”

In This Fine Place, Law and Dews examine the “oxymoron” of the working-class academic label. In theory, earning a Ph.D. should propel a person into the middle class. It is not that simple, however. A college degree does not change a person’s past, and many working-class intellectuals feel deeply connected to their blue-collar roots.

Law still remembers the conversation she had years ago with her mother, a widow who worked a number of low-paying jobs to keep the family going after her husband died. “Education destroys something,” she told her daughter. Law agrees. “It was a break, and it did break something,” she says.

“It comes out in the way I talk. I can hear myself as different from my family now.” To illustrate her point, she contrasts what she calls her “higher education-educated accent” with the Ozark hillbilly twang of her relatives.

Law did graduate work in modern literature at the University of Minnesota, but left the school to pursue a full-time editing career. Her most shocking encounter with class in the classroom occurred while she was an undergraduate in Missouri. The professors in her education courses often talked about “at-risk” children — kids who have no books at home and whose parents do not read to them. Such kids, they warned, would always be a “problem” in the classroom.

“They kept painting this picture of a culturally deprived and deficient home that created this culture of at-risk children,” Law remembers. “And I was one of them.” That was the moment when she concluded that “to be valued in society, I’d have to shift my allegiance. I’d have to buy into the professors’ message, and turn a very critical eye on my home life.”

Law, who was raised in a home with no books, said the professors’ words made her ashamed and ambivalent. “You, on the one hand, hate your past, but want to defend it,” she explains. Her experience might explain why it is so difficult to pin down numbers of working-class Ph.D.’s. Scholars who study the class dynamics of academia use the phrase “class closet” to describe the mentality of Ph.D.’s from working-class and poor families who refuse to talk about their class origins out of fear that their middle-class colleagues will look down on them.

Hidden bigotry

Some working-class Ph.D.’s, like Marjorie Gurganus, think their professional progress has been hindered by middle-class colleagues who buy into negative class stereotypes. Gurganus is a law student who spends her spare time doing pro bono tax work in low-income communities. Before starting law school, she earned her Ph.D. in genetics at North Carolina State University. Her father made his living as a factory maintenance worker while pursuing his law degree at night. Though he eventually finished law school and set up his own practice, he never made much money as a lawyer, and the family still qualified for food stamps.

Gurganus, who worked at McDonald’s for two years while in high school, recalls one Ph.D. who would make fun of her for having worked at a fast-food job. She says that, instead of being impressed by her hardscrabble skills and work ethic, ”He was just horrified” and viewed her as “a contamination” in the lab. She thinks academics from working-class and poor backgrounds take a professional risk when they talk to colleagues about past jobs or problems with money. “Some of them have always worked in a nice, clean place that was always advancing their career,” says the Jacksonville, North Carolina native, who did her undergraduate work at Cornell University. She thinks some middle-class Ph.D.’s have trouble relating to people who have to “deliver pizzas for eight dollars an hour rather than work in a lab for five” just to make enough money to buy groceries. “They start viewing you as someone who has these problems,” she says.

Gurganus left the genetics field in part because she was unsuccessful in landing a position as a professor, a circumstance she feels was partly related to her class background. She describes the Ph.D.’s she was competing with as “more established.” She says many of them already had the standard middle-class accoutrements — “a home, a couple of cars, a stable family, hobbies” — in addition to strong scientific backgrounds. Gurganus believes that, when choosing among candidates with near-equal academic credentials, middle-class professors have little incentive to hire someone from the working classes. She sums up the mindset this way: “If there are several of you who are smart, why take the one who doesn’t have the same background as me?”  

Blue-collar bonding

There is an irony inherent in academic elitism. After all, school is supposed to help level the playing field for people from economically underprivileged backgrounds. Students from working-class and poor families often expect a college education to increase their professional options and provide them with opportunities that their parents did not have. When that optimism butts with class realities, the effects can be painfully disillusioning.

Barbara Peters is a working-class academic from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who teaches sociology at Long Island University’s Southampton College. “When you’re brought up in working-class and poverty-class situations, you’re taught that education is the ticket out,” she says. “It’s like Nirvana: You’re going to go to college, and your life is going to change. So you’re kind of idealistic.”

Acknowledging that a degree doesn’t offer the access it seems to promise, in 1993, Peters founded an online support group called Working-Class Academics, where professors, Ph.D. students, and independent scholars can discuss what it feels like to be working-class in academia. The group, which started with just 25 members, now has between 250 and 300.

“It’s probably the thing I’m most proud of in my academic career,” says Peters, whose mother was a school cook.

Not everyone is impressed by her activism, however. Peters’s views were once challenged during an online discussion with fellow intellectuals. One person criticized the concept of class labels, saying that people change classes throughout their lives. The same person said that she herself had chosen to be working-class by taking a job as a waitress.

“If you chose to be working class, then you aren’t working class,” Peters replied. That exchange prompted Peters to start the Working-Class Academics list.

Peters, who walks with crutches due to a degenerative arthritis condition, points out that being disabled adds another dimension to her concerns about discrimination. She also notes the challenges faced by women and people of color in the academy. “It’s a matrix of oppression,” she concludes.

Despite the criticism she has faced (some have called her a “reverse classist”), Peters is determined to keep reaching out to working-class intellectuals. “We are here. It would be wonderful if people from the upper classes would listen.” Citing growth in the Working-Class Academics list’s membership, she adds, “I think there are more working-class academics out there than we’d even realized.”

Money too tight to mention

While in graduate school, Amy Feistel worked multiple research assistantships to avoid taking out loans she knew she could never repay. She says she was criticized for spending too much time at work and not enough time on her studies. She remembers one scholar telling her that she was “not cut out for academic work” and would “be better as support personnel than as a scholar.”

Such comments did little to bolster Feistel’s image of herself as an academic. “I felt like I was not provided with the appropriate support to build the analytical skills required to be a scholar,” she says.

Feistel, whose parents struggled to support five children on modest missionary salaries, did graduate work in cultural politics at a top-ranked university. Her family history reveals a mix of classes. She describes her father’s relations as upper-middle-class and college educated, “with well-provided, secure futures.” Relatives on her mother’s side, however, have always had financial problems, often raising large numbers of children on low military salaries.

While Feistel appreciates the support she received from some of her professors, she insists that “one or two people hardly make up for a difficult system.” She adds, “I have always been forthright about my circumstances, but have found the circumstances often make others uncomfortable.”

For working-class academics with few financial resources, the economic obstacles to graduate education begin long before the courses start. “It’s just difficult at every step of the way.” says Paige Adams, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Baylor University. She had to scrape together nearly $100 just to take the GRE, a large investment for a woman who waited tables, taught aerobics, and took out $35,000 in loans to finance her undergraduate degree at the University of Houston. She handwrote all of her applications to graduate school because she could not afford a computer. To make matters worse, some of the schools to which she applied did not offer application fee waivers.

“This whole idea that you have to have all of this money upfront puts aspiring working-class scholars at a disadvantage from the start,” Adams insists.

Most Ph.D. students put up with long hours and low pay as teaching and research assistants. However, Adams thinks those from working-class and poor families have it especially hard. “Most people I knew in graduate school had parents that helped them out,” she says. “There weren’t a lot of students there from poor families.”

Feistel remarks, “Working-class academics face the usual issues that all academics face, but I believe the issues are exacerbated by the concerns for daily living: income, housing, food, transportation.”

Jennifer Gibbons, a pharmacology Ph.D. student at Duke University, relates, “I find that many people here in graduate school went to private high schools, or at least large schools where they had the opportunity to have honors classes and take Advanced Placement tests.” Her own high school offered “no real honors classes” and only one AP test: English. The Indiana native continues, “I feel as if I had very many lost opportunities at my school, but had no choice — my parents couldn’t afford to send me anywhere else.”

