Thief Me (Or, Giving a Six for a Nine in Providing Public Education)

Theft is, from a moral and legal perspective, a bad thing. Theft that occurs by lying, faking or other subterfuges as opposed to by good old-fashioned five-fingered grabbing is often considered even more reprehensible. Though typically thieves do no physical harm to their victims when they abscond with other people’s stuff, thieves are high on the list of most disliked criminals. As my late grandmother-in-law Nen used to say in her Caribbean accent: “I don’t want nothing to do with someone who thief me.” In her parlance, “thief” was a verb that was synonymous with “steal from” as well as a noun. A thief thieves people. Nen also seemed to envision a special place in hell for people who thiefed people by pretense or fraud. Some of the worst people, she said often, are people who give a six for a nine.

In Norwalk, Connecticut Tonya McDowell has been indicted for first-degree larceny. She faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $15,000 fine. She is charged with stealing education: she allegedly enrolled her son in Norwalk schools from September 2010 to January 2011 when she did not live there. She is alleged to have used the address of her babysitter who did live in Norwalk. You can read about it here in the New York Times. Several people have expressed outrage that a parent seeking a better education for her child would be subjected to such charges. They argue that what should be under indictment is the system of school funding in much of the United States that relies upon local tax funding and thus makes schools in wealthy neighborhoods more likely to be excellent while leaving schools in poor areas deficient.

There are however, a large number of people who remain silent through all of this. They are the quite rational, well-meaning, sympathetic and even empathetic people who, though they might not have criminally charged Ms. McDowell if it appeared that she had enrolled her child in a school district where she did not live, certainly would have advocated the prompt removal of her child from the school. One of their arguments goes something like this: “I worked hard for years to be able to afford a house in this neighborhood. I work even harder to pay the taxes that support the schools in this neighborhood. Why should someone who hasn’t done those things get to take advantage of the school system here?” I get this argument; I really do. Good quality education can be expensive. Yes, we do in many cases pay taxes for certain other services that may be used by all comers whether or not they live in our neighborhood, such as roads, firefighters, and police. But these, we might assert, are in the realm of the really necessary from a health, safety and welfare standpoint. Moreover, these tend to be services that do not always rely entirely on local funding, or that are not frequently used by non-residents (and still, there are sometimes calls to limit use or to charge a fee for use of even these essential services).

There is also the argument made by those who would have supported the removal of Ms. McDowell’s child that school excellence is the result of more than just well-funded schools or excellent teachers. Excellent schools are often attended by large numbers of children who come from safe, warm, clean homes with plentiful, nourishing food, attentive if not loving well-educated parents and other relatives, books and music, private lessons that supplement schooling, opportunities for travel, and all sorts of enrichment. Even if we could insure that all children attend well-funded schools, we would likely have to do a great deal more to create optimal educational conditions for all children. I get this argument, too. Education is, after all, more than instruction. Education has to do with the formation of an individual in numerous ways, ranging from the intellectual all the way to the moral, social and cultural. In contrast, instruction is more precise, and has to do with specific methods used for the transmission of knowledge. Instruction is a part of education, but education is not necessarily instruction. Education begins at home and continues at home long after instruction at a school or anywhere else is over.

So what does this say about whether or not we should be lodging theft charges against a mother for seeking to educate her child in a place where she does not live in order to obtain what she believes (and what many objective measures show to be) a better school? Do the Ms. McDowell’s of the world thief those of us who reside in better neighborhoods when they enroll their children? Is their behavior even more reprehensible because they must by necessity give sixes for nines to school enrollment officials when making representations about where they live?

The answer lies in how one views public education. If we conceive of the provision of public education as a consumer good or service that is subject to being “stolen”, then it is right to charge Ms. McDowell as if she had stolen an item from a luxury store or failed to pay for a hotel stay after representing that she could in fact pay. Such a view is deeply problematic, however. Public education is not a good at all, and though it is a service, it is a really unique type of service. It is a cornerstone of civic engagement and of democracy itself. However, while many of us would agree that we owe a public education to all children in our society, far fewer would agree that we owe a quality public education to every child. That seems to be something reserved for those with the price of admission. This is at the heart of the matter. It could be that by not providing quality education to all children it is we who thief the Ms. McDowell’s of the world. Through some combination of sympathetic tut-tutting and sophistic language about the nature of school funding, we give sixes for nines to the least advantaged persons in our society.

