(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

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?