Carol Williams, a professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, felt similarly disadvantaged coming into graduate school. “Poor results on the GRE is perhaps where I felt most disabled coming to graduate school initially,” Williams recounts. “I felt I came to the exam already lacking basic skills. No account is taken in standard testing for cultural or economic differences, and I feel this favors not only Caucasians, but those from wealth.”

A different world

Sociology professor Michael Schwalbe relaxes in his paper-packed office where a poster for his book, Remembering Reet and Shine, a biography of two working-class African American men living in the South, hangs near the door. Sporting shorts and sneakers, he talks about his journey from Boys Technical School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “I haven’t pursued my career in a conventional way,” says Schwalbe. On his way to becoming an academic, Schwalbe worked as a mechanic, a bartender, a music promoter, and a nature writer.

He calls his decision to buck family tradition and pursue a non-vocational path “risky but freeing,” though he admits he was a little lost at first. “I didn’t know what you do to become a professor.” When he decided to pursue his Ph.D., he considered only two schools: Washington State University for its natural surroundings and the University of Texas at Austin for its folk rock music scene. That way, he figured, if the sociology path did not work out, he could easily pursue one of his other passions. He did not even consider applying to the prestigious University of California at Berkeley, though one of his professors urged him to do so. At that time, Schwalbe had no concept of what he calls “the prestige factor,” and how going to a school like Berkeley might influence his professional future.

Most of the working-class Ph.D.’s interviewed for this article say they grew up knowing much less about the academic world in general than their middle-class peers. “You mean there’s school after this school?” was working-class academic Beverly Rockhill’s reaction when her undergraduate cohorts at Princeton started talking about doing a Ph.D.

The language of academia shocked Jodie Lawston more than anything. “They were talking very theoretically and using language I had never even dreamed of,” recalls the sunny-voiced Long Island native. She describes the students in her graduate program as being from wealthy families and “worlds ahead” in terms of vocabulary. Lawston found their theoretical lingo intimidating at first, but now pokes fun at the bulky phrases. Her answering machine greeting instructs unsuspecting callers to leave their name, phone number, and “a brief ontological explanation of women’s existential dilemmas.”

“The academy is a place for ideas and not for activists.”

During one of her graduate seminars, Lawston suggested that scholars put social theory into practice. According to her, a classmate erupted, “The academy is a place for ideas and not for activists.” Lawston was stunned. She later heard a similar comment from another colleague.

Lawston, whose father is a construction worker, grew up having to deal with things like the phone being disconnected and the heat being cut off in the middle of the winter. “We were not philosophizing at the dinner table,” she laughs. She thinks some of her middle-class counterparts take a hands-off attitude toward social activism because they have not had to do without basic necessities. “Even though they study classism, that’s all they do — study it.” she says. “They don’t really struggle with it.”

Working-class academics themselves struggle with it in different ways. Monique Lyle, a Ph.D. student in Duke University’s political science department, remembers being “really class-conscious” when she began her studies at the elite school. But for Lyle, class has always been a question of both money and race. “In a lot of ways, class distinctions are along racial lines,” notes Lyle, who is black.

Jason Allen, an assistant research professor at Duke, came to the United States from Barnsley, England, and earned his doctorate in exercise physiology from Louisiana State University. He lives with his pal, Gordon, a tomcat who paws for attention during our phone interview. Allen sums up the difference between the United States’ and England’s ideas about class this way: “In England, they care where you came from. In America, they care where you’re going.” Allen thinks American class distinctions are based more on money than birth, but, like Lyle, he also believes those distinctions are impacted heavily by race.

Allen, whose mother works in a bakery factory, has found that many American academics hold British people in high regard. He believes the Yorkshire accent that might have hindered his professional advancement in his native land actually worked to his advantage here in the States. “I moved from working-class to upper-middle class in the blink of an eye,” he says.

The discomfort of straddling

Several working-class academics speak of feeling torn between the world of their families and that of their peers. Carol Williams had a tough time explaining her academic ambitions to her mother. “When I was raising money to attend my program in a master’s degree in England, she stated, ‘Why all this trouble and pain to get a few letters after your name?’” Williams recalls. “She didn’t comprehend the motives for advanced education, nor did she understand what exactly we did there.”

Lyle has had similar troubles. “[My mom] thinks I talk like a white girl,” she laughs. Though she has a strong relationship with her family and loves going home, she does not think they have a real sense of what she does. She feels removed from her extended family and worries that she does not fit in with the black working-class community where she grew up.

Despite the challenges they face, most of the working-class Ph.D.’s interviewed say they benefited from going to graduate school. “I just had a great graduate school experience,” says Adams. “I had a great job, a great boss  …  It just felt like a family. I made a lot of good friends.”

Like Adams’, most of Mulder’s experiences in academia have been positive. Still, Mulder admits, “I don’t know anybody else like me.” Mulder now teaches labor studies to workers and unionists at a satellite campus of Indiana University, a job she got in part because of her unusual life path. “That’s precisely why they hired me,” she notes. “There are not too many Ph.D.’s that know how to be a worker.”

The hybrid advantage

The same family relationships that can complicate a working-class Ph.D.’s relationship to academia can also be a vital source of support. In working-class families where no one has attended college, there is often a sense of vicarious accomplishment in watching one of their own go all the way.

Paige Adams’ mother has been her biggest cheerleader, urging her to pursue the college education she herself always wanted. “She always felt that she missed out by not going to college,” says Adams.  

Jodie Lawston thought of dropping out many times during those first few years of graduate school, but her mother’s words helped her stay the course: “You gotta do it ‘cause we never did.”

In the end, having a foot in both worlds might be one of the working-class academic’s greatest assets. “I’m resigned to a sort of hybrid status, which, as I grow older, I recognize gives me a unique and under-represented intellectual perspective on many issues,” Rockhill says.

Feistel, who now works in educational administration, says her experiences have made her more understanding of the challenges facing working-class students. “I’m in a better position to understand a working-class student,” she remarks. “I’ve been on both sides of the system, and I know how the system works.”

“Mostly what makes me different is a consciousness of what work really means,” adds Law, whose father made his living digging basements with a bulldozer. “To hear some tenured professor talk about their work environment like they’re some kind of miner  …  it really hurts me.”

Other working-class academics, like Schwalbe and Allen, say their life experiences have made them extremely adaptable. “You can move in almost any environment and function with almost any group of people,” says Allen.

Jodie Lawston, who felt “so inferior” to her middle-class colleagues when she started graduate school, now views her working-class background as an asset. “I think it gives you a stronger perspective on everything. I think you’re able to relate to people better,” she says.

STORY INDEX

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This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class by C.L. Barney Dews (editor) and Carolyn L. Law (editor)
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Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class by Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey

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Photo Essays

Touching the untouchables

Mother Teresa’s good works rubbed off on a San Francisco masseuse.


Click here to enter the visual essay.

Mary Ann Finch sits “Rolf” down on a makeshift massage table — a plastic crate — and digs her gentle fingers into his back and neck, releasing years of knots and tension. For a moment, Rolf’s ocean-weathered face seems to relax. Since his wife died, alcohol has taken its toll on the 49-year-old who lives in one of the city’s homeless camps.

While most San Franciscans edge away from the poor and the homeless, people like Rolf, Finch has devoted her career to touching them and training others to do the same.

After a trip to India in 1997, Finch, a massage practitioner, opened the Care Through Touch Healing Institute, a clinic and school devoted to massaging the homeless. While abroad, she studied and observed Mother Teresa, the late Roman Catholic nun and well-known humanitarian. Finch was so moved by Mother Teresa’s work with the poor that she decided to use her “caring touch” skills to help the underprivileged and homeless back in San Francisco.

