I.
It is said that my great-great-grandfather had a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne and corresponded with Marx, and that this correspondence is archived in the Kremlin. That was long ago, before his school in St. Petersburg was closed by the Czar, and the family was saved from deportation to Siberia by a friend of my great-great-grandmother, who was lady-in-waiting to the Czarina, and who interceded such that the family was safe, so long as they could reach the border within twenty-four hours.
This family, one of the sixteen strands which, five Inquisitorial generations out, contribute to the existence of the present servidora – (five generations = 1/32, or 32 great-great-grandparents, and the great-great-grandmother in question was a Jewess of Riga, so I am tainted from there on out at least) – this family made it to the border, and eventually to both Argentina and the United States.
A generation or so later my great-grandfather’s family was living in Glendale, California. He was a Baptist preacher, a leftist, and unstable. He kept losing preacher jobs. They had started a strawberry farm. He still brought in income, so that when he abandoned the family around 1905 it was a petit-bourgeois disaster. My uncle Dmitri left MIT in the middle of sophomore year, came home to work, and never returned to college. My aunt Valeska graduated from high school, Gott sei Dank as she would have said, and gave up her scholarly aspirations. My grandfather Rudolph left school in the ninth grade and went to work as a lineman for the telephone company. My youngest aunt, Frances, did not participate in these events because she had already been killed by a train.
High school graduates were comparatively rare in those days. My aunt Valeska got a government job and did relatively well. She saved and invested, and did not marry. When she died, she left money so that we could go to college, as she had not.
My parents were not entirely pleased with this because they had experienced my aunt Valeska as a controlling person. Even in death, she had effectively decreed that not only could we go to college, no matter what happened – we could also choose where we went. This was only technically true, since there was not actually enough money to pay for private school. But it was the idea of it which chafed. Aunt Valeska was taking charge again, this time from beyond the grave.
My family was one of those which had too much money to qualify for financial aid, but too little to send anyone away for college. Arrangements of many kinds could have been made. Such arrangements, however, would have involved either fancy private schools on scholarships, or staying at home. We urgently needed to leave on other terms. Aunt Valeska made it easy.
In our family it is traditional to sigh about the controlling nature of aunt Valeska. Yet considering matters coldly and impartially, her effect upon my life was freedom. My youngest brother, born not only after her death but after the term of her will, points out that given her own life, her intent has to have been protection. And he should know, since his life has been more like hers than mine.
II.
Tuition at college was $202.50 a quarter. I had $150 for groceries and rent, and $50 a quarter for books. Students on financial aid at that time had $300 per month for expenses. I had enough to live on without working and in fact, given that I also had some support from my parents, I was as flush as the people on financial aid. All of this took place at a time and in a place where financial aid could bring people into the middle classes in a way that it cannot now.
Many students not on financial aid came from fancy high schools where they had had Advanced Placement classes. In the first quarter I was concerned about passing my courses, so I put in my best effort. I was only hoping to pass, so that I could stay, but I got A’s and B’s. This convinced me that I should continue to put in my best effort.
When asked why I did not go out more, I would look up in amazement. “I have had a chance to go to college, and it is being paid for. This is a very famous university, and these professors, who have Guggenheims and MacArthurs, are willing to give me A’s and B’s if I put in my best effort. And you think I should . . . waste it? “Good papers have been written in an hour, Z,” said my friends. But mine were not.
In elite institutions it is fashionable to discuss television, and to call professors by their first names. Where I work, students say, I come from the culture of television. I came here to read books. I know you want to be called by your first name, they say, but I have fantasized about speaking in person to someone who can be called “Dr.” or “Professor.” I want to feel those words roll off my tongue. And I could say that these students are invested in authoritarian structures, or something very sophisticated like that, but what I do say is that they may address me as they wish, so long as they do not call me “Mrs. Z.”
I have been wanting to say this for some time. I think of my aunt Valeska every morning as I walk into class, to students paying close to two thousand dollars a term and coming off the graveyard shift. Axé, Valeska. The photographs you took in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1924 are on my wall, and they look like New Orleans. I would love to talk to you now.
III.
And now, pace Foucault, pace Bourdieu, pace everyone, for I do understand the repressive nature of institutions, I have a question. Is complaining about the soul-crushing effects of one’s college education, a middle class affectation? Do not misunderstand: I am an intellectual, but I do not at all idealize universities or university life.
