The Upstairs/Downstairs World of Education Under COVID

The education workplace feels more and more like Gosford Park

COVID has been a test of American society, one that we have completely failed. It has also further exposed pre-existing realities that were not as close to the surface. If anything, it has exposed what a grossly unequal and stratified society that we live in.

In areas where public schools have been closed, private schools have been open (including the one where I teach.) Actually opening schools in a safe manner under COVID requires monetary support and funding, something being deprived from public schools. Poorer students are less likely to have reliable internet and to live in place where schooling from home is comfortable. It's more likely that their parents have to work outside of the home. They were already struggling, now they are underwater. Meanwhile, wealthier parents in schools that are shuttered can afford to be pod people and pay someone to be their children's governess. It's like a return to the 19th century. On top of this, they have the kind of white collar professional jobs that allow them to work from home, allowing them to avoid steep day care costs if they are not pod people.

Others are not so lucky. Not only must they work outside of the home and sometimes confront angry customers who refuse to cover their faces, they are more likely to live in the kind of crowded circumstances where the disease spreads easiest. That's the result of the country's crisis in affordable housing, which was hurting people before but is now killing them. 

Those of us who are lucky enough to have better housing and steady work during this mess can still see the hierarchy play out in more subtle ways in the workplace. This is especially the case in education. Administrators get to sit in their offices without being exposed, often without their masks on, while teachers are there in the trenches in the classroom. The admins also get to make decisions about opening and closing, which impact them the least. They can make those choices without bothering to take the concerns of their faculty into account. After all, they're just the people teaching the students. 

Meanwhile those teachers have completely altered their pedagogy and teaching materials. We have been forced to do our jobs in entirely different ways that we were never trained for. In the hybrid classroom we get to try to teach in two different worlds at once, real and virtual. Sometimes this means constructing two lessons for the same class. Our reward will be firings, furloughs, and pay cuts. The government is refusing to help state and local governments, meaning public schools and universities are screwed. Private schools are seeing students leave due to the cost and fund-raising dry up in the midst of a recession. 

In higher ed there are stories of universities slashing whole departments and tenure track faculty members. Those same institutions still have football coaches who are the highest paid public employees in their state. They still possess an army of deans whose only purpose in life is to make their faculties  do stupid shit just to justify their useless positions. 

I know a lot of teachers and profs who are furious about this situation. I know multiple educators very close to me who contracted COVD at institutions that were irresponsible in their handling of the virus. Without any radical action the inequalities in education, already festering, are going to defeat any possibilities for future change. I foresee a scenario where teachers start quitting en masse due to burnout, and public schools start de-professionalizing teaching by plugging in untrained employees who can at least apply a pre-set digital curriculum. At the college level adjunctification will overtake the totality of entire disciplines. Those fortunate enough to live in the right zip code will still have a good public school education, and will get accepted into universities what have not been converted into glorified vocational schools.

The only way forward is to join together and fight. It's time to tell the "bone spurs" types among our colleagues that they need to orient their dissatisfaction away from unproductive spite towards action. It's time to tell the "company men" among our colleagues that the company will throw them away if they feel like it. It's time to tell our bosses that they need to make a shared sacrifice, and if they want our labor, they have to listen to us. It's time to demand that the government actually fund public education and do right by our students. 

Pulp, "Common People"

Nothing was conventional about Pulp. Their lead singer, Jarvis Cocker, was a beanpole in giant nerd glasses whose lyrics discussed sexuality in extremely real and uncomfortable ways. The band's sound, with plenty of synths and the guitars relegated to moods and textures on most tracks, was completely out of step with the go-hard rock riffing of 1990s grunge and Britpop. They were one of those bands that if you liked them, you felt like you were in a club (at least in America.) Whenever I met a fellow Pulp fan back in the 90s I always felt an immediate bond with them.

Nobody obsesses over social class like the Brits, and so its not surprising that maybe the best pop song ever about class comes this literate band hailing from Sheffield. On "Common People" Cocker took a slight break from his romance and sex obsessions to deliver a staggering anthem about what it's like to be a common person confronted by a rich hipster poseur. Because Pulp are not a riff-rocking band, the anthemic chorus is almost orchestral, the guitars and synths climbing to a fever pitch as Cocker hits the high notes as he sings "You'll never live like common people."

