{"id":88,"date":"2017-12-14T01:10:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-14T01:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/wordpress\/roguerhet\/?p=88"},"modified":"2025-05-30T21:07:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-31T02:07:11","slug":"elitism-encoded-within-university-settings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/2017\/12\/14\/elitism-encoded-within-university-settings\/","title":{"rendered":"Elitism Encoded within University Settings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many students, I started to search for the courses with the clearest, most rigid grading criteria. \u201cWriting\u201d became a euphemism in my experience for \u201ccultural awareness\u201d in a white-upper-middle class<\/a> sense. There were two versions of this, one that required you understand the self-assured confidence white-collar parents teach their children and the other was the over-coming marginalization narrative, composed in the language of that managerial class<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Writing scared me because it then meant a good grade was linked to words and phrases I would never had heard as a child and had not mastered. Writing meant knowing the norms of a culture to which I did not belong. Writing was part of this:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.vox.com\/2017\/9\/11\/16270316\/college-mobility-culture\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

University of Cincinnati psychologist Shane Gibbons, who has researched this topic and counsels first-generation\u00a0students, said these students are often raised by parents who have working class jobs \u2014 and in those work\u00a0places, being assertive or individualistic can get you fired.<\/p>\n

“I think that experience of the parents’ workplace is transferred to children,” he said. “There’s less of challenging of\u00a0authority figures, but to some professors that looks as if the student isn’t trying.”<\/p>\n

In addition, research shows that first-generation students tend to go to school for different reasons. An annual\u00a0UCLA<\/a> survey finds that\u00a0first-generation students\u00a0are more likely to go to school because their parents pushed\u00a0them to do so \u2014 and because they see it as a way to ultimately get a job and support their family.<\/p>\n

In contrast, middle- and upper-class families instill very different values from an early age.<\/p>\n

Sociologist Annette Lareau<\/a> followed dozens of children for a decade and found in her 2003 book,\u00a0Unequal\u00a0Childhoods<\/a>, that more privileged children tend to be raised to reason with and question authority.<\/p>\n

She named this parenting style “concerted cultivation,” and found that the skills that these children develop\u00a0translate well to a middle- and upper-class environment.<\/p>\n

And it’s those people who fill the quads and administrative buildings on college campuses, and they come with a\u00a0certain worldview about how successful humans should act. This is also true of second-tier schools, where\u00a0students come from less affluent backgrounds, but administrators still come from upper-middle class backgrounds\u00a0and exhibit upper-middle class expectations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Professors who called me names and insulted me were responding to a cultural norm. My father (a nurse) and my mother (a classroom paraprofessional) would never have questioned their superiors: doctors, teachers, etc. There was a deference to authority, deeply ingrained. And the argumentation skills are not the same for a first-generation student as for the child of the managerial class.<\/p>\n

Math and science were my safe spaces, where I could ace any test, score perfect, and know I could defer to the professor. The text was (generally) correct, and if you did spot a mistake, you could ask politely and the professor or TA would check the math or code.<\/p>\n

Writing? These were horrible classes of heated debate, which left my stomach aching and my head throbbing. I\u2019d leave at breaks and not return. I\u2019d do anything to not take a writing course, the entire time I had been writing for the local newspapers since high school. Writing fills hundreds of journal pages and bins in my basement. I never stopped writing outside the classroom – but I have nearly no confidence with academic genres. The anxiety paralyzes me, enough that I sought out an educational therapist to help me with my focus to pass the writing classes on areas for which I was already a professional writer!<\/p>\n

The therapist worked with a doctor, who prescribed various medications. They resulted in hyper-focus and some really good weight loss, but they didn\u2019t help me actually complete assignments without panic. Still, I was riding my bike 100 miles a week in the mountains!<\/p>\n

Pushing through the MFA started in 2004 and ended in 2017. That\u2019s a long time to struggle with the format of peer review and instructor feedback in writing and creative courses. The feedback was brutal, and often done in front of an audience.<\/p>\n

Little tiny class markers in the writing class reminded me of my isolation. I hadn\u2019t been to live theater, a concert, a museum, et cetera until I was an undergraduate student. I hadn\u2019t taken vacations to interesting places. My world wasn\u2019t the one reflected in writing prompts, assigned readings, or the activist pedagogies of some professors. My goal was to get a job and help my family and community. Period. This entire \u201cself-improvement\u201d thing? Not something to which I could relate.<\/p>\n

Classmates talked about taking a year off to travel. They went places during summers. Their writing mentioned people, places, and ideas that were foreign. And when a reading was supposed to be about experiences like my own, I wanted to shout, \u201cHey, that author knew he\/she had a safety net. That\u2019s not the same as being poor, with three generations living in a one-bathroom house. Not the same at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing courses still scare the heck out of me\u2026 and I teach writing. I constantly worry if I\u2019ve become what I dreaded. The unintentionally elitist professor who judges students unfairly because they defer to my authority or that of peers. \u201cSpeak up! Take a stand!\u201d These are not so easy.<\/p>\n

Even in my doctoral program, I dropped a couple of classes that felt like Utne Reader<\/a> Salons for the secretly initiated. The anxiety of writing the \u201cright way\u201d and expressing the \u201cright\u201d views was paralyzing. I could barely put a couple of words to page without hyperventilating. It wasn\u2019t healthy, so I found classes like, \u201cWriting in the Sciences\u201d to reduce the stress.<\/p>\n

When students worry that they might need a specialized therapist to pass writing courses, maybe the courses are the problem?<\/p>\n

Photo by Miami U. Libraries – Digital Collections<\/a> <\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many students, I started to search for the courses with the clearest, most rigid grading criteria. \u201cWriting\u201d became a euphemism in my experience for…<\/p>\n

Continue readingElitism Encoded within University Settings<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"iawp_total_views":15,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,12],"tags":[65,77,126,238,299,335,349],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-policy","category-teaching","tag-class","tag-composition","tag-elitism","tag-pedagogy","tag-socioeconomics","tag-universities","tag-writing","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2024\/01\/RogueRhet_1200x630.png?fit=1200%2C630&ssl=1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pfiwhV-1q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1334,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions\/1334"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}