In 1984 I began full-time teaching in a tenure-track position at a small college in Ohio. One day, walking across campus with one of the most senior members of the faculty, I was discussing with him some classroom difficulty we were both having. He shook his head in resignation and said something I have heard faculty all over the world say so often, as though it explains everything, “Well, you know, most of our students come from working-class backgrounds.”

This time, for the first time, I did not stand there in shamed silence. Although it was not my most articulate moment, I said, “So what, Richard? So do I!”

He stopped walking as he threw back his head and laughed. Then threw his arm around me and said, “So do I, Diane. So do I.” I don’t know what that moment meant to Richard, but for me, that moment meant that I was able to say that being working class is not an excuse or a sorrow or a shame. It happens to be where I come from.

There are two kinds of social difference that come in contact here like a short-circuit: the teacher vs the student, the self-that-one-is and the self-that-one-was. The premise of this moment — two teachers talking about their classroom problems — is that to be a teacher, one has to objectify one’s students. But then it becomes obvious — at least in this story, which is why it’s even a story — that this kind of objectification depends on a folk sociology. “Well, our students are from XYZ backgrounds…”: there’s a horrible potential there to slip over the line that separates benign objectification from outright essentialism.

But this time when that line gets crossed, the narrator can’t prevent herself from letting her own social identity come out in protest against the institutional hierarchy that usually precludes teacherly identification with the student masses. And there’s a joy and laughter in that moment of deconstructed hierarchy.

I would still observe, though, that one readily stops being working-class if one becomes a tenure-track college teacher. Class origins aren’t everything; they aren’t necessarily identical to class destinations. Which is why Kendig can apprehend one’s own social origins as something deeply rooted within her but also as something that has become outside and thus a bit uncanny.

Anyway, I’ve been working on an essay about precarious work in French universities, and I came across a passage that I think is a great starting point for any analysis of academics’ class status. It’s in an essay, “Smart,” by Jeffrey Williams, a literary critic; it’s one of the best essays about academic culture that I know. In this passage, Williams is trying to teach us that academics’ class status is ambiguous: definitely not working class in the traditional sense, but distanced, often, from the conventional markers of professional success.

Class is not just a question of what money you have or don’t have, nor solely a question of status conferred by cultural capital, but that it marks your body. If you look at most fellow academics’ hands, you’ll rarely see calluses.

I start with this… to broach both the visibility and invisibility of our class position. As academics, especially in the humanities, we have a vexed relation to class. On the one hand, by normal markers such as educational level (only about 10% of Americans have grad degrees, not to mention doctorates), the kind of work we do (white collar, with some autonomy, setting our own hours, etc.), salaries (which, while we might complain of how low they are, are much above the national mean, and certainly higher than, say, school teachers), as well as by tastes (what kind of magazines we have on our coffee tables—if you’ve ever tabulated the survey at the end of Paul Fussell’s Class), we are of the cultivated classes. Attaining our position through educational credentials, we are quintessential denizens of the professional-managerial class.

On the other hand, we often eschew or deny our class position, projecting a distance from the normal parameters of class in America. There are several ways that we do this: sometimes by projecting a kind of bohemian position on the peripheries of, if not antagonistic to, normative culture (we’re not like sharkskin suited lawyers, but wear jeans and open collars, and proclaim our queerity); sometimes by asserting a clerical position set against mainstream capitalism (we are not profit-seeking businesspeople, instead working in the non-quantifiable realm of culture, whether conservatively sanctifying its lineage or progressively opening it); sometimes by celebrating our uselessness (we fumble at basic tasks like filling out forms, because we reside in the higher realm of the mind); and sometimes by proclaiming our political resistance (as intellectuals, we stand outside capitalist society to criticize and resist it). Thus we are the class that somehow stands outside class.

In some ways this plays out a characteristic attitude toward class in America, that, because we are all in the great middle class, we do not experience the class distinctions of the old world. This affects what the German sociologist Hans Speier calls the “masked class membership” of the middle classes. But it also has specific permutations in academe, and we experience and enact class in distinctive ways. This holds true especially in the humanities, that have a traditional bearing set apart from business and little commercial crossover. In the post-welfare state university, some of the sciences, technological programs, and practical disciplines, like business, are oriented toward paying their own way, through grants, business “partnerships,” and patentable results, so do not oppose the world of commerce. Rather, they embrace it. (If you look at the cars in the parking lots around the quad, you’re more likely to see Mercedes, BMWs, and Lexuses near their buildings, instead of the Hondas near ours.) Members of those disciplines might give up some of the humanistic aura of the university, but they express less ambivalence about their class position.

