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Bringing: Social Class: To the Diversity Challenge

Article in About Campus · November 2001

DOI: 10.1177/108648220100600504

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 BRINGING CLASS
S OCIAL
T O THE DIVERSI TY CHALLENGE
We need, says the author, to stop
pretending that class doesn’t exist
and begin to critically consider

W
it as rigorously as we do
race and gender.

HILE I FINISHED my doctorate in education recently at a prestigious

research university in the Midwest, I had the opportunity to teach master’s
level courses as a lecturer.As is common instructional practice, I had students
introduce them-
selves during the first class meeting of each semester. Many of these new graduate students
were just out of college, and they came from a number of prestigious institutions, including
Georgetown, Penn,Wisconsin, and Yale.
I followed their introductions with my own and prefaced my comments with “Let the soci-
ology of education lesson begin.”
“Neither of my parents completed formal education past the eighth grade. My father was
a bus driver, and my mother was a homemaker,” I told them. I went on to say, “I was tracked
vocational in high school and took classes like Future Farmers of America, wood shop,
business marketing, and power mechanics. I worked full-time at the local drugstore during my
senior year, and I graduated 327th in a class of 457 with a GPA of 2.1. My career goal was to
manage the drug- store or one just like it.”

By Jim Vander Putten

14

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1698885

 ABOUT CAMPUS / NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2001

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1698885

 Through the lenses of race and gender only, Bill Gates
and a white male Appalachian coal miner will be seen
as equal.

At about this point, the facial expressions on the author about this article, please consider sending a copy to About
graduate students in my classes registered any of a Campus managing editor Paula Stacey at pstacey@josseybass.com.
num- ber of reactions: surprise, curiosity,
disappointment, amazement, just to name a few. But
the one question on everyone’s mind, which no
student dared to ask aloud was, So how did you get
here?
Over the course of my fifteen-year career in
higher education, I have become increasingly
frustrated with the so-called diversity work of
scholars and practition- ers in this field.With few
exceptions, working defini- tions of diversity have
been limited to race and ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, and, on rare occasions, dis- ability.
About Campus demonstrated this limitation when it
published Reginald Wilson’s article entitled “Educat-
ing for Diversity” in 1996.Wilson addressed
cultural diversity but constructed it primarily in terms
of whites and blacks.
More recently, the National Association of
Student Personnel Administrators’ on-line
publication Net Results included an article by Carlos
E. Cortés entitled “Building Community from
Communities: Diversity and the Future of Higher
Education.” Cortés went so far as to construct
diversity in terms of “African Amer- ican, Hispanic
American, Asian American, American Indian, and
Pacific Island American ancestry.” Unfortu- nately, he
made no mention of gender, sexual orienta- tion, or
disability, let alone social class. In another example,
the American Educational Research Associa- tion
published the council meeting minutes for the 1999
annual meeting and included a breakdown of
appointments to leadership positions solely by race
and gender.
The primary limitation of using only these two
lenses (in whatever context one would choose) is that
Bill Gates and a white male Appalachian coal miner
will be seen as equal. Some of the shortcomings of
this view are obvious, but let’s dig a little deeper. First,
it reinforces the dichotomous approach of thinking
about and view-

Jim Vander Putten is assistant professor of educational

leader- ship in the doctoral program in higher
education at the University of Arkansas–Little Rock.
He can be reached at jvputten@ualr.edu.