(This post is based on a paper in progress titled Thief Us: The Use of Criminal Sanctions for Enrolling Non-Resident Children in Public School Districts)

Remembering the Victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Today is the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. On this day we pause to remember the untold numbers of African women, children and men who were victimized in the Transatlantic slave trade over a period of four hundred years. Although there is sometimes debate about just how many persons were transported, one thing is clear: it numbered in the many millions, as illustrated by much of the data in Emory University's Transatlantic Slavery Database. In memory of the victims, the U.N. General Assembly, in its resolution 62/122 of 17 December 2007, declared 25 March the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, to be observed annually. The resolution called for the establishment of an outreach program to inculcate in future generations the “causes, consequences and lessons of the transatlantic slave trade, and to communicate the dangers of racism and prejudice”.

The specific goal of this day is to honor the memory of those Africans and African-ancestored people who suffered and died as a result of being enslaved, especially those who underwent the horrors of the Middle Passage. However, in making this declaration, Member States recalled that the treatment of African-ancestored slaves is also at the foundation of many present-day situations of social and economic inequality, injustice, racism and hatred aimed at African-ancestored people. This is a day not only to remember the past, but to promote contemporary awareness of the continuing ills of this particular form of slavery.

We might well wonder how something of the magnitude of the African slave trade could be little known or at risk of being forgotten. The problem lies not, however, in whether we are ignorant of or forget about slavery, but in the nature of what we know and in the manner in which we remember slavery. In the case of African-ancestored slavery in the West, history and memory are often contentious distant kinsman instead of close siblings. There is, for instance, a tendency to historicize African-ancestored slavery as an institution instead of simply (or complexly) remembering it as a series of ongoing events with very real, material consequences for individual and collective groups of enslaved black people. As scholar Pierre Nora wrote in his discussion of the relationship between memory and history, memory and history are far from synonymous; they appear often to be in fundamental opposition. The opposition is between an actual past phenomenon and a representation of the past phenomenon. The treatment of African-ancestored people during slavery and in its aftermath is part of a somber past. This past is not, however, personal to African-ancestored people themselves, or to former slave societies, but to the entire world. African women, children and men were removed from their homes and introduced into a system of bondage that was not only sometimes violent and capricious but which also deprived them of the essence of their humanity: freedom and hope for future.

Bridging the history and memory of slavery poses a number of problems. Perhaps chief among them is how not to stand in judgment on a slave past that in some measures defies critique by its very historicity: 1811 was not 2011, and it is at best facile and misguided to bring to bear on the slave past the norms that guide us in present times. Nonetheless, African-ancestored slavery remains a searing memory that scorches the fabric of modernity, and hence, is something that merits attention. The notion of people as property makes manifest Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoires, disparate sites where “memory crystallizes and secretes itself.” While Nora envisions such sites as places, concepts, or objects that symbolize the memorial heritage of a community, in the case of slavery the bodies of enslaved black women, children and men were and are themselves sites of memory. The bodies of the dead are, however, enshrouded by a historic past that obscures the memorial past inscribed upon their very remains.

Gender, Race and Power in the Legal Academy (Or, the BAU Haus Rules)

In recent days news circulated regarding an incident at Widener University’s school of law. It seems that a faculty member was called to task for repeatedly offering hypotheticals about killing the dean in the context of teaching his criminal law class. The dean happens to be a black woman, Linda Ammons. Some students complained about what they viewed as repeated instances of “violent, racist, sexist” behavior by the white male professor. There were also apparently claims by students that the professor had engaged in a “pattern” of misconduct , "cursing and coarse behavior, "racist and sexist statements" and "violent, personal scenarios that demean and threaten” the professor’s colleagues at the institution. You can read one newspaper's account of the matter here.