While the song is a tell off to a rich girl who "came from Greece with a thirst for knowledge," there is a strain of sadness, rather than defiance to it. The line "you'll never watch your life slide out of view" is on my mind as I am in middle age. Working class people very early on in their lives are aware of limits, of their ideal life having to give way to reality, a moment where the life they see their life "slide out of view." Another painfully real line is Cocker saying this rich girl will never know what it's like "to live your life with no meaning or control." The wealthy are usually unaware of the security and options their wealth gives them. As Cocker sneers, "If you call your dad he can stop it all." That's not an option for common people.

It's easy to see why this was a hit in the UK, and why it went nowhere in the US, a nation constantly denying the existence of its social class hierarchy. This song has been on my mind a lot recently. The Kavanaugh hearings were a pretty clear example of how this nation's ruling class exists above the rules that the rest of us must follow. The people who went to Georgetown Prep will never live like common people. I only wish Americans could see this as clearly as folks across the pond can.

Hollowed Out (My Hometown As A Microcosm Of The "New Economy")

The Chautauqua Pavilion, a relic of my hometown's Progressive Era boom years

When I was back in my rural Nebraska hometown of Hastings last week I had the pleasure to go on a thirteen mile bike ride around the town with my dad. We went to pretty much every corner of the town of 24,000, and I was able to see more vividly than from my car window what's been happening in it.

Hastings is not typical economically, but many of the broader trends are remarkably visible there nonetheless. The town initially grew up in the Gilded Age as a railroad junction where the Burlington and Union Pacific came together. Growing up timing a trip across town had to include some extra minutes to account for waiting for a train, since there was no under or overpass on the Union Pacific as there was on the Burlington. After the economic depression of the 1890s the town boomed in the early twentieth century. It was my great fortune to have grown up in a town that had its youth in the Progressive Era, which meant the library, parks, and schools were all well-made and well-supported.

It's economic high point came in the 1940s, with the building of a massive naval ammunition plant on the edge of town for World War II. (My dad's father, too old for the draft, worked there.) The city's population increased by a third, but that would be the last major economic boost. After the war small industry assisted by proximity to the railroads remained (and still does), and the city persisted as a commercial center for the surrounding rural area.

However, when the interstate was built through the state, it went through larger Grand Island, 24 miles north. There is a line of broken down and abandoned motels on highway six in Hastings attesting to the significance of this decision. Then, in the 1980s, Nebraska's farm economy took a major hit, forcing many farmers into foreclosure. This is evident in the small towns in Hastings' orbit, which mostly look beaten down and half-abandoned. The industrial sector is still thriving (unlike elsewhere), but the commercial economy has greatly declined. The Union Pacific re-routed their tracks to bypass the town in the 1990s, which seemed to say something about its reduced place in the world.

What you see in my hometown now is something you see around the country: the squeezing out of the middle. I was lucky to be from a middle class family that stayed up during the squeeze, others were not. My old neighborhood is evidence of this. It was built in the 1960s, consisting of very small, box-shaped ranch houses. Growing up it was solidly lower-middle class and people owned their homes. Now many of the homes are rentals, as home ownership even in a market as cheap as Nebraska's is increasingly difficult.

Businesses that cater to the disappearing middle (and especially lower-middle) are also struggling. The local Perkins and Applebee's restaurants are closing, in the midst of what is supposed to be an economic boom. Allen's, the local department store with its own grocery store is now closing everything except for food. The last non-box store general clothing store (Herberger's) is closing too. (I got a couple of things there and mourned the place I bought all my school clothes as a kid.) The local men's store and tailor is still going downtown, but anyone not wanting to buy a men's suit either has to go to Wal-Mart or drive 24 miles to Grand Island. Herberger's was the last holdout in the ironically named Imperial Mall, now a giant dead rotting hulk visible from my parents' front window. Behind it are an abandoned theater, grocery store, and restaurant, likely to be ruins forever.

Many more local establishments are gone now too. A legendarily wild bar with a dance floor called the Second Street Slammer, due to the bars on its windows, is also closed. So is the local family restaurant, the OK Cafe, as well as Bernardo's, the steak house where I marked all kinds of family milestones, from my sister's wedding rehearsal dinner to my grandparents' fortieth wedding anniversary. Ponderosa Lanes is no longer setting up the bowling pins.

