I had been meaning to post for a while on the conservatives in academia thing, because I wanted to tell the story of one of my friends, a conservative grad student whom we will call C. I feel a bit ambivalent about doing so, because I realize I don't want to imply bad things about the Berkeley Classics Department, which is populated on the whole by very kind, sensible people. I don't think this is a tale of anyone meaning to do C. any harm or plotting against him in any way, and lots of people drop out of grad school for lots of varied reasons. Nonetheless, there's no question that C. was made to feel unwelcome in the department -- perhaps moreso by his fellow students than by any professors, now that I come to think about it.
C. was raised by his grandparents in somewhat straitened circumstances in South San Francisco because his single mother wouldn't or couldn't care for him. He never talked about her, so I don't know what the story was. He did well in public school, enough to get into Cal, but sort of floundered as an undergraduate; he had a long commute, was working, and just didn't have it all together. But, he learned Latin and he really liked one of his Classics profs, a very old-school and now-retired British guy. So, then he up and joined the Marines, partly to help pay for school. They taught him Arabic as well as your more traditional how-to-kill people skills (hey, he could go far these days!). He fought in the first Gulf War, mostly working as a translator for interrogations, as I understand. I see him as the good cop, for sure. While he was in the Marines, he taught himself Ancient Greek, whiling away the boring hours of troop transports with a Loeb containing the Laches, given to him by the old prof (the Laches is the Platonic dialogue on courage). When he finished up, he returned to Berkeley to finish his BA, and joined the Classics PhD program in my year, one of five in the class.
When I first met him and heard all this, I thought C. was the man. Really, how cool is he? (And no, this isn't about Tacitus' secret life; I think he was in the army or something, and anyway he's a bit older.) He and I became friends, though not close friends. Now, C. is a libertarian-type conservative. I have known a few libertarian guys of this kind: raised in lower-middle-class surroundings by grandparents or single moms, smart over-achievers. (I only know guys like this; I think women raised in similar circumstances tend to face enough blatant sexism not to turn out quite the same way.) C. felt like a fish out of water among the (for the most part, pretty rich) Ivy Leaguers around him, and he resented being told by people who had been to Yale and come out without any debts that he was the recipient of vast privileges because he was a white man. I think it would be fair to say that most of his fellow students regarded him as a big freak at best, and possibly an evil person at worst. This is not to say that most people weren't nice to him, to his face, but they did all think he was crazy because he wasn't a lefty. I mean, really crazy. And dumb.
Why would anyone think C. was dumb? Well, he was a conservative in intellectual matters as well as political ones, i.e., he was hostile to Theory. These two things don't necessarily go together in Classics. The most up-to-date gender theorists in Classics still make you take exams in which you translate the Times of London obituary of Winston Churchill into Greek in the style of Demosthenes, after all. And, given the way of things in academia, the very crustiest prof on the roster is as likely to be some kind of unreconstructed Commie as not. Nonetheless, people with far-left political views are usually hot on Theory, and politically conservative people cool to it.
So, I think it would be fair to say that C. was excluded from the inner circle of grad-studentdom, the people who are percieved to be going places and hooked up with the younger and/or the more prominent professors in the department, on the basis of his conservatism (in both senses.) Now, maybe he had made it all too clear at some point that he didn't think much of them either; no one is going to waste their time mentoring someone who thinks ill of their work. In this sense, discrimination against conservatives is just a kind of creeping extension of collegiality. It's also important to note that if feeling bitter about everyone in grad school constitutes being discriminated against, then all grad students are victims of terrible discrimination. Nonetheless, I think it would be fair to say that C. faced an environment which merits the term 'hostile', and which was hostile to him in a way that it was not to me. He went around all day with the fully justified suspicion that people discounted his contributions to seminar as both obviously dumb and motivated by a highly suspect ideology. This made him a bit testy, I think (and he was a sardonic fellow to start out with).
There were certainly professors who were more conservative in the roughly anti-Theory sense with whom C. got along fine (I realize that I have no idea about the political views of these men, even some I knew well). I always liked those guys too, but they were not hip and happening; not people whose recommendations you would imagine, even in a hopeful moment, might help you in the shark-pit of job-hunting). The ascendancy of Theory does produce a somewhat troubling result in a Classics department, which is that those old crusty guys do a lot of work that is boring, and you would never want to do it, but you do want someone else to have done it. Textual criticism, of the old-fashioned kind, for example. (I mean the kind where you posit the existence of a particular misreading in the now-lost manuscript gamma.) Or military history. In my experience people pay a lot more attention to the sexy moment just before the plays start, where all the budding hoplites get displayed before the assembled polity, than they do to boring developments in tactics. So much more can be said about the former. But when you complain that the towering work in some sub-field was written in 1898 and is obviously massively suspect for that reason (as I have done myself plenty of times), then you have to be sure there are people around who are going to write a new one, and not just stuff about performing gender. Note that this is true even if you think lots of excellent work is being done along Butlerian lines.