Note: We would like to receive feedback about the

articles we publish. If you are sending an e-mail to an
ing these issues as simple categorizations.
Arguments about the accuracy of the
construct of race aside, given the rates of
interracial marriage in the United States, I
firmly believe that the concept of race will be
much less useful to us as educators and
researchers within the next twenty years. In
fact, Cortés confirmed this multiracial- izing
of higher education in his article entitled
“The Diversity Within: Intermarriage,
Identity, and Campus Community.”
Second, using only the lenses of race and
gender places value solely on individual
appraisal based on read- ily recognizable
characteristics—such as sex and skin
color.This limited view can be attributed to the
widely held myth of the middle class (that
everyone in the United States belongs to the
middle class), but it is the same obstacle that
people with learning disabilities, which are
not visible, have been struggling with for
years.To illustrate the danger of these
generalizations, I often quote these words from
a T-shirt designed by the artist Robert Therrien
Jr.:
Heterosexual does not mean
15
ABOUT CAMPUS / NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2001
homophobic White does not mean racist
Male does not mean sexist
To take this one step further, I’ll add,“White male
does not mean middle class,” and I try to convey that
mes- sage to students at the beginning of each
semester dur- ing course introductions.
Frankly, diversity is more complicated than just
race and gender. As a result, if we are to consider
ourselves fully competent to address the concept of
diversity, it’s time that we in higher education
recognize the full complexity inherent in the concept
of diversity and the ways in which it influences our
campus cultures.This complexity must include
considerations of social class. I was glad to see Greg
Roberts, former president of the American College
Personnel Association, describe his working-class
social origins in a recent article, when he stated,
My father was a “master builder” and he
would always get excited when the crews
fin- ished the “skeleton” of a structure. He
would say, “It’s not what the outside looks
like, but the integrity of the internal
structure that will withstand the test of
time.” (p. 1)
 In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education
article, Jeff Sharlet described the race-class-gender
view as a triumvirate and raised the question,“Is
there a more familiar mantra in fin de siècle
academe?” Unfortu- nately, the focus has been
almost exclusively on the influences of race and
gender, and the influence of class has been ignored.
James Rhem noted the short shrift given to class
issues when he wrote,“Social class remains the poor
relation in the family of diversity issues.”
Unlike women students and students of color,
white students from working-class backgrounds are
largely invisible on college campuses.This
invisibility serves as the foundation for the dearth of
academic pro- grams that consider social class.
There are many women’s studies and ethnic studies
academic programs on college and university
campuses; however, I am aware of only one
working-class studies program, housed at
Youngstown State University. Many campuses have
student affairs centers or offices that provide ser-
vices to women students and students of color. Does
your campus have a center for students from
working- class backgrounds?
I firmly believe that we need to make concerted,
intentional efforts to examine the role of social class
in the race-gender-class trio of diversity education
on campus. Otherwise, discussions of diversity will not
fully account for the influence of social class on race
and gen- der, and these discussions will continue to
equate U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice with an African American female housekeeper
working in a conference hotel.
One salient issue for students from working-class
backgrounds involves the concept of status
incongruity, as described by Richard Sennett and
Jonathan Cobb in their book The Hidden Injuries of
Class. Students from working-class backgrounds
often experience ambivalent feelings about which
reference group and social class they identify with.
On one hand, their working-class upbringing exerts
a significant influence on how they view the college
campus. On the other hand, the middle- class culture of
higher education and the middle-class backgrounds of
many of their classmates provide another
16
ABOUT CAMPUS / NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2001
influence on this view. As Jake Ryan and Charles
Sack- rey observed in their book Strangers in
Paradise, the incongruity between the social class
of one’s background and the social class of one’s
current environment creates confusion and
discontent.This significant shift in social- class
environments creates feelings of being out of place
in a social class higher than that of one’s origin.
Sennett and Cobb identified these feelings as status
incongruity, defining it as “the discontent as a
result of upward mobil- ity from the social class of
one’s origin to a higher social class” (p.71).This
status incongruity can be described as living on the
margin, not belonging to either of two dis- tinct
worlds.As a result, feeling out of place on a college
campus is not the sole domain of students of color;
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students;
students with disabilities; or women students. Social-
class origins exert influences on the student
experience as well.
In her article “Blue Collar, Crimson Blazer,” M.
Elaine Mar described an encounter with an alumnus
during her first week at Harvard:
The most publicly embarrassing encounter
was another conversation with an
alumnus.A kindly man from a long line of
Harvard grad- uates, he shared with me all
the advice he had already given his son. He
seemed genuinely curious about my
interests and hobbies and anxious to help
me make the most of my col- lege
experience. Then, remarking on how
proud my parents must be, he
asked,“Where did they go to college?”
“They didn’t go to college,” I replied.
He was so confused by this answer that
after a few awkward “oh’s” and some
frantic chewing of the ice from his glass, he
excused himself to get another drink.
Sometime later I discovered his son’s
middle name adorning one of the buildings
in the Yard.
As this encounter reveals, on campuses of prestigious
institutions, there is a stark contrast between students
from different social-class origins.
Feeling out of place on a
college campus is not
the sole domain of
students of color; gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and
transgendered
students; students with
disabilities; or women
students.