It's not all doom and gloom, of course. The local bookstore, Prairie Books, is still going downtown after the death of one of its owners. The beautiful historic municipal baseball park, Duncan Field, now has a summer league team. However, the places that are new and thriving are the ones catering to the affluent, rather than the middle. There are two coffee shops downtown, a new fine dining restaurant that takes reservations (!), two (!) microbreweries and old building lofts being converted into condos, including the home of an old brewery that had never been occupied by anything in my lifetime. Perhaps these innovations will attract the educated professionals who rarely come back after growing up in Hastings, and who do not stay long if they move in from away. Be that as it may, it is obvious that in Hastings, like everywhere else, those at the top are doing well for themselves.

Things are not so great for those squeezed down. For a town with a very low unemployment rate, Hastings has blocks and blocks of dilapidated housing, some of it built in a temporary, slap-dash fashion for war plant workers in the 40s. Working-class neighborhoods look worse for wear, some scruffier, some practically squalid. I got wind of the literal squeeze at the county fair, when I overheard a conversation about a factory worker experiencing wage theft. The low wages that make Hastings attractive to bosses make living tough for workers. Now even Wal-Mart might be too expensive to shop in. There are now three dollar stores in town, one in the cancerous growth of box stores on the edge of town, two others in working class areas on the other side of the tracks where other stores and restaurants lie vacant. 

That vacancy can be seen elsewhere. While associational life in Hastings might be stronger than in many other communities, it is much less pronounced than it used to be. At the county fair there were many, many, fewer civic organizations with tables than 20 years ago, and all of them had conservative religious or political (or both) orientations. A got a graphic glimpse of this when biking past what was once the Knights of Columbus Hall, which is now an auction house touting the sale of guns and ammunition. The Tribune, the Monday-Saturday daily paper, still lives but it is thinner than boarding house soup. When I attended 11 o'clock mass with my parents at one of the two Catholic churches I was shocked at how few people were there, even accounting for it being summer. (There is a megachurch in the aforementioned cancerous growth on the edge of town, so perhaps this represents more a shift than a lack of engagement.)

Associational life is a plumb necessity in an isolated Plains town like Hastings, but even there it is going the way of the dodo. While people what they call "the Heartland" often feel apart from the broader currents of American society, they are not. My hometown, like so many others, is one more atomized and divided by class than ever before. At least they have IPAs.

The Consolation of Classical Music

I'll admit that Bugs Bunny first gave me an appreciation for classical music

I write a lot about pop and rock music on this blog, but I have a pretty wide range of listening interests, including jazz and classical music. Those two genres of music are notably declining in popularity in our poptimistic age, which treats love of anything intricate and refined as somehow undemocratic. This flusters me mostly because I came up in a rural lower-middle class world where being able to appreciate music like this was a way of displaying one's refinement in a positive, not negative way. Now I must live in a topsy-turvy world where the children of affluent suburbs who went to Vassar and Amherst and now reside in Manhattan pretend at being populist by applying the cultural theory they learned there to The Real Housewives shows. They get to have pedestrian cultural tastes and simultaneously show their class superiority. That way they can knock down the strivers who are attracted to what was once elite culture while basking in their own moral and class superiority.

Okay, okay, I'll stop griping about my class resentments and get down to business. Classical music has a power that is difficult to match. I find it capable of plumbing depths of emotion that other kinds of music can't even get close to. Ever since election day I have been returning to classical music for comfort and for wallowing. It can put my mind at ease, but it can also get me weepy, depending on what I need that day. Here's a sample of stuff that works for me:

Samuel Barber, "Adagio For Strings"

Beautiful. Devastating. I feel like this is what they should be playing on the radio right now on a 24 hour loop. I have never heard any piece of music that sounds more like my soul in a state of mourning. I have a hard time even articulating something to say about this work of music, it moves me so much.

Albinoni, "Adagio in G Minor"

This YouTube link contains an ad for online therapy. That just about says it all, doesn't it? Evidently the original baroque composition was just a fragment discovered in Dresden after World War II, which was then worked into a real piece by Albinoni's biographer. That makes sense, since this is the sound of devastation, and Dresden was devastated like few other cities in the war.