Hands-on massage is just the first step in Finch’s work. She uses touch as a vehicle to make contact with her clients, to elevate their self-esteem, and to eventually assist them in finding shelters, rehabilitation programs, and jobs.

The institute is located on Golden Gate Avenue in the Tenderloin District, but Finch can be found at a number of locations around the city, including homeless shelters, recovery and drop-in centers, residential hotels, or simply “working the streets.”

Finch also finds time to train interns from around the world on the art of massage. After an intense and lengthy workshop, the interns head out to local spots to begin their work lifting the spirits of the poor, the ailing, and the forgotten.

Sister Elsie and Sister Mary Ellen, both graduates of Finch’s program, are Catholic nuns who came to San Francisco after working to build clinics and schools in developing countries. They will take pillows and towels to a local men’s shelter and, after a brief greeting, begin to massage the “untouchables.” The client will sit under a pair of healing hands, his head lowered, with a look of ease and relief slowly appearing on his face. Some clients drift off while others speak quietly to their caregivers, identifying particular physical pains to focus on, or sometimes voicing personal concerns. After 20 minutes or so, time is up. Reluctantly, the grateful client says goodbye while the next client sits down for “care through touch.”

Following one such session with Sister Elsie, a client stands up to say goodbye. Before leaving, he asks for one more favor.

“Sure, what’s that?” she asks.

“A hug!”

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Commentary

Go ahead, make my next four years

What’s really behind the sound and the fury of Clint Eastwood criticism?


Sunday night’s Academy Awards proved that we’ve come a long way in the so-called culture wars. There was a time when Clint Eastwood cut the cloth of the perfect liberal boogeyman. In 1971, The New York Times film critic Pauline Kael famously called Dirty Harry a “medieval fascist” for his unrepentant pursuit of vigilante justice. Eastwood’s characters saw the world in Manichean terms, and his movies’ plots were simple-minded conflicts of Good vs. Evil — a storyline the Bush Administration is fond of imposing on real world conflicts.

Fast-forward to 2005, and Eastwood — a lifelong Republican — has become the bête noir of conservative pundits like Michael Medved and Rush Limbaugh, as well as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has called Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby “morally offensive.” The film’s “permissive depiction of euthanasia,” the USCCB claims, “will leave Catholic viewers emotionally against the ropes.”

Now, I don’t claim to know why Catholic bishops watch movies, but I do know that great art does occasionally challenge our ethical and moral sensibilities. Oedipus Rex, for instance, involves the prickly issues of patricide and incest. Same goes for a lot of Shakespeare’s work, which could be skewered by twenty-first century Republicans for portraying for all kinds of acquaintance-assisted suicide.

None of this matters, of course, if you are the moral arbiter of all that is good and just in America like Wall Street Journal columnist Michael Medved, who spoiled the plot of the movie because, as he claims, “There are competing moral demands that come into the job of a movie critic. We have a moral and fairness obligation to not spoil movies. On the other hand, our primary moral obligation is to tell the truth.”

The truth being, evidently, that Dirty Harry has become a puppet of liberal Hollywood.

Still, this self-righteousness is nothing compared to News Max columnist Ted Baehr, who called Million Dollar Baby a “neo-Nazi movie.”

Take that, Pauline Kael!

What the controversy over Million Dollar Baby really underscores, though, is a paradox in the ascendancy of the Religious Right since the last election. While religious conservatives from James Dobson to Jerry Falwell have amped up their cultural critique of everything from the Super Bowl to SpongeBob, they have yet to accomplish one single victory in culture wars. The sound and fury of the Religious Right may get rural voters in Alabama to the polls in November, but let’s face the facts: Religious conservatives are never going to change popular culture.

That’s because, as Thomas Frank demonstrates in What’s the Matter with Kansas , they’ve built an entire political strategy based on false martyrdom. As Frank writes:

[The Religious Right’s] voters toss a few liberals out of office and Hollywood doesn’t change …They return an entire phalanx of pro-business blowhards to Washington and still the culture industry goes on its merry way. But at least those backlash politicians that they elect are willing to do one thing differently: They stand there are on the floor of the U.S. Senate and shout no to it all.

Still, as the 2005 Academy Awards proved, Americans — even those who consider themselves apolitical — love to watch transgression. The transgression may be sexual (e.g. ABC’s Desperate Housewives or HBO’s Sex and the City) or moral (e.g. Million Dollar Baby) — sometimes it may even be a conflation of the two — but it always appeals to viewers across the aisle. In fact, it’s only when the transgression is overtly political, as in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, that the culture industry gets cold feet.

Right-wing politicians and pundits who think a Republican-dominated Congress and second Bush Administration will change the tenor of Hollywood or prime time TV are either self-deluded or using rhetoric to manipulate their religious base. The latter is more likely since Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan have been chirping on about “moral values,” only to spend all of their political capital on economic policies like tax cuts and Social Security privatization.

Next time a conservative Republican politician pledges to clean up the crassness of American culture or some such nonsense, someone in the media — just for once — should stand up and say: “Go ahead, make my day!”

STORY INDEX

The writer
Russell Cobb, InTheFray Assistant Managing Editor

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Commentary

The joy of six milligrams

With my psychopharmacologist’s help, I spent six months in Xanax limbo.


“I don’t feel like the Xanax is working anymore,” I lied.

“You’re on an extremely high dose, but if you need more, I’ll up the dosage,” my shrink replied in disbelief, shaking his head.

A smile began at the corners of my mouth but I held it in; he couldn’t know the Xanax was my only source of joy, of pleasure. I was now on six milligrams of Xanax a day, twice the recommended maximum. I had long since moved up from the blue, football-shaped tablets to the slender white pills known as bars. Also a psychopharmacologist, my psychiatrist prided himself in his knowledge of drugs and dosages, yet I was playing him for a fool. I left his office clutching the prescription in my hand, hesitant to put it in my pocket, hesitant to let it out of my sight whatsoever.

It was a beautiful day. Staring across Fifth Avenue into the park, I was jealous of all the people seemingly having fun: Women pushing baby strollers and carrying their Louie bags, and men strutting around in suits. I wished I could be like them. I wished I could be “normal.” Instead, I was wearing dirty blue sweatpants, a long-sleeved shirt, and sneakers. My hair was greasy as all hell since I hadn’t showered in who knows how long. I usually didn’t go outside. I usually didn’t get out of bed. But for my monthly prescription of Xanax, there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do.

The subway home seemed to take forever; it always does when you’re waiting for something extra special at the end of the tunnel. I couldn’t go to the pharmacy on my block because I once broke into a psychotic rage, accusing the pharmacist of insinuating that I was a crackhead after I’d finagled another prescription just days after filling the original. After popping the entire bottle in only a few days, I told my doctor the Xanax fell down the drain after I sat it on the sink. It was a sorry excuse.

I’d simply have to go to a pharmacy down Queens Boulevard, also known as the Boulevard of Death. I used to be an uppers girl, but that grew tiring after a while. Because of my bipolar disorder, I could get pretty high on my own brain chemistry. I preferred to take my daily maximum dosage of Xanax around 5 p.m., a few hours after I woke up. My depression killed me; I could not stand being aware. After taking the Xanax, I would return to my dream world for the remainder of the day. That was definitely better than being awake. Lying there, in that bed, in that dark room, in my dirty apartment. I stopped telling others how I felt. No one understood anyway, and I doubt anyone really cared. “Get a job,” “Go back to school,” and “Clean the apartment” were phrases I couldn’t bear to listen to any longer. What “they” failed to understand was that I couldn’t do anything. I was surprised every time I arose to take a shit, rather than simply doing it in bed. It was more than depression.