17
ABOUT CAMPUS / NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2001
 Because social class can play a significant
role in explaining the college experiences of women
and students of color from working-class
backgrounds, it must play a significant role in
how we define diversity.
If you earn thirty thousand dollars a year
In another recent analysis of social class in working in an assembly plant, come home from
higher education, Jonathan Kauffman examined the work, open a beer and watch the game, you are
campus culture at Duke University. In this article, working-class; if you earn twenty
Duke direc- tor of admissions Christoph
Guttentag describes a new institutional measure:
economic diversity.This concept refers to the
proportion of students from poverty and working-
class backgrounds that are part of the student
body in comparison to students from middle-
and upper-class backgrounds.This view is useful in
providing an additional conceptualization of
diversity.

DEFINING SOCIAL CLASS

I N THE LATE 1960s, Christopher Jencks and David

Riesman were among the first scholars to apply con-
cepts of social stratification to American higher educa-
tion, and they combined economic position and
occupational data to form the single concept of social
class:

When we speak of the upper-middle class,

for example, we will mean families
headed by someone with a professional or
managerial job, usually making at least
twice as much as the average American
family.When we speak of the lower-middle
class we will mean fam- ilies headed by
clerical or sales workers or small
businessmen, usually earning fairly close to
the median national income. When we
speak of the working-class we will mean
fam- ilies headed by a blue-collar worker,
again with income close to the national
average. (pp. 65–66)

However, drawing significantly on household

income is problematic, as Julie Charlip, associate
professor of history at Whitman College, illustrates in
her 1993 essay:

thousand dollars a year as a school
teacher, come home from work to a
glass of white wine and PBS, you
are middle-class. (p. 8)
Drawing on both these ideas, I have arrived at
the fol- lowing description of working-class
students, which I apply in different ways in my
research on social inequal- ity in higher
education:
• Both parents possess an education level of high
school or less.
• The student had low-income status during childhood
and through their undergradu- ate college years.
• Parent(s) work in blue-collar occupations: farmer,
maid, coal miner, factory worker.
• Parent(s) and student did not
participate fully in a middle-class
lifestyle.
In these predominantly African American higher
education campus environments, I was able to control
for race, so to speak, and isolate the potential
influences of faculty social-class origins on faculty
perceptions of being role models for HBCU
undergraduate students. In other words, I took a
structural pluralism approach rather than one of
cultural pluralism. Stephen Steinberg articulated the
primary rationale for using this approach in his book
The Ethnic Myth: “Many cultural attributes
commonly associated with ethnicity are not
S rooted in ethnicity as such, but are artifacts of
social class” (p. 67). One theme that emerged from
my long inter-
views with HBCU faculty was the importance of
social-class origins in what faculty felt they had to
offer students. One African American assistant
professor from a working-class background talked
eloquently about placing a high level of importance
on education, despite the fact that her parents had
not completed high school and did not place as much
importance on education. She described how she
used that as a way to demonstrate to students that
motivation can help to overcome some obstacles to
one’s goals in life.
Another theme that emerged from the data is that
faculty from working-class backgrounds will
sometimes disclose their own background to their
students. An African American professor talked about
how, by describ- ing her own working-class origins,
she can communi- cate to students that “you’re going
• The student feels distance from the
middle- class lifestyle.
• The student identifies with the concept of
the working class.
As the list above demonstrates, defining social class
and identifying the social-class origins of students are
much more difficult than identifying race or gender.
Because social-class origins can play a significant
role in explain- ing the college experiences of women
and students of color from working-class
backgrounds, they must play a significant role in how
we define diversity.
The term working class could be viewed as
political code for white industrial workers. This
idea raised questions for me about influences of
social-class origins for people of color and spurred
me to investigate the intersection of race and social
class. In my qualitative research on the perceptions of
historically black college and university (HBCU)
faculty as role models for HBCU students, one
aspect of the data began to emerge: the influences of
social-class origins for people of color.
through something [higher education] I’ve already been
through, and you can be successful, too.”
What was interesting to note in the qualitative data from
the long interviews is that in these predominantly African
American higher education campus environ- ments, the
focus is solely on the influence of social class (none of the
interviewees mentioned race).
THE BENEFITS OF INCLUDING
SOCIAL CLASS
OCIAL CLASS is a social construction with no basis
as a biological or genetic concept. A product
of lived and material experience and, consequently, like all
socially constructed identities, social class is an impor- tant
category of difference that we must study and understand.
Unfortunately, the United States has been portrayed as a
classless society or, its corollary, a middle- class society with
egalitarian ethics in which most peo- ple live more or less
the same lives.The erasure of class has denied individuals an
important source for under- standing their experiences.
To provide some examples of just how pervasive is this
myth that almost everyone in America is middle class and
that very few people are either rich or poor,
it’s instructive to look at some popular books
from the recent past. In Fear of Falling, Barbara
Ehrenreich points out how several influential
books that ostensibly are addressing issues of
concern to society as a whole are really
addressing only the middle class. Ehrenreich
notes, for example, that David Riesman’s
book The Lonely Crowd abjectly ignored the
blue-collar working class; that Betty
Friedan’s work The Feminine Mystique did
not address all women but rather “college-
educated, suburban women married to
doctors, executives, and psychiatrists”; that
Charles Reich’s book The Greening of
America depicted the greening of only the
white-col- lar crowd and their student young;
and finally, that Robert Bellah’s work Habits
of the Heart focused solely on the habits of
middle-class hearts (p. 4).
Clearly, we need to stop pretending
that class doesn’t exist and begin to
consider it as rigorously as we do issues of
race and gender.The consideration of race
and gender has yielded enormous benefits to
both stu- dents and our campuses, including
increased sensitivity to and appreciation of
the contributions all students bring to a
campus community and equalized educa-
tional opportunities. In addition, the presence of
women students and students of color in
settings in which they have been historically
underrepresented has contributed to raising
nature of the higher education campus environment indi-
cates that I don’t belong here and that I shouldn’t
have survived. Pauline Clance defined this sense of not
belong- ing as the imposter syndrome, a well-known
phenomenon among working-class academics. As
Darlene Miller and Signe Kastberg identified in their
study “Of Blue Collars and Ivory Towers,” the
imposter syndrome is particularly prevalent among
female working-class academics.
One way in which the imposter syndrome
manifests itself for white students from working-class
backgrounds involves the insensitive use of the
descriptor white trash. In my periodic Internet
searches on the keywords “white trash” (try it
sometime, but prepare yourself first), I once came