Shostakovich, "Symphony 5, Third Movement (Largo)"

Like a lot of other modernist artists in the Soviet Union, Dmitri Shostakovich faced persecution once Stalin started pushing Socialist Realism. For his fifth symphony he would have to create something to please the state, or else. Most of it is upbeat and "heroic," especially the fourth movement, which he intended to be a ridiculous parody of "inspiring" music. The third movement, however, is Shostakovich's requiem for his friends jailed and murdered by the Soviet state. I remember hearing it played live at the symphony and fighting to control my emotions. Nowadays I get extra emotional thinking about how his dedication has managed to live on while Stalin's body still molders in the grave. I take my hope where I can find it.

Beethoven, "Symphony 6, First Movement"

Alright, enough of the mopey music. I used to love the real headbanging Beethoven music, like the 5th or the 9th, but in my middle age I have attained a huge love of the 6th, or "Pastoral" symphony. The Romantic movement was obsessed with nature, and it never was personified as gorgeously as in this symphony. The glory and beauty of the natural world is mostly muted in the winter time, so I put this symphony on to get a taste of it.

Mozart, "Marriage of Figaro Overture"

Bach may be more satisfying, Beethoven more emotional, but neither is as joyous as Mozart. There is something in his music that I can't quite name that just makes me glad to be alive. Mozart just makes me smile. His joyful, light touch might be expressed best in the overture to Figaro. I dare you to be in a bad mood after listening to this.

21st Century Victorians

Great news gang, the great Jacobin has published an essay I submitted. I am very proud of it and very happy to have something published by such an institution. It's called "21st Century Victorians," and it's about the parallels between modern bourgeois moralism and that of the 19th century, as dissimilar as these two eras might seem. I would love it if you checked it out, if you already haven't. Here's a passage below that I like:

"Intensive parenting expectations continue well after children leave infancy. Young children are encouraged to participate in costly club sports, and parents to give up their free time to support them. These activities take time and money, two resources working people lack.

This proliferation of organized activities represents a form of improvement: a child’s free time is now completely subsumed by Bildung. And the ability to provide these opportunities to kids is portrayed as a reflection of a family’s morality, not their economic situation. Just as Victorian women had to learn to play the piano and speak Italian — showing off a refinement unavailable to the other levels of society — modern kids play soccer, learn Mandarin, and volunteer at a local charity.

But the capstone of the modern quest for Bildung is surely the college application process. There is no good nineteenth-century analogue for this ridiculous new ritual, although Dickens would’ve been perfectly able to satirize its inherent absurdity: Millions act as if a system weighted very heavily toward privilege is in fact some kind of meritocracy, and that a person’s worth can be judged by the prestige of the school where they have been accepted."

Untangling Class, Race, and "The Good Old Days"

Quite a few trees have been felled and servers burned out in the cause of explaining the support for Donald Trump's presidential bid. As is usually the case with complex questions, people are looking for monocausal answers. Some in the mainstream media have gone out of their way not to talk about racism as a factor in Trump support, preferring to see him as the candidate of downtrodden working class whites. Others (more rightly) have highlighted the obvious face that white racial resentment is a huge element of Trump's support, but also tend to see talk of formerly middle class workers longing for the "good old days" to be a fig leaf for white supremacist yearnings. Though the latter group may be much more correct in their outlook, they also conveniently set aside the legitimate reasons so many would in fact pine for "the good old days." Not understanding that will make it very difficult to defeat Trump.

In the first place, the white racial resentment driving Trumpism is obvious, and the evidence for its strength grows with each passing day. A recent article in Salon shows this very starkly. Even without the statistics handy, the fact that working class people of color are not supporting Trump is a pretty glaring sign that his appeal is in no way purely or even mostly class based. As the article shows, Trump supporters are more likely to hold negative views of African Americans, Muslims, Hispanics, and the LGBTQ than even other Republicans, and higher opinions of white people as well.

At the same time, Trump supporters look to the past, when things were better for "people like us." In my mind that's why I call them Archie Bunkers. If you remember All In The Family, Archie was always railing against the same people Trump voters don't like, except for Muslims, who had yet to become as vilified by his ilk. Every show started with he and his wife Edith singing "Those Were The Days," a song that longed for a former time when "men were men" and there was no "welfare state." Then as now, this pining for the past before the social revolutions of the 1960s is politically reactionary when put in those terms. Archie himself benefitted from the white affirmative action aspects of the New Deal, from his union job to a house whose mortgage one could assume was backed by the FHA. It's when others benefitted from the welfare state that he got mad, a pretty typical occurrence after the Great Society among Nixon's "silent majority."