I threw up when I was forced to listen to my mother talk about how well her Prozac was working for her and how I just needed to find what drug would work for me. I wish I had her “depression.” Well, Mommy, I’ve been on every medication there is and none of them work for me. I vomited when I saw the Zoloft egg jumping around the television screen, talking about not feeling like “your old self.” I say “Fuck off” to my mother and the egg, and to my boyfriend, who is an uncaring bastard, to other family members, and even friends. Once they’ve been bedridden for five months, showering every other week and eating nothing, then I might take their well-meaning advice. I waited the obligatory half-hour to get my prescription filled, took 10 milligrams, and proceeded to slip into unconsciousness.

July

“Baby, please get up. It’s Fourth of July — let’s go to the beach,” my boyfriend urged. I remained motionless under the blankets with my eyes closed and thought about how much I hated him.

“You love the beach.” Reid was always pleading with me to do something, while reminding me of my interests. Rarely did I care to appease him. But that day, I tried. “We’ll smoke at the beach. Don’t get all ‘Xanied-out.”

“Your weed sucks,” I replied, which to him was the ultimate insult. I decided it was useless to shower since I was going to the beach. I really could care less that my legs were hairy, but drew the line at leaving the house looking like a French woman. When I looked in the mirror I saw my eyebrows were crying out to be waxed.

“Reid, I can’t go, I look like shit.” Whining had become the permanent tone of my voice.

“You look beautiful,” he yelled from the other room. Shut up, dickhead, I thought. I was infuriated since he hadn’t even looked at me.

I yelled, “Don’t say that to me. I look like shit!”

“You’re always beautiful. Hurry up!” I got incensed at him, yelling at me to hurry up, and since I hated him, I spat in his face when he entered the bathroom.

“Alexis! You have to control yourself!”

The notion that I could control myself was humorous and a foreign concept. Self-control was impossible even with the aid of numerous mood stabilizers, anti-depressants, anti- psychotics, and anti-anxieties. I felt nothing but intense anger. What caused this, I didn’t know, but I kept it at bay with Xanax.

Reid took me by the hands to comfort me, but I took everything out of context and felt, irrationally, that he was going to hurt me. We often took our constant fighting up a notch to physical confrontations. I began to scream for him to get off me, mixing in profanities at every available opportunity. I reminded myself of The Exorcist, and although I knew I was acting crazy, I didn’t know how to stop. My emotions, my mind, and the physiological aspect of my brain were all working on different pages. If I had been living with anyone else, I would have probably been committed to an institution. But Reid knew how much I despised mental hospitals, and he didn’t have the heart to admit me. Not yet at least.

After I had plucked my eyebrows to death for nearly an hour, I was ready to go. As soon as we arrived at Long Beach, I wanted to return to the apartment. The sun, the people, everything was too much for my tired brain to comprehend. I dragged myself out of the Honda Civic and languidly pulled myself to the beach. As Reid was setting up various blankets and towels, I retrieved a water bottle from my beach bag and shoved 8 milligrams of Xanax down my throat, relieved that in about 20 minutes I wouldn’t know what the hell was going on.

I opened my eyes to Reid, and was surprised to see he had a terrified look on his face. He was yelling at me, but I was foggy from the Xanax and everything took a few moments to register. Where was I? Unlike the bedroom, it was sunny and people were staring at me. Shit, I was at the beach.

Finally, I could distinguish Reid’s voice from all the ones chattering in my head. He was asking me what I took, but I was too exhausted to answer. “You have sauerkraut stuck all over you.” I slowly sat up and looked down. The sauerkraut had dried to crust in the sun and was stuck to the corners of my mouth, my chin, my chest and my hands. How did I do this? “You were eating a hot dog, I fell asleep, woke up, looked next to me, and there you were, looking like you were dead. I couldn’t wake you up.” Reid led me to the ocean, and we cleaned the crusty sauerkraut off my body together.

September

I had various corners pressuring me to attend school. I knew I was in no state to return, but I obliged. By now I had coerced my doctor into upping my Xanax to 8 milligrams a day. To the average person, 3 milligrams is the maximum, but I kept asking for more and the prescriptions kept coming. He was a very giving person, as he was seeing me for free. Usually the doctor charges $500 for 45 minutes. I couldn’t attend the full first week of classes. I scheduled an emergency appointment with my doctor. “I’m having trouble, a lot of trouble — it’s practically impossible. I can’t get out of bed for anything,” I explained. “It’s the depression part of the bipolar. You have a severe mental illness. Perhaps you shouldn’t have gone back to school. You really should consider returning to an institution. If you came to my hospital, I could keep a closer eye on you. I also think it’s time for you to consider electroconvulsive therapy for your condition.”

“Maybe at the end of the semester, but I need something now. I’m failing out of school. It’s my senior year.”

“Alright, I’ll give you a prescription for Adderall,” he said, with slight hesitation. “But once the semester’s over, you have to do something about yourself.” I left his office that day, and now I wonder why neither of us made the connection that I couldn’t get out of bed because I was on such a massive amount of Xanax.

I didn’t want to discontinue using it, but I secretly wished he would have forced me to stop. I thought I couldn’t get worse, but my descent into prescription drug addiction had only just begun. I didn’t know what I wanted. I was going on my ninth month in bed. I didn’t necessarily have the desire to get out yet, but I definitely didn’t like being confined there.

I didn’t know what I wanted; all I knew was that we had tried every single one of the “new generation of medications designed for mood disorders,” and none of them worked. He talked electroconvulsive therapy up like it was a miracle, and a miracle is what I needed. Too bad I didn’t believe in them. No one knew how deep and scary my depression had grown; even more frightening was the thought of the mania destined to come after.

By keeping myself drugged up, I could stave the mania off — the voices, the visions, and everything else that accompanied it. Suicide was a constant thought in my mind, but I didn’t want to hurt those around me, so I continued lying in bed and taking a shitload of Xanax.

It was only slightly after 2 p.m. when I got home from the city. I had a few hours until Reid was off work and about 20 minutes until my prescription was ready. I won’t lie and say I had the best intentions concerning the Adderall, but I didn’t let myself admit what I was about to do, until after I picked the drugs up from the pharmacy and was standing in front of the kitchen counter with a spoon in my right hand and the bottle of Adderall in my left.

The idea occurred to me as soon as my shrink mentioned the stimulant. I flirted with Ritalin my freshman year of college. My suitemate supposedly had Attention Deficit Disorder but didn’t want to take her medication. After a few months of living there, a friend and I discovered a stockpile of the uppers in her nightstand drawer. These came in handy on the eves of paper due dates and after long nights of partying. But the first time I tried coke — with coworkers in the now-deserted Pacific Sunwear on Sixth Avenue — well, that high turned the Ritalin into a long-forgotten fifth grade playmate.

I had heard Adderall was like cocaine without the bloody nose and headache. I poured all 30 of the 15-milligram pills onto the countertop. I placed one blue tablet away from the others, covered it with a spoon, covered the spoon with my hand, and pushed down. Immediately the pill morphed into light blue powder. Using a maxed-out Visa and a rolled-up dollar bill, I proceeded to push the blue powder into a fat, straight line, and then sniffed it up my nose.

There was no burning sensation, no chemical smell. I was in love. I walked through the dining room to the living room futon, and waited to feel something. I’ll give it 10 minutes, and then I’m sniffing more, I thought to myself. The first change I noticed was the total absence of sound in my apartment, except for a barely audible thudding. Relaxed on the futon, I spread out and no sooner than I had lain down, I was back at the kitchen counter.

This time, I’ll do three at once, I thought. After three, I waited about five minutes, then snorted two at a time until they were gone. I didn’t set out to do them all, and I couldn’t believe I had just sniffed 30 pills in a matter of minutes. But I hadn’t felt this awake and energized in months and found myself laughing out loud. I ran to the bathroom, looked at my reflection, and laughed some more, not knowing what was funny but loving the sound of my laughter. I was giddy feeling these emotions, like seeing a lover after months apart.