Many of our codes and practices play out our peculiar relation to class. Most academic measures purport a structural neutrality, beyond class, but they also carry with them, and inculcate, a distinctive range of affects designating our class. While we are not marked with the striations of class in the visible ways that a stooped factory worker might be after twenty years at a drill press, we are nonetheless marked by the ways that we feel, experience, and act out professional life. Some of the difficulty of talking about this realm of feeling or affect is that it is more amorphous than visible marks, but it is not any the less tangible—tangible when the ticket agent acts deferentially to us when it says “Dr.” on our itinerary, or when at the faculty meeting the full professor frowns at the tentative assistant professor and adjuncts aren’t even allowed, or when the persistent student expects us to be in our office 9-5, by his or her lights seeing us as the clerk behind the counter of the educational department store, by our lights misrecognizing our true position. Or tangible, as Stanley Fish has pointed out, when we drive sensible cars. Affect is how we embody our class position, and in a sense generates our class position.

It’s a splendid piece of social observation: it remarks on frowns, on hands, on academics’ titles and their choices of automobile. The observational detail is, perhaps, more sparse than in an ethnographic text; Williams uses his details to illustrate his analysis, rather than using the analysis to try to make sense of the details. But I think he is right to call attention to the fact that American academics participate in larger fantasies about American classlessness. And he’s right to raise the spectre of the Bohemian heritage (a real study of academic bohemianism is long overdue).

One does wonder two things about this analysis. First, of course it’s true that academics’ class status is going to be shaped by the larger class structures of the society where they live. But don’t academics have a peculiar mixed-class status elsewhere as well? In France, for instance? And, relatedly, aren’t academics more socially heterogeneous than Williams makes out? There are plenty of underemployed adjuncts out there — they clearly don’t have the same class position as the Ivy League tenured superstars, even if they share a professional identity. Class and professional identity are not always synonymous.

The common sense definition of “non-profit” is an organization whose income just barely covers its expenses. The designation of universities as non-profit institutions encourages one to think of them as organizations that are modest by nature. Even a school like Yale, which is obviously well endowed, is often imagined to be operating close to the margin, devoting whatever income it generates to the provision of high-quality education and leaving just a small cushion between the university’s costs and its revenues. The truth is that Yale pursues an active policy of accumulating surplus wealth, and that by 1996, its annual earnings exceeded its operating costs by nearly $1 billion.

At the end of the 1995-96 school year, Yale’s assets totaled $6.3 billion, including an endowment of just under $5 billion. Its endowment made Yale the second richest school in the country, surpassed only by Harvard. Moreover, the university enjoyed a phenomenal run of success in the 1990s. In 1995–96, while employees were on strike, the endowment earned a return of 25.7%, or just over $1 billion. Nor were the mid-1990s freakishly good years. Rather, they continued a long-term trend of exceptional performance by the university’s investments. With some ups and downs, the endowment grew steadily and impressively for 25 years. In the five years leading up to the 1996 strike, Yale’s endowment earned an average return of 16.7%, the highest in the Ivy League.

One way to make sense of the university’s financial standing is to consider where Yale would fit in the corporate economy were it not classified as non-profit. The surprising truth is that, by almost any measure, Yale’s wealth places it among the largest corporations in the country. Depending on which measure is used, Yale would rank between 250 and 300 in the Fortune 500 listing. Ranked by total assets, the most conservative measure in 1995 placed Yale squarely among the corporate giants, ahead of such well-established firms as Turner Broadcasting, General Dynamics and Nike.

Since the university strictly limits how much of the endowment’s earnings are devoted to educational expenses, it generates large annual surpluses. In 1995–96, for example, the endowment earned a total return of just over $1 billion; but only $171 million of this went into the school’s operating budget. An additional $159 million should be considered the level of reinvestment necessary to maintain the real value of the endowment against inflation. This means that Yale netted nearly $700 million, after all expenses and after accounting for inflation. In common sense terms, then, Yale made a profit of nearly $2 million per day. Far from operating at the margin, the university had reached the point where it could easily afford to charge zero tuition to its students, improve the wages and benefits of its employees, and pay full taxes on its local property, and still see the endowment grow well ahead of the rate of inflation. (pp. 97-98)

It seems to me that there are several rather memorable things here, so if you don’t mind, I will repeat some of Lafer’s findings for emphasis.

