(no subject)

[ursula]

Tim Burke has some comments (on a New York Times article I have avoided reading) about the way liberal-arts schools sell choice which seem remarkably aware of the ways in which the liberal arts are genuinely elite.

My roommate for a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates several years ago was Hoa. At some point not very far into our acquaintance, she asked me, "There aren't very many Asian kids at your school, are there?" at which point I said, "Huh?" and she explained, "You seem to have trouble understanding my accent."

My small-elite-liberal-arts-college was full of Asian-American students; but it didn't have many students like Hoa, who had been in the U.S. all of two years, and had switched her major from teaching (in Vietnam) to mathematics (at a large East Coast state university). Hoa seemed to conclude that my school was horribly expensive; but of course it was too well-endowed to ask anything at all from someone like Hoa. The issue was more that nobody like her would have considered attending an institution focussed on writing and reading and being a better person. She was going to college-- and participating in a competitive math REU-- so she could get a good job when she was done.

That was the true luxury of Swarthmore: the luxury of getting an education, rather than a career. It was a class distinction, but not the distinction of pricetag; and I think that elitism was invisible to most of us.

Comments

[hesychasm]

I was definitely conscious of the fact that I'd be graduating with a distinct lack of practical, career-oriented skills. Real world skills, even. In fact, I was quite bitter about it. But I also stayed very much in the humanities areas -- perhaps if I'd taken more science or social sciences, I'd feel differently.

[ursula]

Yeah, I don't think anyone really believes she's majoring in English or Comparative History of Ideas or what-have-you for that increased ability in communicating difficult concepts in a business environment or whatever the skill is that they're always telling us liberal-arts graduates possess. But now that I'm at a big state school, I notice many more students like the one in glasseye's electrical-engineering course who asked him, "You actually like this stuff? I'm just doing it 'cause my parents want me to get a real job!" And the students who do major in the liberal arts seem much more likely to resign themselves to selling coffee once they graduate, which last I noticed you weren't doing.

[q10.livejournal.com]

by some accounts, the etymology of the term ‘liberal arts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts)’ comes from assumptions about their being the arts studied by those who were members of the upper classes (and so were free, in the sense that they were exempt from certain large categories of social, political, and especially economic compulsion).

[ursula]

BRING BACK THE TRIVIUM!

[q10.livejournal.com]

i couldn't agree more (i've been tempted for a bit now to just say i'm in ‘trivial studies’ when people ask me about my academic focus).

i remember, during graduation rehearsal at Swarthmore, i was seated behind a couple of people who were discussing, with what appeared to be real concern, the possibility that the school might not be a revolutionary institution. i didn't laugh, or cry, or otherwise give them a piece of my mind, but there was something very striking in the fact that they'd seriously entertained such illusions up to that point.

[ursula]

I find that sort of nostalgic and endearing, but then other graduations I have attended include my high school graduation, where the Teacher of the Year (a retiring coach) declared, "Some people like reading. I didn't," and mangonini's graduation from Georgetown, where Cardinal Arinze gave a list of Threats to the Nuclear Family, which traveled through homosexuality and ended in DIVORCE. (At least one professor walked out.)

[tiurin.livejournal.com]

I've never visited, but I've never known any Swatties who tell me that there's a weird tower in back of the school where students fight duels...

[ursula]

That's because all the duels take place on top of Parrish.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

this was really intersting (and boy, did i just waste an hour reading through difficult to follow non-threaded blog commnts??? :-)

but you're right, it *is* about choice and about the leisure to learn non-useful things. then again, i always feel that it's even larger than that...when you're fighting for survival and shelter you don't write much poetry...we as a society want to afford it (or no literature would ever be taught!)

finally, i wanted to share an embarrassing anecdore that i remembered when someone in some thread commented on why these women got advanced degrees and whwther that was the new upper midde class elite status symbol: one of my friends was talking about her sister whose new nanny was working toward her Ph.D.; wherupon my husband felt the need to share that he indeed had a finished Ph.D. taking cre of his children and cleaning the house.

amusing if it weren't so bitterly true!!!

[ursula]

What I find most interesting is that the choice displays a class distinction rather than an actual income distinction-- one can be raised by organic farmers on a small island who are writing poetry, or just by starving grad students, and still retain this apparent freedom.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

well, i recently realized that we need to look at earning *potential* rather than actual income. i mean, i make about $4000 a year, but i'm firmly middle class (if not upper middle class).

in fact, i'd argue with all of the people barely getting by on my flist, very few of them are actual working class...students, mothers, non-profit jobs...we *choose* our lack of income (well, the mother issue is more complicated, but there still are various choices involved...for example, i could get a tenure track job across the country and have a long distance marriage..but i wouldn't want that for my kids, so: choice! otoh, i don't think of parenthood as a luxury that i choose to spend my time/money on...if for no other reason than that i'm rearing the tax payers of the future!!!)