I have watched in horrid fascination the various deconstructive responses to this story from members of the legal academy:

1. Silence. This is perhaps the most interesting response, especially given that Dean Ammons has been in the academy for many years and is known to many.

2. Dispassionate equanimity. This mostly consisted of calls to wait and see, to not jump to conclusions until all of the facts are in. We are, after all, law professors. We wouldn’t be acting according to our training if we took a position before knowing all of the facts.

3. Precedential analysis and dismissal. A number of scholars, many of them “progressive”, have suggested that if the legal academy were to get up in arms about what the professor under fire said, it wouldn’t sit well with the position of many (but certainly not all) progressive faculty members in the case of Ward Churchill. Some of you will recall Ward Churchill as the academic who in an essay compared World Trade Center victims on 9/11 to "little Eichmanns". Churchhill was fired by his university but later reinstated.

4. It’s all good because it’s part of the game. Many academics who also teach criminal law have loudly asserted that hypotheticals that feature the death or maiming of people are part of the “morgue humor” that prevails in this area. After all, homicide is for many of us who teach criminal law the crown jewel of the course. There are, by necessity, unpleasant discussions. People die in some cases, sometimes in really horrible ways. If we didn’t laugh, we might cry. Also, an acknowledged part of the “game” of academics is engaging in what one professor called “passive-aggressive” behavior towards administrators. How else can you get back at deans who give you bad offices and worse schedules than with a little good-natured ribbing in hypotheticals?

Moreover, many have asserted in response to this situation that an important part of the game is academic freedom. This mostly consists of assertions that making such statements is well within the rights of a professor. After all, one of the hallmarks of academia is the right to make remarks in the course of doing our work that may be unpopular. Indeed, the whole notion of tenure is closely tied to academic freedom, in recognition of the fact that academics may sometimes do and say things that are not well received or highly valued.

Somehow I have been troubled by all of these responses, so I offer my own deconstruction of the deconstruction.

Silence is perhaps the worst of the responses. Silence basically suggests that this just doesn't matter enough to comment upon one way or another. In some respects this is akin to another relatively recent situation involving a black woman academic. See my blog post On Being a Black Woman Lawyer (Or, the Sound of Silence).

The dispassionate equanimity approach, while making sense on its face, obscures the broader concerns here and hides itself in a cloak of legalism. No, we shouldn't make a decision until the facts are in. But given the nature of the claims here, where we are not really dealing with a denial (the professor under siege apparently admits that he made such remarks about the dean), there is plenty of room for righteous indignation. While the dispassionate equanimity approach is no doubt a tribute to legal formalism, it is also a marvelous example of what some people call the "formalist fiction": that broader normative and policy considerations have no relationship to formal articulations of law.

The problem with the particular brand of precedential analysis offered here is that the analogy to Ward Churchill is, in my view, a very inapt precedent, as it offers little that is substantively useful by way of analogy. A professor who writes an essay ostensibly assailing a group of people that most of us consider innocent victims is very different from a professor who apparently repeatedly makes remarks that invite the captive listeners to violently envision an actual individual known to the listeners. At a minimum, we can generally choose not to read essays. Students in contrast have little power to choose not to listen to their professors or to absent themselves. As I have written elsewhere, the paradigmatic approach of the “legal method” is sometimes flawed, as it is based upon the often unstated assumption that there is broad agreement on the warrants of the paradigm. Now, we usually understand that in undertaking analysis by analogy, there may be few cases that agree “on all fours,” and that part of the exercise is exploring the aptness of the cases cited as precedent. The problem comes in when such analyses take shortcuts whereby no one bothers to parse the analogy, usually based on the assumption that we all agree anyway, when really some of us, sometimes huge sums of some of us, disagree on the aptness of the precedent. This dissonance undermines the value of precedent as a legitimate tool for reaching conclusions, and works a startlingly odd form of legal discursive violence on those in disagreement.