1. It appears that the richest universities have accumulated wealth far beyond what their administrators need or desire to spend on research or education. (Though admittedly, this year isn’t looking so great for university economies, and it must be said that these huge accumulations of surplus wealth have probably helped save rich private universities from making cuts on the scale of, say, those at the University of California.)
2. These universities are economically at the scale of the world’s largest corporations (ahead of Nike!). I don’t know about you, but I just find that striking.
3. Finally, it seems to me that our concepts of the university need to be reformulated to take this massive concentration of wealth into account — and also to account for the organizational poverty and resource deprivation that characterizes so many less prestigious, often public universities. A really materialist theory of universities, whatever that might mean, would have to think more carefully about the relationship between universities and capital – though, as Zach and I agreed in my last post’s comments, this would involve avoiding simplistic views in which universities just “are” (or “have become”) corporations. Lafer doesn’t stress this point, but it’s obvious that a wealthy private university like Yale, for all its wealth, is not accumulating wealth in the same way as a private corporation. For-profit corporations are seldom the recipients of multi-million-dollar philanthropic donations. For-profit corporations typically sell commodities, while a university degree is arguably not exactly (or not only) a commodity – not that this has prevented the growth of private for-profit universities, of course. At the same time, the university is far older than the modern shareholder-owned corporation, a fact which is (I suspect) not entirely without conceptual significance. On this point, it’s noteworthy that the branches of these private universities that are responsible for the endowments are remarkably separate from the academic parts of the organization; there are separate, seemingly rather independent endowment managers who, e.g. at Harvard, made as much as $35 million in a year. In fact, there is historical resistance to having input from the rest of the university on the management of the endowment; at the University of Chicago, for instance, a 40-year-old policy explicitly underwrites a near-total separation between academic debate and management of university property. This says a lot about the university as loosely coupled systems (a concept which also signals some major problems for any overly-monolithic theory of universities).

But I guess rather than speculate further about the relationship between universities and the business world, it would be better to read some of Christopher Newfield’s work, which I haven’t done yet. Coming up soon here: some results of a little reading group I’m putting together on the comparative, international workings of neoliberalism in national university systems.

A sudden piece of English text inserted in the middle of an exhibition of political photographs at my field site. Paris-8. A charming metacommentary on global reality. Merry crisis!

If you wanted to describe this image in the most basic descriptive language you could say: this is a photo of a photo of a graffiti tag set among other photos, photos of people bloody in protests, of police in riot gear lines, of people running and throwing things, of people invisible in showers of light. See that flood of white in the photo immediately beneath Merry Crisis? With the figure askew and silhouetted? I have no idea what that is. But I do comprehend that this is a collage of leftist protest culture, aestheticized in the genre of an art photo exhibition, and further recontextualized in the form of political statement attached on the outside of Paris-8’s Bâtiment B2. Paris-8 is a university with an enormous visual text taped and sprayed across its walls. Campus buildings frequently have deteriorated walls, just from the sheer number of signs (affiches) that have been put up and torn up and torn down. It’s the kind of place where images, like this one, are not only compound visual objects (referencing other visual objects and visual genres), but are units in an overwhelming student reappropriation of academic space, a culture of defacement of the corridors that someone jealous of property rights might call vandalism with a political alibi.

This defacement has limits, though, being essentially restrained to surfaces within arm’s reach of the ground. The buildings themselves tell a different story.

Two French universities. At left, the Sorbonne. At right, Paris-8. It doesn’t look like a den of graffiti in this picture, does it? From certain angles it looks slick. White. Steel. Futuristic, even, like a university garden city. With newly planted trees. The low orange fence, dimly visible here, shows that campus is still under construction. The Sorbonne, on the other hand, is a visual object that displays its prestige and institutional centrality through a long parade of arches and stone finery and towers, through the conspicuous display of functionless decoration, through pillars and chimneys and wrought iron that connote its age and full integration into the architectural code of state power in central Paris. (In other words: the Sorbonne is made of the same color stone and with the same bombastic architectural flourishes that characterize important public buildings in its part of town. Though I’m not an architect so I lack the vocabulary to really describe this homogeneity.)

The Sorbonne does a pretty good job of integrating its traditional stone architecture with its pristine self-presentation as a simultaneous icon of wealth, prestige, and the French establishment. On the other hand, at Paris-8, I sense a certain dissonance between the architectural invocations of futuristic architecture and the decrepit graffiti-laden floors and walls.

No future?! No peace! says a lone piece of militant graffiti in the Sorbonne, again at left. The staircase in Paris-8 at right, by contrast, is tagged twelve different places in red and yellow, its aestheticizing decorations patching the decrepit stairwell walls. The Sorbonne staircase has varnished wood paneling; Paris-8 has stained cement block and bare pipes. The texture of the two places differ, radically: sheen vs dirt.