But the old Archie Bunker still lived in the postwar world of high paying blue collar jobs and a growing middle class. Large swathes of the country in the last forty years have experienced great economic decline, from the Great Plains farm belt to Appalachia to the Rust Belt cities of the Great Lakes. The Rust Belt declines have had an even harder impact on African Americans (just look at Detroit, Cleveland, and Flint), but it is working class whites who have leveraged these declines into Trumpist anger. Whereas deindustrialization kept other groups from getting the entree into the middle class that they sought, the same factors have been pushing whites in many areas out of the middle class that had just been entered into by their parents' generation. The anger over losing has been transferred onto the "other," which Trump has exploited. Loss of economic power can be blamed on immigrant laborers and foreign trade, not on the vicissitudes of capitalism.

When a lot of older white folks answer poll questions and say life in America was better before 1965, they're not necessarily pining for an older social order. My own hometown in the farm belt of Nebraska is a place that was certainly a lot better off economically before the massive blows to the farm economy in the 1980s. However, it is possible for voters to be driven by BOTH racial resentment and economic privation.  The latter is not imaginary, and the notable spike in deaths caused by drugs, alcohol, and suicide in working class whites shows the human toll this is all taking. But a lot of the same people who are upset at seeing their towns crumble as the jobs have moved away also have plenty of hate in their hearts and cling to a threatened white supremacy which they used to count on.  Working class people of color continue to have it a lot worse, but the discrepancy is not enough to satisfy the need by many white people in this country to be in a special slot on the hierarchy.

The thing is, a lot of those whites unhappy at the economic turn are not turning to hate. The Democratic party has to reach those voters. I am not making the usual call for Democrats to appeal to working class whites at all costs, because those days are over and the Democrats ought to prioritize those loyal to them. Instead, I want the party to solidify its connections to those working class white voters willing to be in a multiracial coalition. While there is a stereotype that the white working class is overwhelmingly Republican, that is actually skewed by the numbers from the South. Outside of the South, it's much less the case. The Democrats can use the "good old days" narrative in a more positive way by arguing for worker protections, strong unions, and support for college and child care. Trump is actually handing them an opportunity, I only hope that they take it.

America's Brezhnev Years (Continued)

Vintage Soviet anti-alcohol poster

One of my favorite theories is that the United States has entered its Brezhnev period.  In case you don't know, Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, presiding over its long decline.  While he enjoyed giving himself medals and flexing Soviet power, the system began to rot and most people, even in the party itself, stopped believing in the party ideology.  Similarly, our political class profess to love freedom and democracy, all while democratic institutions crumble.  Elections are bought and sold, and voters can't be bothered to show up at the polls.  Gridlock and acrimony have led to a do-nothing government no longer even able to pass the most basic legislation.  Social institutions are hardly faring better. Our universities, once the pride of the world, have become money-grubbing enterprises whose high cost make debtors out of their students.  Roads crack and bridges fall due to lack of funds. As labor unions have been crushed, workers are seeing their wages shrink while the wealthy see unprecedented gains.  Abroad America's failed War On Terror has, like the USSR's ill-advised invasion of Afghanistan, exposed a once mighty empire's clay feet.  Belief in institutions has been broken, and the fact the military and police routinely come out on top when Americans are polled about institutions that they trust shows an authoritarian longing that belies all of the democracy talk.

This week brings more news to confirm my thesis.  A recent study found that middle-aged whites are now dying at a HIGHER rate than before.  This death rate is increasingly especially among the least educated, and death is coming at the hands of suicide, heroin, and alcohol.  I wish the data was broken down by region, because I suspect these trends are most pronounced in the Rust Belt and in rural areas.  Low educated whites used to be able to find work in farming and factory labor, work that could actually pay pretty well, too.  Those whites who are currently middle-aged and low-educated grew up at a time when they were told they could quit school and go right to work (a lot of guys I went to high school with did this), but deindustrialization has pretty much destroyed that avenue.  They put themselves at a disadvantage expecting a decent option, but then found themselves with the rug pulled out from under them.  Our society does, however, provide easy access to the tools for obliterating the mind and providing temporary pleasure.  Cheap booze and now cheap heroin make for tempting escapes.