The it’s all good, it’s part of the game approach also has much to recommend it on its face. As someone who worked as an assistant prosecutor in an office where we once passed around photos of a dismembered drug suspect and invited laughter (“there’s one we won’t have to try”), I really understand “morgue humor.” When I taught criminal law I had a hypo where a robber came into the classroom and held a small knife to my back, and I in turn pulled out my high powered assault weapon from the podium (where I repeatedly asserted that I kept it), aimed it at the robber, demanded that he drop his knife and then shot the robber repeatedly until he died. Self-defense or not?

I also get the urge to passive-aggressiveness in hypotheticals. I used to offer a long-running hypo about leaning out of the impossibly small, oddly-positioned window of the office to which administrators had assigned me (jab) and doing target practice by firing across the street to hit the window of a tobacco shop. The “joke”, and the key fact, was that I did this while hundreds of people gathered for a parade in the street below (as was sometimes the case). As I used to explain, I taught so many large classes and served on so many committees that there was little chance that a parade would occur when I was not present at the building (another jab). Is it manslaughter or murder if I kill someone during target practice? It all made for great discussions. But never, ever, did it occur to me to make an actual person, and certainly not an actual person in my workplace, the subject of my hypothetical homicides.

Passive-aggressive humor that explicitly or implicitly assails those who hold power over you is a time-honored part of what some scholars have called “carnivalization”. Carnivalization usually occurs where social subordinates breech the norms of polite discourse and behavior as a means of acting out against oppression. Carnivalization may include mockery of those in power or self-mockery by the oppressed group. I have written about this in the NYU Review of Law and Social Change.

The problem with carnivalization is that while carnivalization represents an upsetting of mainstream power and norms, it is possible to deploy carnivalizing norms to silence persistent outsiders, especially when those outsiders are perceived as "upstarts", that is, when they begin to have some claim to power or status themselves. In my previous writing on this topic I used as a principal example Imus’s calling members of the championship Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed ho’s”. I also offered the instance of upper middle class white college students throwing “pimp and ‘ho” parties right in the midst of their dismayed black classmates. This is ersatz carnival, a cynical inversion of carnival norms. Even in today’s post-racial, post-sexist United States, race, class and gender still frame relations of power. Even when the president is a black man, or the dean is a black woman, there is no disruption of mainstream power norms when those who have traditionally wielded power continue to deploy it in verbal assaults—it is racist, sexist, BAU: business as usual.

Follow-up February 27, 2011:

I received many comments to this post. Thanks all of you for reading! Most comments came directly to me via e-mail, and were signed. Three comments came via the blog and were anonymous. Two commenters expressed disagreement; they were among the three anonymous submissions (funny how that works.) I published the two dissenters below under comments. Quite unintentionally I'm sure, they actually make my point rather than counter it. The third anonymous commenter sent me a link (that I declined to click on, thank you) titled "Why I Hate American Women", LOL. It's all good, I guess. Free speech lives! Kind of. As many scholars have noted (key among them Chris Demaske), the power of discourse in modern societies, and of "First Amendment norms" in particular, lies mostly in the way that such discussions mask the true character of modern power and as a result conceal domination. The power of dominant groups is not via censorship, but in the illusion of the inclusiveness and accessibility of the debate. As long as mainstream discursive norms are able to exercise the equivalent of socio-political, socio-legal filibustering of discourse that drowns out response, and then call it all square, can speech be truly "free"? It is worth remembering that not everybody can speak. LBI

(In)Sanity, Thy Name is Woman (Or, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall)

According to a recent New York Times article, the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5 for short) has eliminated five of the current ten personality disorders. Perhaps most noteworthy among the personality disorders to be eliminated is narcissistic personality disorder. (They are also planning to jettison, among others, histrionic personality disorder. Maybe good riddance to that one, as some of the symptoms seem oddly gendered. Consider that sufferers often: "act or look overly seductive"; are "easily influenced by other people"; are "overly concerned with their looks"; are "overly dramatic and emotional", are "overly sensitive to criticism or disapproval" and believe "that relationships are more intimate than they actually are". (Hmm. Sounds like WAY too many people I know.)