I learned to talk very well about the numbing effects of school, but then I studied at one of the very best public institutions in the country. Everyone there, even the football team outrageously recruited straight outta Compton and the poor, had a comparatively vast array of opportunities open to them, both in and outside of school. Suffering was a luxury in which sensitive souls could indulge, while the brazen engaged in more ironic fun.
Now, though, when I make one of my wry remarks, the students fix me with a beady eye. Ma’am, I like to read. Every hour I spend here is an hour I do not spend in a shipyard or at an oilfield. Every semester I finish diminishes my likelihood of taking a contract with KBR. I am glad to be here.
It is a conservative analysis, and not at all postmodern. I do not think it implies that I am actually doing anyone any good, or rescuing anyone from a dire fate. However, it deserves respect. I mean, real respect.
So, in this context, is complaining about the soul-crushing effects of one’s college education, a middle class affectation?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Hello,
I have recently discovered your blog (one of my regular reads links to you), and I only regret not having enough time to go through your archives! I really enjoy it.
In answer to your reflection: I think it probably is, in a lot of ways, middle class affectation (of which I am also quite representative). After years spent deconstructing knowledge in the academia — because I have the luxury to do so –, I find it is a great lesson to be faced with people (students, family, passers-by) for whom it is vital to build and to construct knowledge.
Does it disqualify my work? No. Put my own background in perspective? Yes. But most of all, in my opinion, it is this very confrontation, facilitated by some institutions, that makes for creative thought, good science, and… truly human contacts.
Yes, Aunt Valeska!!
Children of the middle class (like me) are sheltered from the awareness of their privilege, until it is withdrawn, and even then it can take a long time to leave behind the sense of entitlement. At least that was my experience.
I am the oldest of three children, and my father was a doctor, so it was assumed that we would all go to college. My mother, on the other hand, was from a working class family, and her parents both died when she was a teenager, so she was on her own and went to nursing school instead of college, although she certainly loved learning more than my father. Marrying my father and sticking with him (for the children) seemed like the right thing to do, and she sacrificed her own financial independence for the idea that he would take care of us. In my junior year of college, my father left the family, and I don’t just mean he left my mother: he left my brother and sister, who were just finishing high school, without the means to go to school of any kind, and my mother with debts of his to pay. I was able to finish, but had to “remind” (beg) him each month for the money, always feeling “greedy” but not wanting to drop out so close to finishing. My brother went to a state college but dropped out after a year because asking for the money was too painful and he declared that he wanted to be an artist and artists didn’t have to go to school. My sister apprenticed herself to a baker. Meanwhile, my father and his second wife took a trip around the world.
My brother and sister have since made good lives for themselves, but it was really hard–there was a period when I sent my sister her rent so she and her son would not be homeless. They had the experience of having been raised with middle class expectations and then having those withdrawn –of course, they didn’t understand this through a class analysis; they experienced it as evidence that their father didn’t love them, and that I had been given preferential treatment because I was the oldest. It took me a long time to sort out the class analysis because what was most obvious at the time was how marriage and the traditional family were fucked up institutions. Hence, I have never ever wanted to be financially dependent on anyone, and even though my daughter’s co-parents have said they are going to help pay for her college education, and I am sure they are sincere, I will believe it when I see the money. In the meantime, I assume it will be my job to open that door for her, and I am doing my best to make an Aunt Valeska-like pot of money for her.
I could say a lot more on this, but it’s time for lunch.
Welcome, StupendousWoman – and yes! 🙂 Somewhat related: my father points out that it is only the privileged classes who idealize the lives of the workers, and he is quite right.
Joanna, class analysis, yes. And you know, I’ve noticed that some of the people most traumatized by the depression were not those who most suffered, but those who merely came to see that their class status could become precarious. One of the things my older relatives keep insisting upon is that the frightening part of the Depression was that even men who owned business suits were starving. I get the point, but I also get offended because of the suggestion that the middle classes are the most important.
On another note, I would also love to do a feminist study of Aunt V. Much of what she did within the family, although it was perceived and has been retold as mean, looks on paper (and was perhaps even conceived as) women’s solidarity. I would love to articulate more of my hypotheses, which if verified would rehabilitate the dead, but I will not out of respect for the living who experienced Aunt V as a terror.