I knew this joy was fake, simply a byproduct of the pills labeled Amphetamine Salts, but I embraced the joy, happy to experience the forgotten emotion regardless of where it came from. I had no conscience to listen to, and instead concentrated on the thudding sound which filled my ears. As I curled up on the couch, I realized the sound was my own quickly beating heart.

Two weeks later, I had my next appointment with my shrink. In the waiting room I was calm and collected, but I was on a mission. The mission was to get a higher dosage of the Adderall. Like all addicts, I was a good liar. “I only took the Adderall for a week because it didn’t do anything helpful. I still couldn’t get out of bed. You have to do something, I’m failing out of school.”

The desperation in my voice was not a lie; I needed more Adderall, and there was a chance, however slim, that he would not provide it. As though he were a well-trained dog, my doctor replied, “You must not be on a high enough dose. I’ll double it to 30 milligrams a day. You start with that, but I’ll write the prescription for 60 milligrams a day — that way if 30 doesn’t work, you can try 45, then 60.”

I was shocked, I was moving up from 15 milligrams a day to 60? This was too easy; my doctor was either an idiot or a drug dealer. Both possibilities worked to my advantage.

December

I had been speed-balling on prescription pills for over three months, and didn’t know up from down. I somehow received three C’s and one D for the semester, although how I managed that, I was not sure. Two of our friends lost their jobs and apartment and moved in with Reid and me. It was then that I began to care about my “problem.” While alone in the apartment I could act like as a big crackhead because nobody could see me. But with Lynn and Dylan staying home with me every day, I realized I needed a change.

This need crystallized one night when the four of us decided to eat KFC for dinner. Having refrained from taking pills for a couple of days, I wanted to reward my good behavior and snuck off into the bedroom while Lynn and Dylan were gone and Reid wasn’t paying attention. I took my Xanax out from the bureau drawer and dumped the remainder of the bottle’s contents into my hand. Seventeen bars fell out, equaling 340 milligrams. My tolerance was ridiculously high, and I wondered what effect such a high dose would have.

Out of nowhere tears began rolling down my face as I realized what a pathetic life I led. And how pathetic my options were. I could admit myself to a hospital and get treated like shit from all the staff because once you were in there, you were crazy and nothing you said mattered to anyone. Reid would visit me on visiting days, him in regular clothes and me in my thick socks with the rubber gripping on the bottom, a thin cotton hospital gown, and a paper robe; or I could pretend I was Frankenstein’s monster as I received electric shocks to my temples.

I tried not to feel sorry for myself, tried to realize people had it worse, but that was no comfort. I felt all my dreams for a future fading away. I thought I would never get better, get out of bed, or do anything worthwhile. I simply wanted to be left alone.

As I heard the front door open, I poured the Xanax down my throat and got into bed. I heard footsteps thumping on the wooden floor of the hallway and wiped my face on the pillow. Lynn came into the room. “Lex, are you going to eat with us?” She was so sweet and caring. I loved Lynn, so I got up and followed her into the living room, all but forgetting I had just taken a shitload of Xanax.

Following my friend down the hallway was the last thing I remembered. Then I heard laughter, guys laughing and Lynn’s voice urging me to get up. I opened my eyes and lifted my head. Lynn was standing next to me with a wet towel and Reid and Dylan were sitting on the futon, attempting to hold back smiles. I tried to get up and couldn’t work my legs. I felt my head falling; I was passing out.

I woke up in bed, with Reid sitting up next to me. “Do you remember what happened last night?” he asked. I tried unsuccessfully to shake my head. I couldn’t remember anything about anything whatsoever. “You passed out in KFC with your food in your mouth and almost choked. You looked ridiculous — you had mashed potatoes all over your face.” Feeling immense embarrassment I rolled over and passed out again. Within a few days I was out of the fog and out of Xanax and Adderall. I had a friend with serious Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and a Xanax/Oxycotin addiction. She started letting me have some of her pills and my addiction continued.

In early 2004, I traveled home to California to visit my family; my trusty Xanax came along with me. Bored in Galt, with absolutely nothing to do, I took a large dose one night and passed out. In the morning, I discovered my younger sister had tried to wake me during the night and was unable to do so. I had scared her. This instance was the first time I had ever felt remorse at taking the drugs; sorry for myself, yes, but remorseful, never. That was the end of my Xanax addiction.

Once I got off the Xanax a lot of things changed. I was able to remember yesterdays again. I could get out of bed. But when the depression hits, it’s hard and fast. A bullet from a Glock. If I were presented with the same set of morbid circumstances, I am not sure I would do anything differently. This is not a story of recovery; it is simply a retelling of some of the events taken from six months of my life.

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News

Breaking through the Class Ceiling

Working-class academics question the Academy’s diversity.

By Stacy Torian
Illustration by David Benque

Working-class academics

Cold, drenched, and hanging from a telephone pole on a rainy March day sixteen years ago, Cathy Mulder decided she’d had enough.

Mulder had been with the telephone company for eleven years and was active in the union.  This was her sixth year as a cable splicer, a dangerous but well-paying position she landed after filing numerous gender discrimination complaints.

“I found myself hanging from a pole and decided I could do more for workers than getting soaked,” says Mulder, a forty-six-year-old labor studies professor with a straight-shooting Jersey accent. A year after the revelation on the pole, the Teaneck, New Jersey, native quit her job and went back to school full-time. Two years later, she graduated summa cum laude from Stockton State College with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

Spurred on by her Stockton State professors, Mulder went on to do something she never thought she would do: she enrolled at Temple University and started pursuing a PhD. After two years at Temple, she took a terminal master’s degree and transferred to the University of Massachusetts to finish her doctorate. She has passed her comprehensive exams and is now completing her dissertation.

While race and gender diversity among university faculty and graduate students has increased substantially in recent decades, class diversity has lagged behind, making stories like Mulder’s less than typical. Many working-class academics say it is still unusual to find a PhD colleague who is not the child of a doctor, lawyer, corporate executive, or other middle-class professional. Working-class PhDs have written papers, dissertations, and even books about feeling out of place and misunderstood in the ivory tower.

Since for most fields, graduate school is the only route to becoming a professor, class bias within doctoral programs must necessarily translate into a bias in faculty hiring. But trying to get a statistical handle on that bias is nearly impossible. None of the organizations contacted for this article — the National Center for Education Statistics, the College Board, and UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute — could provide statistics on the class backgrounds of graduate students. Information on faculty class backgrounds is also tough to find. However, the studies that do exist indicate, as expected, a strong middle-class bias among the nation’s professoriate.

When Seymour Lipset and Everett Ladd analyzed the results of the 1969 Carnegie Commission on Higher Education Faculty Survey in their 1979 paper “The Changing Social Origins of American Academics,” they found that roughly 60 percent of the fathers of the over 60,000 survey respondents came from professional, managerial, and business backgrounds, while only 25 percent were “of working-class origin.”

Looking at faculty makeup in the fifteen years following the Lipset and Ladd study, researchers Joseph Stetar and Martin Finkelstein reported in 1997 that the percentage of faculty from professional and managerial-class families had scarcely changed between 1969 and 1984, although the class demographics of university students changed “significantly” during that time to include more students from low-income families.

In 2001, Kenneth Oldfield and Richard Conant conducted a small-scale survey of the faculty at a Big Ten university. Over half of the 567 professors who responded said they had parents who were doctors, lawyers, or other professionals. Less than 2 percent of the respondents said their parents had jobs in the lowest 20 percent of the socioeconomic scale, in fields like farm work or dry cleaning.

