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.
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