The long and the short of it is that C. left the program. (Then again, I am not in Berkeley finishing my thesis at the moment either, and the Berkeley Classics Department gave me lots of money, lavished personal attention on me, and so on. It's hard to say why people do things). I always felt that he was treated rather shabbily, and undeservedly so. There were people in the program who actually were crazy and dumb, whose comments in seminar I felt quite justified in ignoring. C. was neither crazy nor stupid. He knew the languages really well (a point of macho pride in Classics); he cared a lot about his students and taught some of them exceptionally well. He had a teaching style some found intimidating (though I prefer it): he had very high standards and expected his students to work very hard. He lost some people this way (this is whay I say "some of them"), but if you stayed in his Latin I class you would come out knowing the material very well -- better than the students of more touchy-feely grad student instructors. He and I once engaged in a doomed struggle to change first- and second-year language instruction from 3 days per week to 5. It seemed ridiculous that people were being given more class time to learn Italian than Latin, even though it's much harder to learn a non-spoken language. Of course we, um, didn't have any authority to raise the pay. Yeah, so, moving on...
C. was a perfectly sensitive reader of ancient texts, and his specific criticisms of theoretical models were usually spot-on, though they often provoked uncomfortable silences in the seminar room. Some people have their feeling hurt when the theories they advance are criticized, but, frankly, those people aren't taking their intellectual responsibilities seriously, and are great big wusses besides. I remember quite well that when we did a kind of round-robin criticizing one another's papers for a Livy class, C. was the only one to deeply question the theoretical basis of my paper (I was using Girard's sociological theory in an entirely different, i.e. literary context, without any justification), and he was totally right. Everyone else was too polite to mention an obvious, and quite serious flaw. So, I think it was a loss for the field that C. is now doing whatever other white-collar job he is doing now. When last I talked to him he was considering a political career, but he seems much too smart for the California Republicans. Those people really are crazy.
This was a deligthful read. I'm a little unsure of the hot-for-theory = political leftism identity, though I can see how it'd be more applicable in classics.
I think a serious case could be made that being forced how to learn to read Greek and Latin in classics departments constitutes eurologophallocentrism.
Posted by: Chun the Unavoidable | February 16, 2004 at 11:05 PM
I was just musing on my blog today about this issue, but this piece (a great read) adds another layer to the whole question. I wonder how much some of the bias being talked about in this whole meta-discussion is about a culture issue, e.g., the degree to which academia is quietly dominated by the children of the professional upper middle-class, and anyone outside of that is made to feel subtly weird and different and potentially "conservative".
Certainly I think this gets at some of what Erin O'Connor's correspondents are talking about when they get frustrated with the perceived hostility of literary criticism to loving literary or doing formalist criticism. (It's why I'm pleased to see Chun grooving on this essay: it's not *all* philistinism, you know. I grok why some people feel so confounded about why their motives for doing literary analysis don't seem to match up with what they encounter in grad school, and C. is a good case of that.)
Posted by: Timothy Burke | February 17, 2004 at 08:02 AM
Wow, thanks Chun. I was curious to see what you'd have to say. In C.'s case there really was a big class issue in his prickly defensiveness and others feelings that he was weird somehow (as Timothy points out). As for the eurologophallocentrism, you've got us dead to rights there. I think my Greek prose composition exam example (and yes, that's one I actually took) pretty much proves that point. It's not rational to have a macho fixation on knowing that names of obscure agricultural implements in Greek and Latin. Too late for me though, because I already kick too much ass.
Posted by: Belle Waring | February 17, 2004 at 10:43 AM
The class issue is real, even in the hinterland research universities. I had to design a defixionum to curse certain enemies at one point.
Posted by: Chun the Unavoidable | February 17, 2004 at 11:54 AM
That was a really interesting story. It's too bad that C. wasn't received better. Whether you agreed with him or not, at the very least he presented a different viewpoint that made other students (and profs for that matter) consider their own views in a more rigorous way. I thought that was what grad school was all about....
I think Tim is on to an important piece of the puzzle regarding class. As a non-upper middle class person who attend public school and state universities (and whose girlfriend's family is very upper class, Ivy League-types), and now works/studies at one of the Ivies, I can relate.