In an age that is chock full of people babbling loudly on cell phones about the mundane details of their private lives while riding in crowded public conveyances, and twittering and facebooking and blogging (!) endlessly, it is wonderfully ironic that narcissism is soon to be dead letter from a clinical perspective. The “me generation” has breached the defenses and taken over the fort (asylum).

The problem, apparently, is that the tuna net of narcissistic personality disorder was catching up too many dolphins in its diagnostic mesh. Being excessively self-absorbed is not really enough for a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. Instead, a special kind of self-absorption is required:

--a grandiose sense of self, meaning a serious miscalculation of your abilities and potential that is often accompanied by fantasies of greatness.

--an expectation that others see your superior qualities and tell you so (mirroring)

--extreme sensitivity to personal slights coupled with an insensitivity to other people’s points of view

According to the author of the Times article, most people with narcissistic personality disorder are men. This is perhaps not surprising. Despite the fact that women are often considered vain and self-absorbed, the truth is that there is very little social space in which women may engage in pompous, bombastic, self-aggrandizing behavior. Even calmly assertive, self-confident women who insist on speaking their minds are more subject than men to being told to “just shut up.” (Ever wonder why there aren’t more women bloggers?) Silence becomes her. After all, it wasn’t very long ago that the symptoms of one form of insanity specific to women included “talking incessantly”, self-amused laughter, obscenity and complaining of “imaginary wrongs”.

A perhaps not unrelated story in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently noted that women athletes may be more likely to have concussive head injuries overlooked.

According to the Chronicle piece:

"Male athletes, though, often reported cognitive symptoms like amnesia or disorientation after a suffering a concussion—signs of head trauma that are not easily overlooked. Female athletes, by contrast, often had neurobehavioral symptoms like drowsiness, or somatic symptoms like sensitivity to noise.

The female athletes’ symptoms, the report cautioned, could be more easily missed than the male athletes’ symptoms. They could also lead sports-medicine staff members to attribute them to a different condition—anxiety, for instance."

So, sports-medicine staffers notice if you seem really out of it, as male athletes apparently often do after head trauma. But if you have more subtle symptoms such as drowsiness or noise sensitivity, as women sometimes do in cases of head trauma, the symptoms may be missed altogether or attributed to “anxiety.” Women can be so high strung (as well as vain and self-absorbed). Anxiety, concussion—gee, who could tell the difference? Certainly not the narcissists among us; they generally avoid the helping professions, and when they do engage in them, they tend to focus on their own opinions and not the complaints of those whining patients. How many times have you been asked "How much pain do you feel? [stage direction: show patient picture of sad face, neutral face, ecstatically happy face; ask her to circle one] and thought that you were getting through to anyone with your reply?

I hope that some of the really useful personality disorders such as OCD will continue to be available to us. After all, it has become a mark of intellectual distinction (if not cool and sexy) to be OCD (a sufferer of obsessive-compulsive disorder). The image that used to come to mind was of Lady Macbeth walking around mumbling "out damned spot" while rubbing her hands together. Now we think of brainy, "revenge of the nerd" college (or ex-college) students who turn hours of seemingly repetitive programming tasks into billion dollar Internet businesses.

Time to end this; my mirror is waiting.

Who’s Sorry Now is Like the Corners of My Mind (or, Connie Francis meets Gladys Knight and Mashes-up Public Memory)

A New York Times headline recently trumpeted that Virginia Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had telephoned law professor Anita Hill at her faculty office and left a message. You can read about it here. Odd behavior, to say the least. And by odd behavior, I don’t mean the fact that Professor Hill reported the call to campus security or that her university reported it to the FBI. Under the circumstances, I consider the call vexing and harassing. The proffer of an “olive branch” is usually used to symbolize peace, not to figuratively re-assault the victim.