I find this interesting because Brezhnev-era Russia also saw a similar rise in alcoholism and increase in mortality.  Things got so bad that when Gorbachev came to power he started a campaign to reduce alcohol consumption.  That plan would be short-lived, and in the 1990s after the fall of Communism, both mortality and alcoholism would rise in tandem, until recently.  Just as the Soviet system failed to provide a way forward for its workers in an age of stagnation, the shrinking prospects for so many Americans are also finding an outlet in drugs, booze, and eventually, early death.

As the Berlin Wall fell so many people in this country acted as if America was the great victor in the Cold War.  Perhaps that was not really the case, and that one of the Superpowers just happened to lose about thirty years before the other one.  Or maybe in the coming years America after the Cold War will be compared to Britain after World War II: a dying empire.

Dusty Rhodes and Mid-80s Working Class Populism

Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive, a study of the white working class in the 1970s, is one of my favorite recent works of history, not least for his ability to weave in popular culture.  He ends his story, however, in 1984, seeing that year as marking a kind of end point for a white working class culture rooted in progressive populism.  I think he's mostly right, but there were still some glimpses of that progressive populism after '84.

I was reminded of that fact with the passing of Dusty Rhodes, who was big during the time when I watched pro wrestling most intensely (mid to late 80s).  At the time I was more interested in Hulk Hogan, Bruce "the Barber" Beefcake, Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka, and the Ultimate Warrior, and didn't know much about Rhodes.  In the wake of his death I saw his famous "hard times" promo from 1985, and was transfixed.

I shit you not, this actually puts tears in my eyes.  Yes Rhodes is dressed outlandishly and sloppily at the same time, speaks in an odd lisp with street preacher slang and cadence, and has a scarred forehead beneath his ridiculous blond perm.  However, he speaks with real conviction and real experience about being a "plumber's son" who understands the plight of mill and auto workers losing their jobs.  The part where he puts his hand out and asks his viewers to touch the screen and give him the love he needs to defeat Ric Flair (who was Reaganesque in his flaunting of fancy suits and Rolexes) puts chills down my spine.  It was as if he was trying to channel all of the suffering experienced by working people in the 80s in order to defeat their tormenters

It might seem silly to cry at an usually large man with such a ridiculous appearance saying these things, but he was articulating something that the more "serious" figures at the time preferred to ignore.  Mario Cuomo's barn burning speech at the 1984 DNC is another good example of mid-80s working class progressive populism, but fewother politicians were speaking like this any more.  I am increasingly beginning to think that the ultimate triumph of neoliberal ideology actually came in the 1990s, rather than the 1980s.  Even in the height of the Reagan Era the old time working class ethos was still being openly expressed by everyone from pro-wrestlers to Bruce Springsteen.  In the 90s the Democratic Party basically turned its back on labor and embraced globalization and austerity, making neoliberalism the only game in town.

When, in future years, we look back to the past and name those who fought against the brutal triumph of unfettered capitalism, we just might be remembering a battle scarred pro wrestler who was a plumber's son.

The Misplaced Media Obsession With Elite Universities

My parents both attended Kearney State College, now known as the University of Nebraska-Kearney.  Regional state universities like this rarely factor into our higher ed discourse.

Over the years I've noticed something very strange about our public discourse on higher education, namely that a massively inordinate amount of attention is paid to elite universities.  This is especially the case in high-brow publications like the New York Times, which once had a whole blog dedicated to the college application process.  That same paper will print articles about said process on a regular basis, including a Frank Bruni column last weekend.

Bruni writes as if the phenomenon of parents pushing to get their kids into the Ivy League is much more widespread than it actually is.  At one point he even acknowledges this, but doesn't think the schools that most students attend are worthy of comment.  The vast majority of American college students attend second and third tier state universities or community colleges, but their institutions and what's happening to them rarely make the news.  Those who attend private schools are more likely to matriculate at a small college little known outside of its region than at the likes of Harvard.

