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Monday, October 03, 2005
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CLASS PRIMER David Brooks calls American universities “great inequality producing machines.” Our colleges, notes Ross Douthat in this November‘s Atlantic magazine, have “trumpeted their commitment to diversity and equal access while pursuing policies [early admission, merit-based aid, etc.] that favor better-off students.” “Higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States,” writes Thomas Mortenson of the Pell Institute. Most people, that is, graduate from high school; college is the breaking point, with some people falling down by not going to college at all or by dropping out, and others staying level or (more and more rarely) climbing up by finishing their college education. But what do these abstractions really mean? We can measure them in terms of clear, though narrowing, differences in income between college and non-college graduates, certainly; but as Brooks points out, we need to think more deeply about inherited class divisions and their implications for college: Part of the problem is that kids from poorer families have trouble affording higher education. But given the rising flow of aid money, financial barriers are not the main issue. A lot of it has to do with being academically prepared, psychologically prepared and culturally prepared for college. Psychologically, for instance, higher classness involves a certain mode of reticent self-control, as Alfred Lubrano, whose father was a bricklayer, learned when he attended an Ivy League school. Gregg Easterbrook describes the process: Kids from poor families seem to profit from exposure to [the Ivies] much more than kids from well-off families. Why? One possible answer is that they learn sociological cues and customs to which they have not been exposed before. In his 2003 book, Limbo, Alfred Lubrano, the son of a bricklayer, analyzed what happens when people from working-class backgrounds enter the white-collar culture. Part of their socialization, Lubrano wrote, is learning to act dispassionate and outwardly composed at all times, regardless of how they might feel inside. Students from well-off communities generally arrive at college already trained to masquerade as calm. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds may benefit from exposure to this way of carrying oneself - a trait that may be particularly in evidence at the top colleges. A decisive class marker, then, is not saying certain things, holding back, keeping calm and affectless. This can be learned, as Lubrano discovered to his lifelong advantage. But let us be clearer about the trait and its implications, good and bad. Here it is in play, first as described in Class, by Paul Fussell: It’s among members of the upper class that you have to refrain from uttering compliments, which are taken to be rude, possessions there being of course beautiful, expensive, and impressive without question. The paying of compliments is a middle-class convention, for this class needs the assurance compliments provide. In the upper class there’s never any doubt of one’s value, and it all goes without saying. A British peer of a very old family was once visited by an artistic young man who, entering the dining room, declared that he’d never seen a finer set of Hepplewhite chairs. His host had him ejected instantly, explaining, “Fellow praised my chairs! Damned cheek!” And here it is playing out for young Gore Vidal: Gore Vidal once confided to an interviewer [in Views from a Window: Conversations With Gore Vidal] that his first sexual experience occurred when he was eleven. When asked if it were heterosexual or homosexual, Vidal replied, "I was too polite to ask." This agreement among the higher classes to assume things, not to ask, to be polite to a fault, sometimes has front-page-in-the-New-York-Times implications, as in the case of E. Forbes Smiley, rare map thief. (We’ve already seen the results of the reticent trustees at American University forbearing to ask President Ladner vulgar questions about how he spent tuition money.) On today’s NYT front page, we find the following headline: THEFT CASE RATTLES SEDATE WORLD OF RARE MAPS Sedate. We are clearly in the colder climes of the upper classes here, where it’s bad form if you’re Yale’s rare book library to ask the thin well-dressed man hunched oddly over an old book if the X-Acto knife you just found on the floor belongs to him (see this post for background). The case, writes the Times, “is turning into an embarrassment for prestigious libraries and elite collectors from Chicago to London. A field marked by tweedy scholarship in quiet, climate-controlled vaults has been rattled by disclosures of maps disappearing amid lax security and suspicions that big-money deals were being made with too few questions asked.” To conclude, let’s shimmy all the way back down the class pole. "They never tell you everything they're thinking," a McMansion owner in affluent, old-money Chevy Chase, a suburb near UD’s own ‘thesda, complains to a Washington Post reporter who’s there to report on mansionization. He’s furious at his quietly derisive neighbors, who find his new chateau alarming and embarrassing but won‘t come out and say it. Earlier, this man had seen one of these snobs, a Mr. Russell, talking to the Post reporter about all the big houses going up, and he had shouted at him. "We like all the big houses!" the homeowner yelled at Russell, who ignored him. |