What Education Destroys

Cathy Mulder head shot
Cathy Mulder, a plumber’s daughter from New Jersey, teaches labor studies at Indiana University. Her working-class background has helped her bond with her students, many of whom are middle-aged wage laborers and union members. “There are not too many PhDs that know how to be a worker,” she says.

Many people who identify themselves as working class cite a family history of jobs involving manual labor, service work, and rock-bottom pay. Some, like Mulder, have earned a good living working with their hands. However, the social status of a well-paid manual laborer can be quite different from that of a well-paid white-collar worker.

Growing up, Mulder used to accompany her father, a plumber, to his weekend jobs. She says that although he earned as much or more than many of the people in the suburb where she grew up, she was “treated differently” because she was a plumber’s daughter.

For Mulder, being working class is about more than money. It is about knowing how to “get your hands dirty,” something she thinks many PhDs have little experience doing.

Working-class academics C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Law are the editors of This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, a book that features narratives of scholars from working-class and poor backgrounds. “For poor and working-class people, access to higher education is all about class,” Law says.

In This Fine Place, Law and Dews examine the “oxymoron” of the working-class academic label. In theory, earning a PhD should propel a person into the middle class. It is not that simple, however. A college degree does not change a person’s past, and many working-class intellectuals feel deeply connected to their blue-collar roots.

Law still remembers the conversation she had years ago with her mother, a widow who worked a number of low-paying jobs to keep the family going after her husband died. “Education destroys something,” she told her daughter. Law agrees. “It was a break, and it did break something,” she says.

“It comes out in the way I talk. I can hear myself as different from my family now.” To illustrate her point, she contrasts what she calls her “higher education-educated accent” with the Ozark hillbilly twang of her relatives.

Law did graduate work in modern literature at the University of Minnesota, but left the school to pursue a full-time editing career. Her most shocking encounter with class in the classroom occurred while she was an undergraduate in Missouri. The professors in her education courses often talked about “at-risk” children — kids who have no books at home and whose parents do not read to them. Such kids, they warned, would always be a “problem” in the classroom.

“They kept painting this picture of a culturally deprived and deficient home that created this culture of at-risk children,” Law remembers. “And I was one of them.” That was the moment when she concluded that “to be valued in society, I’d have to shift my allegiance. I’d have to buy into the professors’ message, and turn a very critical eye on my home life.”

Law, who was raised in a home with no books, said the professors’ words made her ashamed and ambivalent. “You, on the one hand, hate your past, but want to defend it,” she explains. Her experience might explain why it is so difficult to pin down numbers of working-class PhDs. Scholars who study the class dynamics of academia use the phrase “class closet” to describe the mentality of PhDs from working-class and poor families who refuse to talk about their class origins out of fear that their middle-class colleagues will look down on them.

Hidden Bigotry

Some working-class PhDs, like Marjorie Gurganus, think their professional progress has been hindered by middle-class colleagues who buy into negative class stereotypes. Gurganus is a law student who spends her spare time doing pro bono tax work in low-income communities. Before starting law school, she earned her PhD in genetics at North Carolina State University. Her father made his living as a factory maintenance worker while pursuing his law degree at night. Though he eventually finished law school and set up his own practice, he never made much money as a lawyer, and the family still qualified for food stamps.

Gurganus, who worked at McDonald’s for two years while in high school, recalls one PhD who would make fun of her for having worked at a fast-food job. She says that, instead of being impressed by her hardscrabble skills and work ethic, “He was just horrified” and viewed her as “a contamination” in the lab. She thinks academics from working-class and poor backgrounds take a professional risk when they talk to colleagues about past jobs or problems with money. “Some of them have always worked in a nice, clean place that was always advancing their career,” says the Jacksonville, North Carolina, native, who did her undergraduate work at Cornell University. She thinks some middle-class PhDs have trouble relating to people who have to “deliver pizzas for eight dollars an hour rather than work in a lab for five” just to make enough money to buy groceries. “They start viewing you as someone who has these problems,” she says.

Gurganus left the genetics field in part because she was unsuccessful in landing a position as a professor, a circumstance she feels was partly related to her class background. She describes the PhDs she was competing with as “more established.” She says many of them already had the standard middle-class accoutrements — “a home, a couple of cars, a stable family, hobbies” — in addition to strong scientific backgrounds. Gurganus believes that, when choosing among candidates with near-equal academic credentials, middle-class professors have little incentive to hire someone from the working classes. She sums up the mindset this way: “If there are several of you who are smart, why take the one who doesn’t have the same background as me?”

Blue-Collar Bonding

There is an irony inherent in academic elitism. After all, school is supposed to help level the playing field for people from economically underprivileged backgrounds. Students from working-class and poor families often expect a college education to increase their professional options and provide them with opportunities that their parents did not have. When that optimism butts with class realities, the effects can be painfully disillusioning.

Barbara Peters is a working-class academic from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who teaches sociology at Long Island University’s Southampton College. “When you’re brought up in working-class and poverty-class situations, you’re taught that education is the ticket out,” she says. “It’s like nirvana: you’re going to go to college, and your life is going to change. So you’re kind of idealistic.”

Acknowledging that a degree doesn’t offer the access it seems to promise, Peters founded an online support group called Working-Class Academics, where professors, PhD students, and independent scholars can discuss what it feels like to be working class in academia. The group, which started with just twenty-five members, now has between 250 and 300.

“It’s probably the thing I’m most proud of in my academic career,” says Peters, whose mother was a school cook.

Not everyone is impressed by her activism, however. Peters’s views were once challenged during an online discussion with fellow intellectuals. One person criticized the concept of class labels, saying that people change classes throughout their lives. The same person said that she herself had chosen to be working class by taking a job as a waitress.

“If you chose to be working class, then you aren’t working class,” Peters replied. That exchange prompted Peters to start the Working-Class Academics list.

Peters, who walks with crutches due to a degenerative arthritis condition, points out that being disabled adds another dimension to her concerns about discrimination. She also notes the challenges faced by women and people of color in the academy. “It’s a matrix of oppression,” she concludes.

Despite the criticism she has faced (some have called her a “reverse classist”), Peters is determined to keep reaching out to working-class intellectuals. “We are here. It would be wonderful if people from the upper classes would listen.” Citing growth in the Working-Class Academics list’s membership, she adds, “I think there are more working-class academics out there than we’d even realized.”

Money Too Tight to Mention

Carol Williams head shot
Working-class academic Carol Williams, an assistant professor of women’s studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, thinks the GRE “favors not only Caucasians but those from wealth.”

While in graduate school, Amy Feistel worked multiple research assistantships to avoid taking out loans she knew she could never repay. She says she was criticized for spending too much time at work and not enough time on her studies. She remembers one scholar telling her that she was “not cut out for academic work” and would “be better as support personnel than as a scholar.”

Such comments did little to bolster Feistel’s image of herself as an academic. “I felt like I was not provided with the appropriate support to build the analytical skills required to be a scholar,” she says.

Feistel, whose parents struggled to support five children on modest missionary salaries, did graduate work in cultural politics at a top-ranked university. Her family history reveals a mix of classes. She describes her father’s relations as upper middle class and college educated, “with well-provided, secure futures.” Relatives on her mother’s side, however, have always had financial problems, often raising large numbers of children on low military salaries.

While Feistel appreciates the support she received from some of her professors, she insists that “one or two people hardly make up for a difficult system.” She adds, “I have always been forthright about my circumstances, but have found the circumstances often make others uncomfortable.”

For working-class academics with few financial resources, the economic obstacles to graduate education begin long before the courses start. “It’s just difficult at every step of the way,” says Paige Adams, who holds a PhD in neuroscience from Baylor University. She had to scrape together nearly $100 just to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), a large investment for a woman who waited tables, taught aerobics, and took out $35,000 in loans to finance her undergraduate degree at the University of Houston. She handwrote all of her applications to graduate school because she could not afford a computer. To make matters worse, some of the schools to which she applied did not offer application-fee waivers.