These small colleges and non-flagship state schools are currently experiencing a storm of epic proportions.  The recent closing of Sweet Briar, probably the most well known of the recent scores of small colleges that have died, has brought out at least some discussion of the problem.  In states like Wisconsin, Scott Walker has slashed the university budget in a way that is especially nasty for regional universities.  UW-Eau Claire is buying out hundreds of employees, and UW-Rock County is looking at professor layoffs.  The flagships have resources beyond state funding to draw from, and can more safely jack up their tuitions because they are so desirable.  Not so much for regional universities.

When I was a professor, both contingent and tenure track, I taught at regional state universities.  Although I never attended one, my parents did, and their degrees brought them out of the working and into the middle class.  About half of my students at both schools were, like my parents, the first people in their families to go to college.  Despite the presumptions about the supposedly meritocratic nature of our elite universities, my best students would have been the best practically anywhere else.  There is an insanely misbegotten belief that everyone who is capable of getting accepted to a top school applies to them.  Those that think this have no idea of how classism and regionalism work in this country.  When I was in high school the idea of applying to an Ivy never crossed my mind, it would have been as likely for me to go to the moon.  My intuition was that people in places like that would look down on a person like me, and time has not changed that assumption one iota.

I was luckier that others because my parents could financially support my college education.  Many students don't have that option, or have to stay near their parents or even financially support them themselves while still in school.  Others go back to school later in life to get an education.  They don't have the option of packing up and moving to a dorm on some leafy campus in another state.  These students depend upon regional state universities for the opportunity to have a better life.  These same universities are now being gutted and turned into the equivalent of glorified vocational schools. We are going back to the bad old days of higher education, when a true college education was open only to a privileged few.

Here's a challenge to all the pundits and publications out there: start writing about the kinds of schools that most college students attend.  Yes, I know these are the kinds of places you wouldn't dare let your own precious children even apply to less they sully your reputation, but these institutions matter a whole lot more than Harvard does for a person like me.  The parts of our university system that do the most to promote social mobility are under attack, but we spend the majority of our time fixated on those that maintain the elite under the guise of "meritocracy."  It's time to stop doing that.

How To Tell If You're a Declasse Academic

I realize this post might be arcane to those who have never worked in the academic field, but bear with me here, since I think it touches on some general social class issues in this country.

One interesting thing I've noticed about academics is that while almost all of them drive sensible cars, live in modest homes, and buy their clothing off the rack (at least in the humanities), there are still some subtle and very powerful class markers at play. I've had many conversations over the years with friends sharing stories about how oblivious our advisors and committee members could be to our economic situations, and got talking about how some academics are "to the manner born": they grew up in academic families, or at least among the well-educated upper bourgeoisie in places that hold cultural cachet. (i.e., not Nebraska) Having an academic job requires navigating its culture, which is awfully tough.  These days, with the jobs drying up, the cultural knowledge and connections that come from a bourgeois background are more important than ever.

While they don't make a lot of money relative to others with advanced education, members of the academic profession still attach a lot of importance to the accoutrements of the high class life. This often made academic culture hard for me to navigate at times; I grew up in the rural petite bourgeoisie, i.e. eating casseroles instead of cavier. I never really thought I was a member of the club, that I didn't mesh with its culture or priorities.  I guess I was right all along, and I wonder how many people who have been squeezed out of the profession in recent years felt the same way.  Without further ado, here are some questions that can help you find out which camp you belong in.

You might be a declasse academic if:

You or any of your family members has ever had a job where you "washed up" after coming home from work.
(Thanks to Brian I. for this one. I'm amazed at the number of people in my profession who've never had to get their hands dirty outside of gardening.)

You actually worked jobs during the summer in grad school to support yourself.
(I can't believe the number of profs who expect their students to magically conjure money to support themselves while researching in the summer.)

Before you went to grad school the only categories you knew for wine were "red" or "white."

You have never used the word "summer" as a verb (as in "we summered in the Hamptons this year").

Members of your family were drafted during Vietnam and couldn't get out of it. (Like a lot of other guys, my relatives didn't want to go, but they didn't have a choice.)

Getting a Ph.D. makes you the most educated member of your family.

Growing up you took family vacations by car (not plane) to locations in the US (not Europe or elsewhere if you took vacations at all.)

You or your family members wear or have worn "trucker caps," overalls, or cowboy boots not as ironic fashion statements but for purely practical reasons.

Your family pressured you NOT to go to the Ivy League for college, because why would you want to be around those snobby rich assholes who think their shit don't stink?  (That's the message I got from my parents, at least.)

