Reflections on Class in Academe

An important discussion that took place on Twitter last week after the budget was released in England had me thinking about this topic more than I usually do. As someone who is always thinking about accessibility, from a physical and social point of view, I really wonder how accessible academe is to those who happened to grow up as lower class or lower middle class (though such precise distinctions are difficult to delineate any more in a world of austerity).

I work hard as an educator to make sure that my class and the material we discuss is accessible to my students for I am acutely aware of the financial strain they are under. About 80% of my students are immigrants, a large majority of them are single mothers, many work not one but two or more jobs to make ends meet and pay for school. By and large they do not have access to fancy new phones or tablets. Everything I want to use or ask them to think about needs to be accessible to them technologically and in terms of time commitment as well. I do this because educational spaces need to be ethical spaces and you can’t disregard a majority of students as participants because they do not have ready access to technology. For an educational space to be a rewarding space, it needs to be open and collaborative for all.

Learning outcomes do not suffer by being mindful of the constraints that your students may be under- in fact you are more likely to achieve the levels of insight, analysis, creativity, and literacy if you keep the need for open access at the forefront of design and pedagogical implementation. However, upon reflection, I wonder if my passion for making sure educational spaces are open and ethical comes from the fact that I did not grow up financially privileged and I held many different positions (some at some rather head-scratching places) to attain my master’s and my doctorate.

I know that I am privileged in certain ways and that cannot be eliminated from the equation, but I do wonder, statistically, how much of the professoriate at any one university or college is made up of academics who happened to come from a financially privileged background. Further, do those demographics change when you compare college and university, especially in Canada? I know that having conversations with colleagues at the college where I teach, a large majority grew up in similar situations as I did. When I was in grad school this conversation was different, many who were there, in fact many who secured outside funding (the kind that makes you look really great in front of a tenure track position hiring committee) were those students who had a parent who was already a professor, a doctor, a lawyer. There exceptions of course, but has anyone run a study on this at all?

  I would like to think that higher education is not only the realm of those who are financially able to access it without the help of loans or government assistance. I mean our whole profession is based pedagogically (ideally) on the fact that this isn’t true- words from Ruskin on the Working Men’s College come to mind. Yet I can’t help but wonder that how all these austerity measures will mean that academe truly will become the ivy gates of privilege. That only those who have ready access and ability to pay for higher education will be the ones who will circulate within the halls with the minds of the future.  That concepts of access will slowly disappear in an intellectual landscape that assumes that everyone is on the same page because that is how it was for them. We certainly seem to live in a time where empathy is dead- this translates to how education is thought of and accessed.

Is there a solution, I mean a solution that does not involve cutting off our nose to spite our face like in England and Wisconsin? I certainly hope so. The thing about the learning, about the idea or concept of education is that it is not something that can be confined to one space as much as people conceptualize it. Education doesn’t need a classroom just as faith doesn’t need a church.  The desire for education, the desire to learn and expand our ideas lives in each of us and this can’t be contained to a high school, a college, a university. If we cut access to higher education I would like to think it will just grow elsewhere (funny how rhizomes seem to haunt) - we just need to be comfortable enough with that paradigm shift to let it happen.  If you are worried look up the Arts and Crafts movement of the 19^th century, it will give you hope.