On College: Reflections 10 Years Later
I graduated from Brown University exactly 10 years ago. Because I have an ill family member in New York, I’m not able to be at my reunion this weekend. But after reading Nathan Heller’s New Yorker piece, “The Big Uneasy: What’s Roiling the Liberal Arts Campus?”, I’m reflecting on what I learned in college about identity and politics, and what has changed since I left school. Heller makes a distinction between two groups of millennials:
“This is the generation of kids that grew up being told that the nation was basically over race,” Renee Romano, a professor of history at Oberlin, says. When they were eleven or twelve, Barack Obama was elected President, and people hailed this as a national-historic moment that changed everything. “That’s the bill of goods they’ve been sold,” Romano explains. “And, as they get older, they go, ‘This is crap! It’s not true!’ ” They saw the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice. And, at schools like Oberlin, they noticed that the warm abstractions of liberalism weren’t connecting with the way things operated on the ground.
Students in college about a decade ago (my cohort) faced an uncertain future. September 11th happened, homeland-security projects slithered out in unsettling ways, the Iraq War became a morass, and the world markets collapsed. People coming of age in that era of inevitable evils tend to be conservative in their life-style ideals (if not yet in their politics), and might be called the Builders: having reached adulthood on unstable ground, they’re opportunistic entrepreneurs, restless climbers, and deferential compromisers.
The kids in college now could be called the Firebrand Generation. They are adept and accomplished, but many feel betrayed by their supposed political guardians, and aspire to tear down the web of deceptions from the inside.
This resonated with me, but only to a point. It’s true that my campus years, 2002 to 2006, were consumed by debate over international issues: the Iraq war, Israel/Palestine, the labor practices of American companies operating in the developing world. But the seeds of today’s politics around race and gender were already sprouting back then. Several friends began to transition genders during our college years, and a small movement successfully pushed for gender neutral housing and bathrooms. Students protested after campus police stopped students of color and asked for their IDs, believing they were “outsiders.” Our college president, Ruth Simmons, launched the Slavery and Justice Commission, which examined the university’s ties to the slave trade and suggested ways to make reparations. Take Back the Night marches raised awareness about campus rape.
Cultural appropriation also came up. Freshman year, I took a linguistics course called “Race and Language in the United States.” When we began to study African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and our young, white professor gave us a pop quiz on AAVE’s grammatical rules, the entire semester went off script. Most students, regardless of their own race, failed the test. Black students were outraged that a white teacher had “tested” their knowledge of the language they spoke at home. Our professor told us she had wanted to make a point: that although AAVE was a language with real structures and rules, it was rarely accepted as such. She had aimed to call us on our hypocrisy, but instead, students told her she was at fault, for theorizing, as a white woman, around their own lived experiences.
The professor devoted an entire class to discussing the controversy, and then apologized to us and offered extra credit to erase our bad grades on the AAVE exam. The rest of the course felt tense, loaded. We all spoke slowly and guardedly. Rightfully so, I think. I embarrassed myself in that class by explaining Yiddish culture to a black classmate during a discussion section. I later found out she was Jewish and half Ashkenazi. I was so ashamed for presuming to know more than her. I hadn’t ever met a black, Jewish person before. I learned a lot in college.
Where did my generation, and the students 10 or 15 years younger, learn a new form of identity politics, one that emphasizes personal testimony over dispassionate inquiry held at a cool remove by a white, male professoriate? From our teachers. As Heller notes, feminists of color, like bell hooks, popularized the crucial idea of intersectionality—that we are shaped not only by race or gender or class, but by all these forces operating simultaneously. The notion dates back a long way. Think of Sojourner Truth asking “Ain’t I a woman?”, demanding that the black woman’s essential femaleness be acknowledged. Anna Julia Cooper, the turn-of-the-century black feminist teacher, argued that black women had the special moral standing, and innate understanding of suffering and discrimination, that would allow them to “uplift the race” through education and public service.
I grew up in a racially and socioeconomically diverse environment, but I wasn’t exposed to ideas like this until college. At Brown, I was assigned, by a white female professor, a 1988 essay by Peggy McIntosh called “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” In it, McIntosh comes to terms with the ways in which she benefits from whiteness, even as she is oppressed by femaleness. We now understand that disability status, sexuality, gender expression, and an infinite number of other identities also confer more or less privilege upon us, in ways that can expand or limit our opportunities in the world.