“This whole idea that you have to have all of this money upfront puts aspiring working-class scholars at a disadvantage from the start,” Adams says.

Most PhD students put up with long hours and low pay as teaching and research assistants, but those from working-class and poor families have it especially hard, Adams says. “Most people I knew in graduate school had parents that helped them out. There weren’t a lot of students there from poor families.”

Feistel remarks, “Working-class academics face the usual issues that all academics face, but I believe the issues are exacerbated by the concerns for daily living: income, housing, food, transportation.”

“I find that many people here in graduate school went to private high schools, or at least large schools where they had the opportunity to have honors classes and take Advanced Placement tests,” says Jennifer Gibbons, a pharmacology PhD student at Duke University. Her own high school offered “no real honors classes” and only one AP test: English. The Indiana native continues, “I feel as if I had very many lost opportunities at my school, but had no choice — my parents couldn’t afford to send me anywhere else.”

Carol Williams, an assistant professor of women’s studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, felt similarly disadvantaged coming into graduate school. “Poor results on the GRE is perhaps where I felt most disabled coming to graduate school initially,” Williams says. “I felt I came to the exam already lacking basic skills. No account is taken in standard testing for cultural or economic differences, and I feel this favors not only Caucasians, but those from wealth.”

A Different World

Michael Schwalbe head shot
On his way to becoming an academic, sociology professor Michael Schwalbe worked as a mechanic, bartender, music promoter, and nature writer.

Sociology professor Michael Schwalbe relaxes in his paper-packed office where a poster for his book, Remembering Reet and Shine, a biography of two working-class African American men living in the South, hangs near the door. Sporting shorts and sneakers, he talks about his journey from Boys Technical School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “I haven’t pursued my career in a conventional way,” says Schwalbe. On his way to becoming an academic, Schwalbe worked as a mechanic, a bartender, a music promoter, and a nature writer.

He calls his decision to buck family tradition and pursue a non-vocational path “risky but freeing,” though he admits he was a little lost at first. “I didn’t know what you do to become a professor.” When he decided to pursue his PhD, he considered only two schools: Washington State University, for its natural surroundings, and the University of Texas at Austin, for its folk-rock music scene. That way, he figured, if the sociology path did not work out, he could easily pursue one of his other passions. He did not even consider applying to the prestigious University of California, Berkeley, though one of his professors urged him to do so. At that time, Schwalbe had no concept of what he calls “the prestige factor,” and how going to a school like Berkeley might influence his professional future.

Most of the working-class PhDs interviewed for this article say they grew up knowing much less about the academic world in general than their middle-class peers. “You mean there’s school after this school?” was working-class academic Beverly Rockhill’s reaction when her undergraduate cohorts at Princeton started talking about doing a PhD.

The language of academia shocked Jodie Lawston more than anything. “They were talking very theoretically and using language I had never even dreamed of,” recalls the sunny-voiced Long Island native. She describes the students in her graduate program as being from wealthy families and “worlds ahead” in terms of vocabulary. Lawston found their theoretical lingo intimidating at first, but now pokes fun at the bulky phrases. Her answering-machine greeting instructs unsuspecting callers to leave their name, phone number, and “a brief ontological explanation of women’s existential dilemmas.”

“The Academy Is a Place for Ideas and Not for Activists.”

Jason Allen head shot
Jason Allen, an assistant research professor at Duke University, is the son of a miner and bakery factory worker. He believes his Yorkshire accent, which could have hindered his professional advancement in his native England, has helped him gain the respect of his American colleagues.

During one of her graduate seminars, Lawston suggested that scholars put social theory into practice. According to her, a classmate erupted, “The academy is a place for ideas and not for activists.” Lawston was stunned. She later heard a similar comment from another colleague.

Lawston, whose father is a construction worker, grew up having to deal with things like the phone being disconnected and the heat being cut off in the middle of the winter. “We were not philosophizing at the dinner table,” she laughs. She thinks some of her middle-class counterparts take a hands-off attitude toward social activism because they have not had to do without basic necessities. “Even though they study classism, that’s all they do — study it.” she says. “They don’t really struggle with it.”

Working-class academics themselves struggle with it in different ways. Monique Lyle, a PhD student in Duke University’s political science department, remembers being “really class-conscious” when she began her studies at the elite school. But for Lyle, class has always been a question of both money and race. “In a lot of ways, class distinctions are along racial lines,” notes Lyle, who is black.

Jason Allen, an assistant research professor at Duke, came to the United States from Barnsley, England, and earned his doctorate in exercise physiology from Louisiana State University. He lives with his pal, Gordon, a tomcat who paws for attention during our phone interview. Allen sums up the difference between American and English ideas about class this way: “In England, they care where you came from. In America, they care where you’re going.” Allen thinks American class distinctions are based more on money than birth, but, like Lyle, he also believes those distinctions are impacted heavily by race.

Allen, whose mother works in a bakery factory, has found that many American academics hold British people in high regard. He believes the Yorkshire accent that might have hindered his professional advancement in his native land actually worked to his advantage here in the States. “I moved from working class to upper-middle class in the blink of an eye,” he says.

The Discomfort of Straddling

Several working-class academics speak of feeling torn between the world of their families and that of their peers. Carol Williams had a tough time explaining her academic ambitions to her mother. “When I was raising money to attend my program in a master’s degree in England, she stated, ‘Why all this trouble and pain to get a few letters after your name?’” Williams recalls. “She didn’t comprehend the motives for advanced education, nor did she understand what exactly we did there.”

Lyle has had similar troubles. “[My mom] thinks I talk like a white girl,” she laughs. Though she has a strong relationship with her family and loves going home, she does not think they have a real sense of what she does. She feels removed from her extended family and worries that she does not fit in with the black working-class community where she grew up.

Despite the challenges they faced, most of the working-class PhDs interviewed say they benefited from going to graduate school. “I just had a great graduate-school experience,” says Adams. “I had a great job, a great boss  …  It just felt like a family. I made a lot of good friends.”

Most of Mulder’s experiences in academia have also been positive. Still, she admits, “I don’t know anybody else like me.” Mulder now teaches labor studies to workers and union members at a satellite campus of Indiana University, a job she got in part because of her unusual life path. “That’s precisely why they hired me,” she notes. “There are not too many PhDs that know how to be a worker.”

The Hybrid Advantage

The same family relationships that can complicate a working-class PhDs relationship to academia can also be a vital source of support. In working-class families where no one has attended college, there is often a sense of vicarious accomplishment in watching one of their own go all the way.

Paige Adams’s mother has been her biggest cheerleader, urging her to pursue the college education she herself always wanted. “She always felt that she missed out by not going to college,” says Adams.

Jodie Lawston thought of dropping out many times during those first few years of graduate school, but her mother’s words helped her stay the course: “You gotta do it ’cause we never did.”

In the end, having a foot in both worlds might be one of the working-class academic’s greatest assets. “I’m resigned to a sort of hybrid status, which, as I grow older, I recognize gives me a unique and underrepresented intellectual perspective on many issues,” Rockhill says.

Feistel, who now works in educational administration, says her experiences have made her more understanding of the challenges facing working-class students. “I’m in a better position to understand a working-class student,” she remarks. “I’ve been on both sides of the system, and I know how the system works.”

“Mostly what makes me different is a consciousness of what work really means,” says Law, whose father made his living digging basements with a bulldozer. “To hear some tenured professor talk about their work environment like they’re some kind of miner … it really hurts me.”

Other working-class academics, like Schwalbe and Allen, say their life experiences have made them extremely adaptable. “You can move in almost any environment and function with almost any group of people,” says Allen.

