White Male Upperclass Privilege

Our readings for this week, Gina Barreca’s Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Co-Education in the Ivy League and Chapter 3 of Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation entitled “The Faculty Organize, But Management Enjoys Solidarity,” are connected by their discussions of the socioeconomic inequalities that the university system has failed to remove from its central models.

Barreca’s working-class roots seemed to create a barrier between her and the typical Dartmouth student throughout her time there. She notes that “what remained totally out of my reach was the polished look that comes from being a kid from a family with a solid financial and social foundation…I didn’t have ‘the look,’ and so literally couldn’t look at things from the same perspective…I couldn’t fool myself or anyone else into thinking that Dartmouth was the kind of place that would have welcomed me” (Barreca 67-69). Indeed, there was certainly quite a bit of truth to Barreca’s outsider status. When she and a group of friends formed a sorority in critique of a more traditional sorority founding, their opposition wrote to the school paper “saying in essence, ‘If these girls are so against our enterprise, why didn’t they use their real names?’ We had. It was us, no disguise, no camouflage. Our names were Barreca, Lager, Cohen, Rosen – with a handful of other names obviously unexpected for a Dartmouth by-line” (Barreca 80).

The idea that not just male gender, but also money and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity made the ideal Dartmouth student is reflected in battles at the faculty and administrative levels. Bousquet notes that a blind trust in the market to make morally good decisions ends up shorting those who do not fit a specific profile. He quotes “Lucy Snowe,” an present-day English professor, as saying that “teaching here is like being in a bad marriage that looks good to outsiders. I’m the wife whose husband slaps her around but who, nonetheless, smiles gamely, maintaining the relationship ‘for the sake of the kids’” (qtd Bousquet 90). Bousquet’s commentary, that “a chief component of Snowe’s oppression is the very idea that this arrangement is fair or rational, the inevitable – and impersonal – consequence of some such guarantor of the public good as a ‘market’ in the wages of women” (Bousquet 91) is an echo of the idea of economic privilege as natural that Barreca experienced at Dartmouth. Indeed, by assigning cash value to subjective qualities (like a good professor or excellence in education), the academy has essentially codified the system of economic privilege that was such a problem for Barreca in the upper echelons of the university.

Here at the College we have seen backlash against former President Nichol’s Gateway Program, which provided much needed financial aid for low-income students. A significant number of community members believe that the Gateway program’s funding was a serious factor in the Board of Visitors’ decision not to renew Nichol’s presidency. And with statewide budget cuts, students in and out of state are facing continual tuition hikes while hiring freezes hurt academics on the job hunt. Socioeconomic tension, which leads to the idea that there is a very narrow “type” of person who goes to college, is unfortunately still alive and well in American academia and especially here at William & Mary.

-Cate Domino