A particularly good place to see the symbolic differences between campuses is in their doors. Their textures differ radically, again. At the Sorbonne: blue wood with many-paned windows divided up by metal bars, the university’s name carved in stone, a large S in wrought metal in the middle of each doors (just visible here), a wrought-iron fence with tulip tips, stone pillars emphasizing the doorway. Paris-8 by contrast: modern doors, metal, one pane of glass each, by design unadorned, in practice festooned with posters, with abandoned posters, with scraps of torn-down posters, part of one of the doors cracked (invisible here, alas) where someone must have kicked it, set on a low threshold. “Université Paris 8 Vincennes -> Saint-Denis” is set like a billboard above the doors in white and red on black (it runs the length of the doors here, just above).

There is a major difference between universities, too, at the level of security just inside the doors. When you go inside Paris-8, you don’t have to show ID but the place is visibly full of security cameras. The security personnel, apparently contractors from a private company, are in casual clothes and tend to lurk inside their security posts; the security post near the door is visibly full of surveillance monitoring equipment. When you enter the Sorbonne, on the other hand, you have to show the uniformed guard your ID and maybe state your business, but once inside, you are essentially unattended. One might schematize this thus: Paris-8 doesn’t care who comes in but doesn’t trust anyone on the premises; the Sorbonne is selective about who can enter but is happy to let its trusted visitors do what they will. (This, to be fair, is not purely a difference of class-laden institutional attitude. The Sorbonne is in a major tourist district, and it seems to be primarily tourists who are turned away at its gates. I have always been let in with my Chicago student ID.)

By now the symbolic differences between the two universities should be becoming second nature… Sorbonne at left, Paris-8 at right. A small amphithéâtre vs. a large classroom. Decorative paintings vs bare white walls. Wooden decorations vs plastic chairs. A bunch of old guys in suits vs a bunch of young kids in casual clothes. This place is ripe for a structural analysis.

Could you tell by looking that this is a vending machine? A vending machine turned into a platform for activist signs and stickers. A vending machine framed by graffiti that reads “Long live armed struggle!” and a crossed out “LRU” (Loi relative aux Libertés et Responsibilités des Universités, the controversial French university reform bill). The stickers, unreadable here, make reference to Palestine and the grêve générale (general strike) in Guadeloupe, and to militant groups (Sud-Etudiant, Union Syndicales Solidaires), and others I can’t make out in my slightly blurry photo… but I adore this as a spontaneous collage of impersonal commodity exchange (it’s a vending machine after all) and militant/graffiti poster art. Are the activists appropriating the vending machines as political advertising opportunities? Or are the activist signs ultimately just drawing attention to a cheap place to buy a cold drink?

Not that I have any quick answers. But I’m growing to like commenting on images. It’s a means of making spaces and atmospheres accessible at a distance, of capturing social dynamics as they become visible. Images have a tactility that can only be approached in prose by resorting to novelistic or surreal styles of description. And it takes time to produce that description… while a photo is taken in a sixtieth of a second. Though, actually, that’s a lie. It’s irritatingly time-consuming to take photos, download them from the camera, sort them, archive them, compare them, interpret them. Visual texts are laborious. (Note to self: find the people who design and put up these activist signs, inquire about how it works.)

I rather hate this phrase, a “visual text.” Images are not intrinsically texts, and though they can certainly be approached as such (examining their formal structure, their intertextualities, their meanings), it’s the height of scholasticism to blindly assimilate images to the realm of texts, to textualize the visual, thus rendering it all the more vulnerable to academic appropriation. I rather prefer the notion of “visual cultures,” which suggests that the visual can become a cultural value, an object of collective work and concern, as in the hallway graffiti of Paris-8 or the towers of the Sorbonne. It’s interesting that the visual environments of universities can articulate commentaries on the university, relations to the university, so that the visual culture constitutes a reflexive social space of its own rather than a mere background on which other kinds of social action occur.

Without knowing much about law school or anything in particular about this blog, I have to say that I am incredibly happy to see someone willing to talk publicly about class as it plays out in higher ed. I hear a lot of informal gossip about this topic (especially about the well-off backgrounds that many grad students at chicago appear to come from), but no willingness to publicly confront the situation, much less to alleviate class bias. Given that status in elite academic circles depends largely on a command of a highly aestheticized technical dialect (with its careful use of the conditional “I would argue–“, its myriad scholastic distinctions, its euphemistic approach to concrete social reality), and given that this dialect requires years of practice that can only be obtained in fairly elevated circles, it seems that a new system of academic status and recognition would be in order, one more tolerant of a range of ways of talking and thinking.

I note in passing that Jeffrey Williams has written one of the best analyses of class behavior in academia that I’ve read, “Smart“, and I implore all readers of this blog (there are about 12 of you as far as I can tell from the stats on google blogs) to read it immediately. Williams argues that smartness is the ultimate marker of academic class distinction — a disturbing observation to hear at the University of Chicago, where the highest possible compliment is to say that “X is the smartest person I know.”