I teach the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill matter in my Race & Racism class and in a class called Law in Literature and Film (we do non-fiction as well as fictional depictions of law in film in the latter class. I spend quite a bit of time discussing, though, whether even televised hearings are truly non-fiction, unvarnished “truth”, given issues of editing, staging, camera angles, etc.). I am always astounded to find that so many students are not at all aware of what had occurred during the Thomas confirmation hearings until we study it. (“Oh,” one student said in a recent class after understanding what had occurred, “Is that why Justice Thomas is always so quiet?” I have no answer for that, really.) My eldest children were very young (younger than some of my students) at the time of the hearings, and yet my children have a very clear memory of the events and a good understanding of what went on based on what they learned as they got older. Given the disparities in shared knowledge about this event, such knowledge (and such memories) begin to feel personal and narrowly cultural rather than public and broadly social. They seem to depend on the particular focus of ones home or educational community.

Public memory can be tricky, as I've determined from exploring it in other work. It is often viewed as static and unchanging, and is typically concerned with forging a collective sense of what to remember and how to remember it, and is often a significant component in forging identities both individual and collective. But public memory, as one scholar writes, is subject to the “history, hierarchies, and aspirations” of a particular community, and is therefore often anything but static. At its core it is both contested and contingent, and the contest is frequently between the “official culture”—that which exercises hegemony, and the “vernacular culture”—informal, unofficial, subsidiary cultures.

In my classes we talk about how the Clarence Thomas hearings started off asking questions about fitness to serve, and ended up as a he said-she said assessment of “truth.” There was no resolution of the truth question, unless you count confirmation as vindication, and I’m not sure that you can. Time has passed, and memories fade or are reshaped altogether, especially where somebody (but who?) should be sorry.

I have to agree with the scholar who wrote: "Memory is more likely to be activated by contestation, and amnesia is more likely to be induced by the desire for reconciliation."

Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of To Kill a Mockingbird

This past July was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird. Recently I participated in a radio show to celebrate the anniversary. You can listen to it here. The show was a wonderful opportunity to reflect not only on the book itself, but also on the ways in which some of the themes addressed in the book, racism, classism, the role of gender in shaping identity, even access to education, have and have not changed over the last half century. When I first read the book in my late childhood, I was focused first on racial issues, especially on the prosecution of Tom Robinson, and next, on how Atticus Finch, the protagonist, represented what was good and right in America, standing firm in his convictions even in the face of adversity.

However, over the years, especially as I have used the book (and the film based on the book) as texts in law teaching, I see the book and the characters differently. I think that the true hero of the book is Scout, the child narrator who delivers the tale. Scout, because of her age and gender, is able to move between the worlds of black and white and of male and female. Her relative social unimportance allows her a veritable cloak of invisibility from which she can see and hear and thereby gain what comes close to an omniscient knowledge of her community and its people. Tom Robinson, the black man accused of raping a white woman, becomes, with every successive reading, a distant symbol, a cipher, someone who must be convicted and who must die, however unjust such an outcome may be. Tom is, however, no “magic negro” as there is no magic in To Kill a Mockingbird. There is only a finely-wrought and complex sense of truth, but it is a truth that falls well-short of despair. To Kill a Mockingbird troubles the notion of thesis and antithesis often seen in discussions of race, whether fictional or real. Scout and the other children in the book illustrate this, for they are more real than many of the adult characters. They are flawed and imperfect, but joyous, passionate and ultimately just. They are the antidote to our 21st century postmodern, poststructual, and allegedly post racial world.

Welfare Cheese, the Working Class and the Tenure Class (or, the Cheese Stands Alone)

I attended the Third National People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference a few weeks ago. It was a wonderful event; it was well-organized and intellectually stimulating and offered a broad array of presentations. The National POC is an event that began in 1999 with the coming together of the several regional People of Color Legal Scholarship Conferences. The focus of the national event, like the regional events, is to provide a forum for law professors of color (and other professors with interest in issues concerning law faculty of color) to present scholarly work in an intellectually rigorous but warmly supportive atmosphere. I have long credited the POC conferences with my success in academia, and by success, I mean the fact that I am still here. M’la; m’ap kenbe toujou, as they say in Haiti.