Posted by: A_Reader | February 17, 2004 at 11:35 PM
My wife has devoted a major portion of our relationship to educating me on this issue, because I was a huge freaking snob when I first met her, and she found that there was a real alignment with the kinds of assumptions I made and the dominant assumptions that our mutual undergraduate school made, which she, coming from a working-class background, did not have. I've seen it a lot since--working-class academics definitely can find themselves on the outside looking in when it comes to many of the daily "performances of legitimacy" that help make someone seem at home with academic life.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | February 18, 2004 at 01:53 AM
I'm intrigued by this "blue-collar academics" thread; I'd like to hear more about other people's experiences. I come from a lower-income immigrant background--my mother was a waitress, my father sold furnace repairs; neither made it into high school, much less out--and I've wondered how much of my occasional sense of estrangement in academia derives from my political viewpoint (right of my profs'), and how much from my unfamiliarity with the silverware, so to speak. (And, of course, there's the estrangement that's endemic to graduate school no matter where you come from.)
I agree with the other posters, too; this was an excellent tale.
Posted by: Rose | February 18, 2004 at 04:54 AM
If C. also mounted a political campaign as a Republican in 2000 (I forget if it was for the legislature or the House) in Contra Costa County, then I had him as an instructor while an undergrad languages major (his story sounds really familiar).
It wasn't him that drove me to law school, but some of the other conservatives I knew (who, by the time I graduated, had clustered in the Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Graduate Group) and the generally forlorn attitude they had about the direction of the field.
It's a pity too- I was pretty good. Then again, anyone who's had Threatte for more than two or three classes tends to be.
Posted by: The Angry Clam | February 18, 2004 at 09:46 AM
I guess you know C.'s sekrit identity now, Mr. Clam -- if that *is* your name;). I agree that Leslie Threatte rules. He was my advisor for a long time, and Leslie Kurke was always like "what the hell are you doing?"
Posted by: Belle Waring | February 18, 2004 at 12:08 PM
C taught me Latin 100 in my first semester at Cal.
Good guy. Couldn't have happened to a better person.
Leslie Kurke was also involved that semester. I was fortunate enough to have Classics 10A with her the year she decided to teach an "advanced" discussion section herself.
Unlike some other faculty I could mention, she was pretty normal. Then again, I liked even the obviously weird ones, so I'm probably not the best person to ask.
Posted by: The Angry Clam | February 18, 2004 at 01:48 PM
Just so you don't drive yourself too crazy wondering who I am, I think it's a one way knowing. You were one of the other TAs for a class I was in, I think (I want to say a class with Prof. McCarthy, but I could be wrong. Leslie Kurke's class was the other course I had that featured TAs, as opposed to graduate student taught courses). In any event, I'd heard your name at some point while I was in the department, although I doubt it was the other way around.
I don't think that we were ever on the same side of the classroom- I got to know more of the people from the Group than our department directly, as they had a higher tendancy to enroll in the upper level undergraduate reading courses.
You weren't in the (few) graduate courses I took, I can state that.
Posted by: The Angry Clam | February 18, 2004 at 11:07 PM
Based on a close look at a half-dozen or so instances, I'll testify that economic class differences in school far outweigh any influence that political differences might have. Liberal proles suffer in pretty much exactly the same way that conservative proles do, and their ideology is just as suspect.
Unironically citing "popular culture," insisting that political action and need differ from theoretical mindset, or testifying to awkward counterexamples -- for the more cultish sort of teacher, these all mark us as belonging at the bottom of the pecking order, reinforced (as far as fellow students as concerned) by any differences in diet, clothing, speech habits, and so on. If anything, our obstinate refusal to learn the game may be more provoking than a straightforward religious or party difference: both the academic left and the academic right find it easier to maintain coherence without us.
The "conservatives are treated badly" banner is emblazoned with the same species of red herring as the "poststructuralism is empty" banner. There are at least as many right-wing bullies as left-wing, and Critical Theory journals are no duller than New Critical ones.
Posted by: Ray | February 19, 2004 at 02:23 AM
I think there is a general assumption that smart people go to private/Ivy-esque colleges and if you go elsewhere its because you're not up to snuff. It's rarely considered that maybe you just couldn't afford to go to a non-state school or that your background didn't provide you with the necessary advantages, etc. And if you do go to the Ivy-esque college that you cut from the same cloth as the rest of the people there.
I'll post some of my experiences over at my (new) blog over the next day or two: http://culturaldetritus.blogspot.com/
Well, Tim, your wife must have done a good job because you seem exceptionally well-reasoned about academia (maybe that's cause I agree with a lot of what you say, but....)
Posted by: C.D. | February 19, 2004 at 05:32 AM
Well, as a former classicist now a lawyer, I would guess that "C" now makes 5 to 10 times what a classics professor does, reads the Fourth Eclogue every Christmastime, and feels bemused contempt when he remembers his former grad school colleagues (and most of his professors).