People in your social circle growing up viewed New York City as a sink of iniquity, not the shining center of the universe.

Your idea of a good restaurant is a place that has "good food and a lot of it for a reasonable price."

You drank Pabst Blue Ribbon before it became a hipster beer. (I have to admit, I totally jumped on the hipster bandwagon with this one.)

You don't utter asinine phrases like "I don't think I know any Republicans." (I actually heard this said before the 2004 election and wanted to put my head through the wall. No wonder the Left got thumped for so long! So many on our side saw conservatives in zoological terms.)

You live in a Midwestern college town like Champaign-Urbana and you don't constantly complain about how it isn't New York or San Francisco.  In fact, you really like it.

You don't drop your alma mater's name into conversations, or automatically expect other people to know about it.

When you go home for the holidays you feel more and more estranged from the values of your upbringing with each passing year, and your family doesn't seem to understand who you've become.

You've never had a conversation comparing the relative merits of private boarding schools in the northeast. (I was around some people doing this on the first day of my master's degree program, that's when I began to realize that I was entering into a different world.)

That's all I can think of for now, and of course not all apply to everyone. Feel free to add your own.

[AUTHOR'S CAVEAT: I should note that the examples I provide are based mostly on my own experience as a lower-middle class white man from the rural Midwest, so they're not meant to be exhaustive or definitive.  Other people with different backgrounds from me will certainly have different class markers to contribute to the conversation.]

Junk Food, The Real Opiate of America's Masses

A few months ago I wrote a post about my favorite kinds of junk food, and I said this:

"If Karl Marx were alive and amongst us today, he would say that cheap junk food, not religion, is the opiate of the masses.  People are willing to passively accept warrantless spying by their government, drug tests from their employers, and surveillance cameras on any corner, but will get up in arms if you dare restrict their right to giant containers of sugary soda."

The recent article in the New York Times Magazine about the science behind addictive junk food got me thinking about this fact again.  Until recently, overconsumption of junk food was a cheap vice that was completely socially acceptable.  Folks might frown at smoking or judge someone for drinking to excess, but chomping through a whole bag of Doritos and washing it down with a liter of Mountain Dew would hardly draw much notice.  Not only that, this was something that I did as a child all the time while having parents who would have taken me to the woodshed if I drank or smoked.  A friend of mine who grew up in a very religious, evangelical environment always likes to talk about how overeating, i.e. gluttony, is the one acceptable vice among devout Christians.

Growing up as I did in a lower-middle class household governed by cheap parents, junk food was one of the few things we were allowed to indulge in.  My mom would bring home bulging bags of Brachs Pick-a-Mix candy from the grocery store every week, along with crates of soda.  (Since it was cheaper, many varieties of Shasta were always on hand.)  My father loved pretzels and Fritos, and cracked open endless cartons of Whoppers.  Once I was old enough to be drawing an allowance, I would go to the drug store across from my junior high and buy a handful of peppermint patties and mini-Reese's cups just about every day, without a shred of parental disapproval.  My family is not alone in this.  Junk food in this country is cheap, plentiful, and always at hand.  As I mentioned before, our whole agricultural policy is centered around the proposition that a bag of Cheetos ought to cost as much as a bunch of spinach.

In the past thirty years, those of us who are not in the upper-strata in the taxpayers have been getting squeezed.  College now means decades of debt, medical bills cause bankruptcy, and wages are stagnant.  However, potato chips, candy bars, and Big Macs are still as cheap as ever.  Having another frustrating day working your no security, shit-pay job where you have no voice?  Just crack open a soda and chomp down on some chips and candy until your body warms up to the sugar and carbs and your troubles are forgotten.

We should be doing more to understand this country's consumption of junk food as a class-based phenomenon, and not of the "the proles are so dumb and uneducated and stupid they're eating themselves to death" variety I keep hearing from affluent urban liberals.  I've changed my eating habits, but I understand why someone might be upset over losing the Big Gulp.  What right does a billionaire like Bloomberg have to deny a simple, if unhealthy, pleasure to a regular person who has so little in life that they can afford to indulge in?  Instead of just berating consumers of junk food, we ought to hold the people who make and market it more accountable, and to question the cruel, unequal economic system that has made the masses seek an opiate in junk food in the first place.