During one of the dinner events at the National POC, I was tickled when one of the speakers referenced welfare cheese. There was a brief wave of laughter, ranging from polite titters to hearty guffaws. It struck me all of sudden: some of the people there not only didn’t know what welfare cheese was, they’d probably never eaten any. Welfare cheese (aka government cheese), for the uninitiated, is cheese that is provided to recipients of welfare and/or other means-tested benefits. I first heard of it, and ate it, during the 1970’s and was mighty glad to get it. Welfare cheese makes awesome grilled cheese sandwiches. I know well what welfare cheese is, from personal hard luck life stories. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who looks like me knows what welfare cheese is from personal experience.

In fact, research shows that highly educated people, even of various racial or ethnic backgrounds, are disproportionately from the middle and upper middle classes or the wealthy classes. This is perhaps nowhere more true than among university faculty members. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discussed the fact that few studies focus on working class or lower class students and faculty members. While there is some data regarding the economic class of students, apparently no comparable data exists for college faculties. I think that all too often, even well-educated people conflate race and ethnicity with social class, assuming that if, for instance, efforts have been made to bring in faculty members of color then by necessity this means that social class diversity has been achieved. This is, of course, not true, and has never, I think, been widely true. While programs offering greater access to education and other social goods over the last forty years have meant greater racial, ethnic and gender diversity in some workplaces, I might argue that some of the people from underrepresented groups who were helped by such programs were already middle class or very comfortably working class, and had been for a few generations.

Of course, such discussions raise the issue of just what it means to be middle class versus working class. For some people, working class means having parents or grandparents who didn’t have a summer home (seriously; someone shared that with me once.) For others, working class means rarely enjoying mainstream cultural events and knowing no one with a college degree, despite having consistent access to necessities such as food and shelter. Never mind what it means to belong to the poverty class. Poverty class means more than lacking some material comforts; it means lacking necessities and having a near absolute deficit of social capital. Social capital is the stuff that dreams (and educational attainment) are made of. Very few people in academia, it would seem, have ever belonged to the poverty class. This is due in no small part to the fact that access to advanced education takes a good deal more than a bright mind and hard work. It takes a startling array of economic and social resources, and these resources are frequently deployed from the time a person is born.

The discussion of social class in academia reminds me of the not unrelated discussion of the future of tenure in the academy. Some people see the tenure system as a hindrance to good institutional governance, since it is sometimes hard to compel tenured faculty members to embrace change. Others see tenure as necessary for insuring an independent minded, intellectually vibrant academy; faculty members who serve at the will of administrators would be little likely to engage in research or teaching that might offend established norms. Both sides have good points. But what often goes unaddressed in discussions of tenure among tenured faculty members themselves (who, not surprisingly, usually favor the tenure system) is the meritocratic assumptions about the nature of the institution. People who have tenure, or are on the tenure track, deserve those statuses, right? Serial adjuncts and faculty members on contracts often don’t have the same privileges, but if that’s true, it’s because people with tenure (or access to tenure) are smarter, work harder, and are just better, right?

Not right. While there are frequently well-articulated, reasonably objective standards for getting tenure (or for getting on the tenure track) what goes unexamined is the practical barriers to meeting the standards and most shamefully, the sometimes differential ways in which the standards are applied. Looking only at legal academia, it is noteworthy that a majority of persons who work as instructors but are not in tenure or tenure track jobs are women. One reason sometimes offered for this is that faculties often recruit nationally for tenure track jobs, and women are sometimes less able to move around easily to accept such jobs. That is true, yes. But all too often what starts out as a national search for tenured or tenure-track positions ends by settling on a local candidate who is, all too often, surprisingly like the majority of people already in place from a gender and racial perspective. There are other barriers as well. Even when women succeed in getting on the tenure track, they are, according to research, likely to have less prestigious jobs and earn less money than men with similar (and often lesser) credentials.

I could go on and on here about class, both inside and outside of academia. There is a lot to say; these are, after all, long-standing problems. Talking about class makes many people uneasy, since in many ways it raises a challenge to ideals of merit. All the more reason we should talk MORE about it, not less.