[ursula]

There's the good old-fashioned argument that women make less money than men and aren't paid for all the things like raising kids or cleaning houses because it's economically convenient to have a large group of people who are underpaid, and it seems like the current U.S. trend to require more higher education for the same job has roughly the same source . . . I sound like I'm arguing against myself, don't I? But I suppose what I'm wondering is whether we collectively have the same earning potential that we have individually.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

ah...that's a really good question!

the things that gets me is the way this system uses concepts like "love" to justify not paying someone for the same job that gets paid (and benefits!) if someone else does it. Even if we step away from motherhood, takin care of sick relatives, dying parents,...same thing!

The entire system relies on volunteer labor that doesn't get rewarded (not even in health insurance nd social security years!!!)...and yes, while every individual woman chooses to do that, as a class, we are "stuck" with it, aren't we???

[ursula]

It doesn't get benefits as often as it ought, even when someone else is doing it . . .

[bloodorange.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about invisible; maybe lurking deep down somewhere, maybe depending upon one's course of study. Those of us who took classes with Marge Murphy were certainly reminded of this very luxury, in any case. I'd read the Times article when it came out and struggled over what to make of it (let's ignore the "three examples makes a trend" skepticism, anyway), and so I liked Tim Burke's piece a lot. It definitely put things into perspective for me--I mean, even though I don't plan to ever be a "full-time" mother with no career aspirations, running a printshop is just the same as being a stay-at-home mom in terms of "using my education." It's messed me up a little bit, maybe especially because the three other members of my family to have gone to elite colleges all have/had powerful and/or academic-field-related careers. All women, too. Sometimes I wonder if there's something else I should be doing with my education and my Intellectual Abilities, but somehow I think that satisfaction of selflessness won't hold a candle to practicing my craft well, practicing other, secondary crafts well (hopefully many involving yeast!), reading the Times in the morning and running around with my dogs. Or whatever.

Oh, I don't know why I'm going on like this in your comments. Something resonates with me, I guess. Don't mind me. I just haven't gotten some of this stuff out yet, anywhere else.

[ursula]

But what good is an education, if it needs a higher degree to activate it?

(And of course, like everyone else, I post to get comments; don't apologize.)

[bloodorange.livejournal.com]

Career-wise? Yep. Maybe I don't need a higher degree to do the work I want to do, but it'd help (say, if I wanted to teach a class here and there, or if I just wanted better credentials). This would, of course, not really be the case had I gone to art school, but art school is basically technical school anyway.

Jessica Todd Harper, naive WASPy Bryn Mawr rich girl at thirty, once told our photography class that the purpose of our education was to make our minds interesting places to spend the rest of our lives. I like this explanation.

[rebeccapaul.livejournal.com]

I'm very aware of the difference in the reason for education, mostly because of amisela. He went to a public university and is still baffled (sometimes, more annoyed) by people who get an education but then don't use it. It is a very big privilege to be able to go to 4 years of college and then take some time to yourself to ponder life, instead of jumping straight into a job to put it to use.

We have a lot of debates on the reasons for higher education because of this...

All Swats are class-enemies of the proletariat. You will be reeducated at the one-walled classroom.

[alsoelsewhere.livejournal.com]

This post feels like a confession, is that how you intended it?

the luxury of getting an education, rather than a career

(1. Getting a career is also something of a luxury.)

2. While I agree with the banal point that it is much easier to disdain money when you have it, the disdain seems to me well-placed. Tim Burke puts it well, "the general critique we should have here is not the critique of choice and privilege, but the critique of the idolatry of productivity in white-collar careers." That said, this idol is more in need of smashing than critiqueing at this point. Who's got a hammer? This [entire discussion] looks for the life of me like an impotent spasm of bourgeois guilt and pity. I wonder what content would be left in the discussion after replacing loaded words like "privilege", "elite", "class", "luxury", etc. by the injustices they apparently connote, as Tim Burke tried half-heartedly to do and ended up with "critique" (the diminuitive of refutation and actual reversal).

I find it extremely hard to believe that the privilege you flatter with the term elitism has ever been invisible to anyone. More likely, and rightly so, it was felt to be a practical fact, without imperative power. What changed?

If you were really in the in-group, you would know it was Swattie

[ursula]

What I find interesting here-- as I'm about to say to cathexys-- is the degree to which one feels free to get a useless education doesn't quite correlate to one's actual income; though perhaps you aren't interested in what one has to do to be bourgeois?

Re: If you were really in the in-group, you would know it was Swattie

[q10.livejournal.com]

this just seems like another indication of the broader fact that class, whatever it is, is a much more complicated animal than wealth.

Re: If you were really in the in-group, you would know it was Swattie

[alsoelsewhere.livejournal.com]

Did you see how its back arched when you said that?

[flammifera.livejournal.com]

so she could get a good job when she was done

::waves hand:: Er, classicist here? Once you've had the first 100 people ask you, 'so...what are you going to do with that?', you sort of get the idea you're getting an *education*, not a *job*.

I know it's quite early days yet, but I've been enjoying the working world more than I thought I would (or perhaps just the absence of homework), so I'm beginning to be curious about how I will use that education -- as you say, an education like Swarthmore's doesn't necessarily mean you'll go into that field and make lots of money. That's one of the things I like about alumni -- they do such cool things which may or may NOT be related to what they studied at Swat.