Posted by: wsm | February 19, 2004 at 10:03 AM
Re: 'blue collar academics'; I'm from the north of England, the scion of a working-class family, and since I specialised in the 18th-century at Oxford, I felt pretty much far to the left, politically, of every one of my tutors.
But then again, my literary tastes were Tory rather than Whig (which sort of makes sense, since the Walpole-era Whigs remind me a lot of the Bush-era Republicans). Which got me noticed and appreciated, even if I felt like a cuckoo in the nest of Oxford academia.
Posted by: nps | February 19, 2004 at 02:08 PM
This comments thread reminds me that I said something so amazingly, embarassingly snobbish the other day (this is off the academic topic and more on a general class topic). I was discussing the movie Grosse Pointe Blank with a Japanese friend, and I explained that it took place in an "allegedly tony suburb in Michigan." My aunt started laughing at me, saying I was the reason people not from the east coast have chips on their shoulders about east coast snobbery. She pointed out that Grosse Pointe was probably one of the richest places in the US. Yeah, but it's IN MICHIGAN, I objected. There are plenty of rich people in mansionettes in Plano, Texas, too, but god knows it's not exactly tony. When she pointed out that my grandmother had a best friend from there (Grosse Pointe) I was somewhat mollified, but unconvinced. On reflection, I realized I was a jerk. Apparently, you can take the girl out of the Social Register, etc. Luckily for me, both my parents were black sheep of their families, and so I got to meet lots of bikers and drug dealers as a young person. Otherwise I wouldn't know anyone normal.
Posted by: Belle Waring | February 19, 2004 at 04:26 PM
I have been reading the Best Post citations for this year's Koufax Awards, and I think that this piece ranks with them.
I came from an Ivy League-educated family, and spent the first six years after high school working as a welder. Class differences are real in ways that have nothing to do with one's ostensible political alignment. I grit my teeth when I hear a fellow liberal Democrat refer to "trailer trash".
Posted by: No Preference | February 19, 2004 at 10:03 PM
Further support for the "crustiest professor can be an unreconstructed communist," sort of.
More like very traditional New Deal Democrat who was also very proud of having voted repeatedly for Barbara Lee, and her vote against the "New Gulf of Tonkin Resolution," including making and placing a sign on his door.
He absolutely hated (and they, in turn, didn't think much of him) the direction of his Art History Department, which he saw as being far too theory obsessed and not nearly art-obsessed enough. I think it shows that it's not exactly political conservatism, but rather a sort of resistance to (post)modern academic trends that really gets one excluded. That the two have, at least in the popular mind, a correlation is a side issue.
Some of my favorite quotes:
"Art Historians are, by definition, idiots." (remember, he's an Art Historian).
"You see, I'm the only one left who teaches Art History. The rest just teach social theory."
Surveying a classroom with the desks in a circle: "I'm one of the few left who still show slides. The others just sit in a circle and hold hands."
"It was one of those exhibits where someone draws a black line on the wall around the room and calls it 'art.'"
Posted by: The Angry Clam | February 20, 2004 at 08:46 AM
One of the reasons why public money is spent on higher education (in fairly large quantities) is that Americans have believed that it contributed to social mobility. Maybe this isn't true any more. Maybe the modern university is the most powerful engine of class snobbery to be found anywhere in America.
Posted by: David Foster | February 24, 2004 at 05:30 AM
No, my experience is that publicly assisted higher education most certainly does contribute to social mobility. But there's no contradiction between that and the university being a place of class snobbery (or, to be less one-sided about it, disagreeable class awareness). Where else would friction be felt except at points of contact and movement?
Posted by: Ray | February 25, 2004 at 04:59 AM
I have been teaching myself Latin for some years now. Too old for even grad school ... and too financially depended upon to even think of trying. I have attempted Greek ... and hope someday to return with more vigor (i.e., time) available.
I have found these ancient languages to be conducive to serious, reasoned argument. I have often thought that their re-introduction,done properly, into high school and college curricula would lead to more reasoned politics, etc.
How can people so fortunate to be steeped in these works fail to be more open-minded?
I don't mean to sound rhetorical; I am honestly amazed at how far we've fallen.
Good blog.
Good luck.
Tell C. I'd gladly pay him to tutor me and my children. (Now back to work for me so I can earn such keep.)
Thanks.
Posted by: Tim Kane | February 25, 2004 at 11:21 PM
I have bookmarked you yet!!!! http://straponcrush1.iespana.es/
Posted by: strapon femdom | September 26, 2007 at 06:06 PM