There’s (as usual) an interesting discussion over at Invisible Adjunct, this one about the scant numbers of undergraduates earning history degrees. As the discussions there tend to do, it’s broadened its scope, to the point where I couldn’t resist adding something — the Adjunct’s is one weblog where I usually find myself lurking rather than responding, often because I feel strongly enough about the issues she raises that I can’t avoid lapsing into rhetorical bombast. (To offer a small defense, I’ll point out that the discussions there are often vigorous: I just know I tend to get dumber when I get het up.) While I was as usual unable to avoid overstatement, the discussion’s taken some productive turns, and the more I go back over it the more it engages me.
There’s some dispute over the examples of Amherst College and Swarthmore College and what they represent, and that dispute got me thinking, and — inspired (well, I’m pretty much completely stealing an idea of hers) by my neighbor and colleague Erin — checking out some links.
The fundamental argument of Bowles and Gintis in Schooling in Capitalist America is “that schools are merely instruments for the reproduction and legitimation of inequality” (Gintis, Replies 159), although education also “produces skills and produces them in a certain way” and also “produces reserve armies of skills”, including “the reserve army of the overeducated. Why? That is what schools are for. Capitalism can only work when it has reserve armies of labor” (164), reserve armies that are fragmented along class lines of inequality. Jean Anyon, in “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”, uses careful sociological work to apply this premise to primary schools in New Jersey. According to Anyon, “In the executive elite school, work is developing one�s analytical intellectual powers. . . . In the affluent professional school, work is creative activity carried out independently. . . . In the middle-class school, work is getting the right answer. . . . In the working-class school, work is following the steps of a procedure” (6-14). This is a bare-bones and crudely reductive representation of Anyon’s work, but it may point in some interesting directions.
Digging around the Amherst Web site reveals a college that favors “men and women of intellectual promise who have demonstrated qualities of mind and character”; a college where “classes are characterized by spirited interchange among students and acclaimed faculty skilled at asking challenging questions”; a college that repeatedly privileges “leadership”. Fair enough: one might expect such rhetoric from any school, no? Perhaps.
The counterpart I offered to Amherst and Swarthmore in the Invisible Adjunct discussion was “Big State U”, so perhaps it’s appropriate to look down the street from Amherst College to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which bills itself as the “flagship campus” of the Massachusetts state university system. Some digging at this Big State University’s Web site reveals an institution that prides itself on its “historic roles in education, research, and public service” and states that its “mission is to provide an affordable education of high quality and conduct programs of research and public service that advance our knowledge and improve the lives of the people of the Commonwealth.” So no, there isn’t really anything about getting the right answer there. On the other hand, the repetition of the service ethic is worth considering in light of Anyon’s middle class.
Finally, as long as we’re in the Amherst area, I think Hampshire College is worth at least a glance. Offhand, I can’t really think of any other colleges besides Hampshire and Evergreen, in Washington State, that don’t use letter grading systems (does Reed College? It seems to me at least to be of the same general character as the other two), and in looking at the “emphasis on each student’s curiosity and motivation” proclaimed on Hampshire’s Web site, it’s impossible for me to not see a correspondence to Anyon’s “creative activity carried out independently.”
Food for thought, at least, and I’m sure there are plenty of counterexamples to be easily dug up, but I’m also wondering — I know John will point me towards community colleges, and rightly so — if anybody else sees these sorts of class correspondences in higher ed institutions they’re familiar with?
(Erin, I’ll acknowledge again that the insights and project here come mostly from you, for which I’m indebted: thank you.)
Two things, Mike:
My community college system’s mission:
The twelve two-year public institutions of higher education that compose the system share a mission to make educational excellence and the opportunity for lifelong learning affordable and accessible to all [the state’s] citizens. The colleges seek to enrich the intellectual, cultural and social environments of the communities they serve. Our colleges support the economic growth of the state and its citizens through programs that supply business and industry with a skilled, well-trained work force.
Also, I wanted to thank you for your response to Chris which started this. I was just catching up on the week’s discussions at IA, and I found Chris’s comments about teaching comp really disturbing. I think we all get tired of reading student papers–it’s hard work–but as you rightly pointed out, there’s a contempt there that goes beyond just being tired. And I, too, am not satisfied by the claim of economic necessity as an excuse for remaining in the classroom when one feels that way.