across photos from a sorority event billed as a “White
Trash Social.”That Web page is long gone, but other
matches from that search included ref- erences to
fraternity “white trash parties” as well. Cam- pus
officials would surely view activities with themes
that would perpetrate stereotypes based on race, sex,
sexual orientation, or physical ability as
inappropriate. Including social class in a definition of
the collective consciousness about valuing these
students and decreasing the frequency of sexist and
racist incidents on college campuses.
In the same respect, when we invite social
class to the diversity table, we can bring more
attention to bear on the unique experiences and
contributions of students from working-class
backgrounds. We can more fully understand
students and their experiences in a multi- cultural
context, and we can value the abilities they bring
to the campus community. In short, just as cele-
brating the presence of women students and
students of color on campus has helped to fight
sexism and racism, including and celebrating the
presence of students from working-class
backgrounds can help fight classism. Just as it is
no longer acceptable for campus activities to fea-
ture racist or sexist themes, including social class
in our conceptions of diversity can help raise the
collective consciousness about classist behaviors.
To bring this discussion full circle, it is important
to revisit the unspoken question that arose in my
classes at the beginning of each semester: How did
you get here? I’ve been asked this question many times
since I’ve grad- uated, mostly by working-class
doctoral students and fac- ulty who are looking for
answers themselves, and I always struggle to come up
with an answer.The best analogy I can come up with
is that I often feel like the only sur- vivor of a ten-car
accident. I don’t know how I survived or why I
survived, and the overwhelmingly middle-class
campus diversity would make important
contributions to educating stu- dents that activity
themes perpetuating stereotypes based on social class
are just as inappropriate as those that dis- criminate
along the lines of race and gender.
What else can campus educators do to make
their colleges and universities more inclusive and
welcoming of students from working-class
backgrounds? First, raise consciousness among the
uninformed about the lived experiences of students
from working-class back- grounds. Rhem cited Lee
Warren of the Bok Center for Teaching and
Learning at Harvard as stating that stu- dents from
middle-class backgrounds are often the least aware
of social class and the ways in which it emerges on
college campuses. It is important for them to under-
stand that some students choose courses based on
the prices of the required textbooks, that some
choose aca- demic majors based on the prospects
for employment after graduation, and that not all
students fly to far-off destinations for spring
break.This is just a beginning. As educators
become more sensitive to class and how it affects
students and themselves, what needs to change will
be clear. Let me finish by issuing the following chal-
lenge: during October 2000, the U.S. Department of
Education promoted both racial reconciliation and
col- lege opportunity by sponsoring the third annual
cam- pus week of dialogue on race.When will it
sponsor a campus week of dialogue on social class?
a Charlip, J. “A Real Class Act: Searching for Identity in the
NOTES
American Educational Research Association.“Annual
Report.” August-September 2000.
[http://www.aera.net/about/
reports/annual99/parttab.htm]
Bellah, R. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and
Commitment in American Life. New York:
HarperCollins, 1986.
‘Classless’ Society.” In C.L.B. Dews and C. L. Law
(eds.), This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of
Academics from the Working Class. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1993.
Clance, P. The Imposter Phenomenon. Atlanta: Peachtree, 1985.
Cortés, C. E. “Building Community from Communities:
Diversity and the Future of Higher Education.” Net Results:
NASPA’s E-zine for Student Affairs Professionals. Jan. 1,
1999. [http://www.naspa.org/netresults/article.cfm?
ID=341&category=Feature.]
Cortés, C. E. “The Diversity Within: Intermarriage, Identity,
and Campus Community.” About Campus, 2000, 5(1),
5–10.
Ehrenreich, B. Fear of Falling:The Inner Life of the Middle Class.
New York: Perennial Library, 1990.
Friedan, B. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell, 1963.
Jencks, C., and Riesman, D. The Academic Revolution.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Kauffman, J. “At Elite Universities, a Culture of Money
Highlights Class Divide.” Wall Street Journal, June 8,
2001. [http://public.wsj.com/home.htm]
Mar, M. E. “Blue Collar, Crimson Blazer: Recollections of
Class on Campus.” National Teaching and Learning
Forum, 1998, 7(5).
[http://ntlf.com/html/lib/suppmat/ v7n5mar.htm]
Miller, D., and Kastberg, S. “Of Blue Collars and Ivory
Towers: Women from Blue-Collar Backgrounds in
Higher Education.” Roeper Review, 1995, 18(1), 27–33.
Reich, C. The Greening of America: How the Youth
Revolution Is Trying to Make America Livable. New
York: Random House, 1970.
Rhem, J.“Social Class and Student Learning.” National
Teaching and Learning Forum, 1998, 7(5).
[http://cstl.syr.edu/ CSTL/NTLF/v7n5/social.htm]
Riesman, D. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing
American Character. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
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Roberts, G. “From the President.” ACPA Developments, Sept.
1999. [http://www.acpa.nche.edu/pulos/ acpa_9_99.pdf ]
Ryan, J., and Sackrey, C. (eds.). Strangers in Paradise:
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Press, 1996.
Sennett, R. and Cobb, J. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New
York: Vintage Books, 1972.
Sharlet, J. “Seeking Solidarity in the Culture of the Working
Class.” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 1999,
p. 1.
Steinberg, S. The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in
America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
Wilson, R. “Educating for Diversity.” About Campus, 1996,
1(2), 4–9.
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