Today’s college students, the most diverse generation ever, have used the tools of left scholarship to demand change from the very institutions that gave rise to that scholarship. Those institutions were built hundreds of years ago, for a clientele presumed to be white, male, and rich. Our parents’ generation opened campuses to women and people of color and a tiny number of working class people, and asked us to be grateful to be there, to feel glad we were allowed to join the elite. Now, students are demanding that the institutions themselves change; that they recruit a faculty that looks like America and stop treating minority students as diversity tokens, allowing them to balance schoolwork with the difficulties of a life that may be more complex, precarious, and politically engaged. The student movement has made some outrageous demands, which Heller’s student sources acknowledge are partly theatrical. Oberlin College will never pay them $8.20 per hour to attend a protest of police brutality, nor should students be exempted from writing papers because they are busy and stressed out. All of life might carry a “trigger warning;” a “safe” classroom should never mean one that shies away from difficult topics.
Those demands attract the media, but there are other campus movements, too. Students are fighting for in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants, unionization and fair wages for adjuncts and other campus staff, and against the interference of state legislatures on curriculum. These struggles touch on the less sexy issues of budget cutting, economics, class, work, and state-level electoral politics. Much of this activism happens at public colleges, which are more economically diverse than private ones. At Oberlin, the focus of Heller’s article, 9 percent of the student body receives a need-based federal Pell Grant, compared to 24 percent at Grinnell, 20 percent at Amherst, and 17 percent at Brown. Many flagship state universities, like the University of Missouri, home to a roiling activist movement, have similarly low numbers of poor students, but at others, like UCLA and UC-Berkeley, more than a third of students receive Pells, which typically go to those whose families earn less than $50,000 per year.
The near-uniform affluence of many selective colleges remains under-discussed. I experienced a pretty profound culture shock when I arrived at Brown in the fall of 2002. Not because I didn’t fit in myself—I am white, and come from an upper-middle class, college-educated family—but because I had never before been in an environment of such intense wealth. I grew up in a post-industrial suburban prison town, a bit rough around the edges, and attended public schools where about forty percent of students were non-white, and a third were low-income. I vividly remember an incident during freshman orientation, when we 1,500 18-year olds were seated in lawn chairs listening to the director of admissions deliver a speech.
“Some of you may be wondering,” he said, “if you really belong here. You may see your accomplished classmates and wonder, ‘Did the admissions office make a mistake?’ Trust me. We didn’t. You are exactly where you belong.”
The sentiment was reassuring in the moment, but one I often mulled over, troubled, during the following four years. The university was constantly congratulating itself for its “diversity,” and yes, there were the children of British royalty and Saudi princes, and of members of Congress, Hollywood executives, and famous writers. I had never known people like this. I was stunned, expanded, and inspired everyday by the broad experiences of my peers. They taught me, a person who aspired to a profession her parents knew little about, to dream big.
In high school, the only kids I’d known who got “sent away” to school were those who’d been arrested; my exposure to the concept of boarding school had been through mid-century novels like The Chocolate Wars and Catcher in the Rye. In college, I was surprised to learn those fancy boarding schools still existed—some of my closest friends graduated from them—and that about half of all Brown students had attended private K-12 schools of one sort or another, compared to just 10 percent of Americans. Most of my classmates were hardworking and curious and oriented toward social justice. But it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the strongest predictor of being admitted to a school like Brown was not some abstract measure of accomplishment or intelligence, but rather, having parents with the socioeconomic capital to acquire for you the childhood experiences that were a precondition to being accepted, from decent K-12 schools to books at home to SAT tutors to volunteer trips to unpaid internships.
After all, where were people like the ones I’d known in my hometown? The first in their families to attend college, kids whose parents received food stamps and who had to work afterschool and summer jobs, not for spending cash, but to cover basics? I know they must have been there, albeit in small numbers—my class was the first to be admitted under a need-blind policy—but there was almost complete silence around the difficulties they must have been experiencing on a campus built by and for affluence.
All this is beginning to change at Brown and elsewhere, thanks to student activism. Of course, it is always helpful when a movement has concrete goals beyond consciousness raising. Peter Dreier and Richard Kahlenberg have proposed several good ideas: In exchange for continued tax-exempt status, private colleges should have to accept a greater percentage of students who receive federal Pell Grants. This would force colleges to more actively recruit in low-income neighborhoods and schools, instead of relying upon a pipeline of low-income students of color hand-selected by programs like Prep for Prep. Second, the number and size of Pell grants should be increased.
These reforms would represent a start to remedying the fact that American higher education is a well-oiled machine for reproducing class privilege, though one less race and gender segregated than ever before, and better at talking about identity.