Jodie Lawston, who felt “so inferior” to her middle-class colleagues when she started graduate school, now views her working-class background as an advantage. “I think it gives you a stronger perspective on everything. I think you’re able to relate to people better.”

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

Working Class Academics List

MARKETPLACE >

This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class by C.L. Barney Dews (editor) and Carolyn L. Law (editor)

Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class by Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey

Update, February 12, 2013: Edited and moved story from our old site to the current one.

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Measure for pleasure


To Mr. Shea, author and director of The Training Institute for Suicidal Assessment, the single obstacle that stands between humans and sustainable happiness is knowledge of the “human matrix.”

In his book entitled Happiness Is. Unexpected Answers to Practical Questions in Curious Times, Mr. Shea conceptualizes happiness as a balancing act: our biologies, perspectives, relationships, environments, and spiritual quests are interacting processes, which, when healthily balanced, provide solutions for realizing ongoing happiness.  

Said the author: “I believe that the human matrix model opens a world of possibilities for transforming pain — from the pain of everyday frustration to the vastly intense angst of  darkenss — into an enduring sense of happiness.  Within its intracies, compassion, laughter and imagination are forever wed.”

—Toyin Adeyemi

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Rev-ed up


If you have chosen to read this article, then you find yourself in a privileged position because here, at InTheFray, I have decided to announce my introduction to the team by coming out.

I hope that by coming out I will gain respect. I hope that people will listen to my voice and interact creatively without stereotyping me and
labeling me.

By coming out in such a forum as this, I hope to appeal to your sense of fairness. I know that there are people like me on TV and in the theater. We have our own radio stations and magazines. Some of us wear peculiar clothing, but most of us are regular people who live regular lives.

You see what I am trying to say is this: I want to, erm, well, admit publicly to the fact that I’m…

OK, I will try and get to the point. It’s not easy because once I make my announcement and put it out there in public, then I’m afraid you will judge me and color my views with your own perceptions of my “type.”

Ok, here we go. I want to tell the world that I am — a Baptist pastor!

Now I wonder if it would have helped my cause if I was announcing that I was gay? But I’m not. The fact is that I am an ordained Baptist pastor in Australia.

You may wonder why I was so apprehensive in alerting you to my status. From my vantage point as an Englishman now residing in Australia, I have been able to witness the rise of conservative evangelicals in the U.S. and it scares me.

I follow my vocation because I believe that the Bible is still relevant for today; not my own particular spin on the Bible; not my political ideology glossed over by putting the label “Christian” on it, but simply the words of the Bible considered and lived out.

I joined the team at ITF because I want to add my voice to the growing realm of writers and thinkers on the Internet. I am left-wing in my politics, and I believe that socialism still has a powerful message if only the left could agree on core fundamentals.

I do not want you to label me and box me in. If you stridently disagree with anything that I may say over the coming weeks, then please respond freely. I will not ignore anyone, no matter what your viewpoint. All I ask is that I receive the same respect in return. For too long, the American conservative wing of the church, often personified in the Moral Majority, have dictated how Christianity is perceived and, in particular, how a Christian political viewpoint is perceived. I am here to take small steps to change that.

I do not claim to have easy answers, but I am prepared to ask questions and to attempt to mold answers through dialogue. I am not liberal either, in case you were wondering. What am I? Who am I? Well, let’s see if we can explore those questions together. Why not look upon this as a journey. I will consider current affairs, indigenous issues in Australia, the relationship between Britain, Australia, and the U.S. I am also happy to talk about life in Australia, and I am MORE than happy to talk about soccer, which is my consuming passion.

Life is not meant to be easy, but it is meant to be lived. In living together, we may begin to see beyond the externals and discover that we each have treasures within that will enrich all of us as we get closer in dialogue.

Please feel free to email me with suggestions for content that you may wish to see explored from a British, Australian or Christian perspective.

Until next week,
Rev. Les

—Les Chatwin

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Robin Williams and the tyranny of (the) right


Michaele Shapiro’s article brought to light the clash between a post-modern, liberal tolerance and the  seemingly narrow-minded, blinkered view of the conservative religious right.

What I want to do firstly, as a Baptist pastor, is to bring to the table the concept that not all Christians operate in such a fixed world, nor do all Christians respond with such rapid knee-jerk reactions.

What bothers me is that there are key words that will automatically provoke a vehement response from the religious right. With the media access granted to this bloc in the U.S., their views are much more clearly propagated than they are in Australia.

In an Australian context, I have to work to get a Christian voice heard and so I consider other people’s points of view; I listen; I dialogue; I seek to understand; I seek to persuade and I seek to build relationships and bridges. Does this mean that I compromise my worldview? By no means! Does it make me a liberal? I sincerly hope not. What it does mean is that I work hard to understand my own thinking and engage it with that of others.

It seems that in the U.S., the religious right, in particular, has a ready made populace who want to hear these views expounded and so they have become lazy in their thinking and rhetoric. It is particularly sad that they have missed the point in the SpongeBob SquarePants debacle and have opened themselves up to ridicule.

I find it irresponsible when Christians leap in with slogans and heated views and, then, when they are attacked, they file it away as “persecution.” The Christian worldview may be unfairly critqued at times, but often it has more to do with half-baked thinking than it has to do with any sense of attack.

Please understand that there is a core of Christianity that wants to engage at a deeper level. I am part of InTheFray to make my voice known and to learn from others. I believe, from my vantage point in Australia, that Americans need to be exposed to a broader range of media that doesn’t just reflect insular views dictated to by a culture that is still largely dominated by right-wing Christianity.

—Les Chatwin
les_chatwin@inthefray.com

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Who’s afraid of Robin Williams?


Alessandra Stanley’s piece today in the International Herald Tribune is a reassuring reminder that no matter how domesticated the Academy Awards may have appeared Sunday night, plenty of inquisitive minds are still alive and well. An inexhaustible fuel sustains such dissenters, their sharpest tool a keen sense of humor.

Stanley makes a reference to the five-second delay, which serves as a cushion for network self-censorship should any unacceptable spontaneity occur during the live awards ceremony. However, other forms of “editing” take place behind the scenes at the Oscars, as was the case with presenter and comedian Robin Williams.

Williams made his entrance with a piece of tape covering his mouth, which he ripped off in order to present the award. Stanley reports that a song Williams had prepared to sing at the Oscars had been censored by ABC executives as well as producer Gil Cates:

“Williams, the presenter of the Academy Award for best animated feature, decided last week that his one minute on stage would be a prime time to lampoon the conservative critic James Dobson, whose group Focus on the Family last month criticized the character SpongeBob SquarePants for appearing in a video about tolerance that the group called ‘pro-homosexual.’”

Williams called upon composer Marc Shaiman and writer Scott Wittman for material. The first draft included the lines:

“Pinocchio’s had his nose done! Sleeping Beauty is popping pills!
The Three Little Pigs ain’t kosher! Betty Boop works Beverly Hills!”

When Cates advised Shaiman to make the song “less political,” Shaiman directed the lyrics away from politics and toward gossip:

“Fred Flintstone is dyslexic, Jessica Rabbit is really a man, Olive Oyl is really anorexic, and Casper is in the Ku Klux Klan!”

Shaiman’s efforts weren’t enough. Last Thursday ABC’s broadcast standards and practices officials objected to the “sexual tone,” potential offensive remarks toward minorities, and suggestions of the “glorification of drug use” in the revised lyrics, as in the line “the Road Runner’s hooked on speed.”

Rather than cutting 11 of the song’s 36 lines, Williams, Shaiman and Wittman decided not to present the song at all. Williams remarked at an interview on Saturday,

“For a while you get mad, then you get over it. We thought that they got the irony of it. I guess not.”

It turns out that the perfect accessory to an Academy Awards tuxedo is white tape.

—Michaele Shapiro

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