I have often noted in the realm of politics that the issue of the middle classes losing things is treated as more pressing than the fact that other people have never had access to such things. On a psychological level, recent loss is felt more acutely than chronic deprivation, which simply becomes background noise, but it does not mean that ethically it is more acute. I suppose it would be naive of me to expect that politicians be at least equally concerned with ethics as with pragmatics but I do wish that it was the case.
jfr, I think you’re right. That is why Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Fear of Falling seems to be to be such an astute analysis of the political effects of professionals’ fear of falling out of the middle class on U.S. politics. I also think it’s important to think about how class status is experienced differently by men and women through the institutions of marriage and heteronormativity (you can marry in, and you can be divorced out, etc).
And yes, in order to take an ethical stance on chronic deprivation when you have not experienced it yourself, one must first undo the incredible amount of ideological labor that has gone into teaching middle-class children that their situation is the norm, and that those who do not share their situation are somehow deviant. Some person, situation, work of art–something has to break through so that one can start to unlearn those lessons.
Fascinating story. And I’d say the answer to your question about complaining about college as a middle-class affectation is “yes.”
In quite another context, the narrator of _Girl, Interrupted_ says about herself, “It takes a lot of money to fund this level of self-pity.” It takes a lot of money, and the promise of more, to be cavalier enough to feel repressed by an education that others see as a ticket to something better.
Undine – Oh, good. I know that ‘we don’t need no education / we don’t need know thought control’ and I understand the sentiment, agree, and so on. And it is easy to critique school. And I have been oppressed by school since becoming a professor. And so on. And education will not solve world inequality, since poverty is not a problem of the individual (is not caused by lack of education). And so on. I wrote my first paper on the education system and its limits / limitations in the sixth grade.
I was recently challenged to a debate by two bloggers who had apparently discovered these things quite recently and wanted to show me that as a professor, I was oppressed and oppressive. Clearly, I would never have thought of these things, because I just must be so invested in power structures, and on, and on. Their educations had oppressed them, and I needed to learn that there were things to learn outside of school. Well DUH, I could have told them that YEARS ago, and I have been knowing it since childhood, where were they then? They feel revolutionary but I think they are middle to upper middle class whiners.
I need to read _Girl, Interrupted_.
I think education has help liberate me. Before I would have so many thoughts, but all were unfinished with nothing to compare them to. I always felt like I had a computer that I could not turn off at night in order to sleep, but the computer was like blurry snow, nothing really, just snow, distraction. Education has helped me focus, has given me tools to guide my thoughts etc. I cannot ever imagine feel oppressed with education, only the structures of the educational institutions, but not education itself.
Well I’m not familiar with the idea of being oppressed by universities, so I guess this might be an American cultural thing. I’m not sure it is always a middle-class thing, though. In my studies of Marechera, I find that he was given a scholarship to attend Oxford University, but that he felt oppressed by the fact that his right to remain in Britain and have money coming in was made dependent upon his attending classes. This appeared to him as a structural oppression. He felt that white culture was controlling him and indoctrinating him and that there was an element of blackmail involved in this structural entrapment. So perhaps that was why he set fire to his dorm in protest.
I think it is important to realise that symbolic protest (setting fire to one’s dorm) can feel like a necessary means of self-assertion. White kids probably protest in a milder way against their parents’ institutions. I don’t know as I never did. To me the world of the intellect is the opposite to my parents and their identities.
Anyway, today I will see a Freudian professor to get help with my essay. It should be fun.
School is a form of acculturation, deculturation, etc., and colonial school or school for colonized peoples is often a form of oppression.
School is an ISA (Althusser) and people like Foucault and Bourdieu have a great deal to say about it and other institutions as forms of social control and so on.
But: I don’t like it when the middle classes appropriate that stuff as an excuse to be lazy, or because they are going to get money anyway so they do not need to excel. And I have issues with U.S. anti-intellectualism, and also with the idea, common here, that if you can think you cannot also feel (head and heart may battle, it is a whole Romantic trope, but it doesn’t mean one doesn’t have both).
***
I had a related thought on the way home tonight, which ought to be the theme of a post: re Woolf and the “daughters of educated men” – the way one is taught one should be accomplished in various salon and marriageable ways, but not do anything really seriously. Music lessons, but do not get too good … French lessons, but do not go so far as to become an intellectual … etc. “Reeducation” thought that was “mental health” and it was of course just antifeminism.
