Many have commented on Bush’s frequent rhetorical deployment of the word “freedom”. One wonders how we might pin down a specific meaning for Bush’s usage: clearly, it’s a catch-all, a universally positive term meant to discourage rather than encourage critical thought, but we can try. What kind of freedom? Freedom from what? Freedom to do what one likes, we might suppose from Bush’s foreign policy agenda: freedom as supreme self-determination. But such self-determination does typically imply a freedom from certain things as well; things in the administration’s case usually constructed as concrete and specific agent-driven oppression: the bad guys holding you down. The market is free, or wants to be free, and so cannot be bad. We are told that lessening restrictions on the economy — making it more free — will make it more efficient, and therefore better. We hear, as well, that trade must be free in order to be fair. But, unlike the recent unfortunate case of Fox’s fair and balanced phrase, there’s a word many historically associate with freedom that we rarely hear these days. Whatever happened to the phrase “Free and equal”? Have we forgotten our historic privileging of the conjoined terms?
Clark Kerr describes the university: “As an institution, it looks far into the past and far into the future, and is often at odds with the present. It serves society almost slavishly — a society it also criticizes, sometimes unmercifully. Devoted to equality of opportunity, it is itself a class society” (14). Ah: so the university, in fact, has not forgotten equality. And yet, later, the word is striking in its absence from the answer to his question, “What is the justification of the modern American multiversity?” Writes Kerr, “History is one answer. Consistency with the surrounding society is another. Beyond that, it has few peers in the preservation and examination of the eternal truths; no living peers in the search for new knowledge; and no peers in all history among institutions of higher learning in serving so many of the segments of an advancing civilization. Inconsistent internally as an institution, it is consistently productive. Torn by change, it has the stability of freedom” (34). Again, I ask: freedom from what? Dennis Gilbert, in his conclusion to The American Class System, points out that the changes in government policies since 1975 “allow greater freedom to market forces, which tend to produce unequal outcomes: rising rewards for some who are talented, well financed, or just lucky, and stagnant or declining rewards for many others” (295). The conclusion seems to me inescapable: despite the conventional wisdom equating capitalism to free markets, and free markets to a free people and therefore to democracy, the fact of the matter is that free markets are directly inimical to a just and equitable society. Mark Mason died blind, frozen and penniless on the January night before Reagan’s inauguration in the gutter in front of the Frick Building, scant blocks from the old Carnegie Building and the Mellon Bank Building on Forbes Avenue, his head stove in by Pinkerton rent-a-cops.
Any concept of class necessarily involves an understanding of struggle, of oppression, and as such contradicts American ideals of equality. This is why people are so hostile to notions of class, and why sociologists invent “stratification theories” to make themselves feel better. We can recognize a fundamental truth that the genders are naturally equal and are therefore owed equal opportunities; we can recognize a fundamental truth that races are naturally equal and are therefore owed equal opportunities. But we despise the ugly notion of class, because we understand that the category of class itself is built upon the foundation of inequality. To acknowledge class is to acknowledge inequality, and so the only appropriate thing to do seems to be to wish it away, to deny any inequality. In this sense, our understanding of class as an invented system of inequality contradicts the thread of social theory that — as feminism, as multiculturalism — celebrates difference. As Mary Soliday points out, people don’t celebrate and affirm someone’s inability to buy a computer as happy evidence of their authentic class heritage.
Or maybe some do.
Bravo! On the evasion of “inequality,” you might play around with the word “winner.” Is it inequality when one football team wins the Superbowl, and the others are ranked below it in the League Standings. I think the myth is that we all have an equal or fair chance to win, but that only the winners get the trophies. Thus we can feel contempt for the losers, who die in the gutters. They earned themselves that dubious privilege. They are losers and get what they deserve. Likewise we idolize winners who come up from nothing, validating our faith that the system rewards hard work and ability. “Meritocracy,” “Social Darwinism.” The most potent argument might be that the game is rigged in favor of those who start with certain advantages — that would be real class system, as opposed to a meritocracy with differential but fair outcomes.
Good stuff, Mike. Your study of class as focused on university comp programs will likely be an artifact of where the real class lines are drawn: the modern American high school. I’ve characterized the essential mission of American high schools as “select the best and forget the rest.” The optimists like to see “best” as merit–thus, those who get into selective colleges and universities deserve it. But if you look at what goes on in the public high schools in affluent communities, you see that lots of parents are buying “merit”–they hire counselors to tell kids what extracurriculars to join and to guide them through the application/testing process.
The perspective of 38 years in community colleges lets me see this process pretty clearly. Many of our students qualify for university, but they are here mostly for “class” related reasons. Family has few resources–or well-off family just divorced and college money went into the settlement–or similar kinds of issues related to the financial status of the student or the student’s family.
At the same time, an increasing number of middle class families have discovered that lower division programs are better at many community colleges. so they save bucks, their kid gets a strong foundation, and then they get a University of
California or private university baccalaureate and no one knows they started on a lower rung.
By the way, as best I could tell, Clark Kerr never “got” community colleges either, even though the California CC system is the largest educational system in the world.
John,
Buying merit — yes, that’s it; excellent way to put it. Are there statistics that you know of dealing with transfer rates between two- and four-year institutions? I’m loving going through the CHE almanac, while at the same time feeling that the data is so incomplete; there’s so much more I wish they’d done.
Tutor,
I think that is, in fact, my argument: the game’s rigged from the outset, and that’s what makes for a class system. The thing is, no one can imagine an alternative: communism now stands as so thoroughly discredited that suggestions of any perspective even tangentially similar are immediately decried. Myself, I’m not a Marxist, and I have little patience for the folks who clamor for the abolition of private property — because I enjoy my privilege, thank you very much. At the same time, I firmly believe that ruthless and implacable logic of capitalism will nuke and pave the world long before any nationalist or post-nationalist military conflict. There’s gotta be a better way.
Mike,
I believe the California Community College Chancellor’s Office lists some data on transfer within this state. About a dozen years ago, the American Council on Education made an effort to establish some way of reporting national transfer statistics. Here’s the problem. Community colleges offer many different kinds of programs. At my college, lots of people who already have degrees take courses. So they need to be dropped from the N in calculating transfer rates. Some other number of students come for very limited purposes, with no goal of a degree or transfer. But it’s very difficult to identify such students.
Our college ranks among the top 3 in California in transferring students, but there’s no central data gathering resource. We can track those who transfer to UC and CSU campuses fairly well, but there’s no formal system for those who transfer to private universities. This issue is quite an old one. It’s just another example to me that university researchers generally ignore the research needs of CC’s. It would be great to have a national study–we’d probably learn something about strengths and weaknesses in community colleges. But I just don’t know who would promote such a research agenda.
I’m glad you are giving this some attention as you read and define your research project.
John
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