Cindy — cripes, that mission statement, especially the last sentence, seems to so solidly confirm Anyon’s arguments, it’s scary. I very much believe in Paulo Freire’s assertion that an education that works to remedy social inequalities cannot at the same time deny workers the skills they need to support themselves in that unequal social order, but the mission statement you offer seems to almost flat-out state, “We’re manufacturing an underclass.” Is that classist of me?
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight is fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows (Leonard Cohen)
Ok, Mike, I’m gonna bite. I’ve commented over at Invisible Adjunct about what I see as a geographical aspect to the discussion. There’s a provincialism I’ve experienced among Massachusetts and New York academics that always catches me off guard.
Going back to the days of open admissions debates at CUNY which led to the canonization of Mina Shaughnessy in composition studies, the field still operates as though the microcosm of New York City reflected the country. In my view, a much richer model of higher education was developed in California at the same time that CUNY debated open admissions, but we didn’t have the debate, because the community college system was already well established–and open. My district’s motto, adopted in 1958, is “Educational Opportunity for All.” The current De Anza mission statement (disclosure: I was part of the writing team) is organized around the verbs “develop,” “achieve”, and “serve.” We are currently the #1 community college campus in California in transferring students to UC and CSU campuses.
Burton Clark’s famous study (based on San Jose City College down the freeway from here) introduced the “cooling out” function concept to Bowles and Gintis and Ira Shor and others who adopted it uncritically and then just cranked it out in support of their thesis.
New York and Massachusetts (ok, Connecticut, too I guess, since the Bushes and Clintons both did Yale) have had 400 years to refine status and class distinctions among their various institutions of higher education. The two states are certainly significant and their histories are important. But Florida, Illinois, Texas and California also have rich, and differing histories, of higher education and systems of access to the limited “elite” slots in both private and public institutions.
There may be a developing sense of class and status even among community colleges (which the simplistic analysis says are on the bottom and dead-ends). Last night, after watching the Sharks play to a tie, my son and I joined two of his friends for a drink. The young woman said she just started college (Evergreen Valley), but didn’t come to De Anza because she thought it would be too competitive and that she’d have an easier time getting A’s at EVC. I doubt that this is so, but it’s interesting that such a perception exists.
My fundamental point here is that much of the literature I know about status of educational institutions (and I did most of this reading 25-30 years ago, so maybe I’m way off base) has a pretty thin empirical base. There’s never been a national study of anything in the 1170 community, technical and tribal two-year colleges.
I don’t argue that there’s nothing to be said for exploring the ways in which our public institutions facilitate or impede class, status, and economic distinctions, and how the institutionalization of those distinctions may limit the possibilities for some people, perhaps for some classes of people. I just wish we could give similar attention to just how individuals use these institutions to transform themselves. I know many community colleges have played critical roles in students’ lives, opening them to possibilities and opportunities their early lives did not provide them. The class studies I know have real trouble even ackowledging this reality.
It never got a lot of attention, but I suspect that Grey Davis’ Stanford education put him at a disadvantage against Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Wisconsin-Something education during the recall campaign. Just an off-the-wall afterthought about class and higher education.
Wow — thanks for the detalied response, John, and you’ve offered more insights than I think I can digest in a single sitting. To your list of states, I’d also add the important histories of institutions in Michigan and Wisconsin, but that’s only from my readings: I speak as someone whose education never made it west of the Ohio River. And I think there’s certainly a national study of the status of educational institutions that’s waiting (demanding?) to be done.
Part of the frustration you’re expressing sounds like it may be definitional: classes are groups of people, and in looking at classes one’s going to look at the institutionalized distinctions between those groups. While it’s a perspective, it’s also a way of not seeing, and what one does not see are the qualities, possibilities, hopes, opportunities, triumphs, and agency of human individuals.
I think the way Mina Shaughnessy read individual intent and agency and consciousness into what were formerly categorized as types of errors associated with groups of people is what made her writing so powerful for me, and I’d like to find a way to do that same skillful back-and-forth negotiation between the individual and the societal — but right now, my temperament and my perception of a structurally unjust system lead me to focus on the societal.
No, Mike, it makes me uncomfortable, too. The importance of “supplying business and industry” with an endless stream of workers as part of a mission statement is scary stuff. I love the Leonard Cohen piece. I’m also imagining students being fed into the gaping maw of a large machine. At the same time, my college president would say that these are the people who are going to donate money to the college so let’s keep them happy.
Some of the faculty fight it best we can, with an honors program, with an insistence in our classes that the life of the mind is as important if not more than the acquisition of “skills”, but it’s hard. I’ll have to dig out my campus’s “vison” statement for you. It’s even scarier.