***
Have fun with the Freudian!
Yes- anti-intellectualism is a huge thing here, and there is something odd going on about it, too, as being educated is a sign of being associated with the British (colonial oppressors), and therefore of being somehow deeply inauthentic. But, like I have said before, it is those who are of the lower middle class — by which I mean the lower rungs of bureaucracies of all sorts — who are the most stridently anti-intellectual here. When I speak to people in the martial arts gym (and they are manual workers and so on), I tell them I am doing a PhD, and this is in no ways threatening to them. They don’t take it as me saying, “Hey I’ve got a brain and you haven’t,” because they know this isn’t what I am about. The aspirationals, though, are probably the largest social group in Australia, who are also prone to being anti-intellectual and right wing.
Aspirationals, what an interesting term … and class and the way it is constructed/perceived is so intricate psychologically.
Yes– class seems to be perceived more as a feature of historical memory. It’s an emotional feeling, rather than a materialist analysis in most cases of practical effect. There was a time when I thought that only British and European people would allow me the time of day, in this culture — and perhaps that is still true. However it is genuinely odd that I have never met a real blue collar person (somebody who works with their hands) who has ever felt threatened by me. It has always been the little clerically-minded types who want to eat me on their toast.
…And the clerically minded types — they really do have a view that the system is based upon merit and that one gets what one deserves. They don’t see that a lot of what one can or cannot do is based on temperament and innate capacity. So, they look at someone like me, who has a huge propensity to see the big picture, to be intuitive, and to make connections between unrelated things (I think very abstractly), and they see that I do not have an eye for detail and that I am not careful about procedure (innate failings, which I can’t seem to correct), and they think: “She hasn’t even mastered the clerical yet, and still she is claiming to be an intellectual and to be able to do abstract thinking!” So, they think I’m jumping ahead of them in the queue of merit, and that I oughta be punished for such presumption. What they do not see is that if I COULD do the kind of detailed clerical work that they take pride in, then maybe I wouldn’t be so good at abstract thinking. One is NOT the ladder to the other, as so commonly presupposed…
“It’s an emotional feeling, rather than a materialist analysis in most cases of practical effect.”
Interesting.
“Clerically minded” – perhaps that is the diagnosis of the educators and Reeducators who so amaze me with small mindedness. And students who do not believe they are there to learn but to amass points.
I think of “classy” attitudes as having integrity, dignity, and empathy but I note that one finds those qualities less in upwardly mobile/privileged persons than among some others. That is of course very schematic.
Yes, the classy feelings are as described by you. And these I have most often found in the subclass of workers that are referred to as “blue collar”. I find it in the dojo a lot, and perhaps this is special because of the training we undergo. Ultimately I think it produces trust, because we all learn to do things to each other that are potentially very harmful indeed, but when we go to spar, or so on, we hold back our force.
The other aspect of the dojo is the shared abjection. We push ourselves to extremes, and this generally isn’t pretty. So, there are these aspects which produce a sense of empathy and integrity, and although not, at times dignity in material fact, dignity in principle.
Then there is the aspect that the dojo is a kind of filtering device — if you are “upwardly mobile” and more concerned with image than with reality, you probably would not last long here. This is the aspect of practical materialism: you need to focus on the reality of what you can or cannot do, rather than just projecting an image that you can do it. So, if you can’t stand almost anybody ending up advising you and/or doing something better than you, you wouldn’t make it in this context.
Perhaps the aspects I have described about the gym also pertain more to a blue collar work place than they would to a white collar context, in which competitive ‘individualism’ and image over content would have greater sway?
“…a white collar context, in which competitive ‘individualism’ and image over content would have greater sway?”
Certainly. And these are precisely the things I cannot stand about academia, by the way.
It gives you academentia.
I had a nice conversation with the Freudian professor today. He gave me some help. He finds no pleasure in my paradigm.
Is it good news for your project that he finds no pleasure in your paradigm?
Not good news, since he mocked me for not being right thinking and for other legitimate things, too. I said, “This is nothing like the intensity of free sparring, so it doesn’t bother me that much. It’s very professorial.”
So we are good friends and we can disagree a little.