The Chronicle of Higher Education - Commentary June 30, 2015 Campus Diversity Efforts Ignore the Widest Gulf: Social Class By Denis O'Hearn This spring my university distributed a report by a dean's committee on faculty diversity. The report was in many ways a fine one, with recommendations about supporting minority and women faculty; hiring; parental leave; and sensitivity training. It said nothing about social class. I was interviewed for the report, and the first question I asked was, "Am I being interviewed as a minority or a faculty member?" The interviewer fumbled through his notes and said that I was, indeed, "a minority." A little explanation is in order. I am Native Alaskan. My grandmother died when my father was a child. My grandfather spent his short adult life in and out of tuberculosis sanitariums. My father and his sister were raised by "uncles" and "aunts" who provided a share of what little they had in poor Irish neighborhoods of Tacoma and Los Angeles, where the family slowly migrated from the island of Unalaska. So I am a minority. I never claimed so on job applications, but several universities were pleasantly surprised when they hired me: They raised their "diversity" with respect to Native Alaskans by a huge amount. They got to "count" me. Nobody ever seemed to care about my class background. Here is what I told the diversity committee: I am technically a minority but was never disadvantaged because of it. But from the time I first applied to college I suffered from my class background. We were poor because my father was Native Alaskan and Irish. Although he was the most widely read man I ever met, he never finished high school and we had no sense of what college meant or how to apply to one. I applied to just two undergraduate institutions: the University of Notre Dame and the University of New Mexico (my home state). I was accepted to both, but because we didn't have the money for Notre Dame, I went to Albuquerque, where I got straight A's. Still naïve about how to rise in the academy, I applied to just one graduate school: the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which accepted me. I was first alternate for an IREX fellowship, which would have made my life easier, but, alas, no one turned down their fellowship that year, so I went on my own dime. I survived graduate school by translating documents about the Soviet economy and taking out student loans. One day I accidentally saw my admission file. The head of the IREX selection committee had written, "Excellent record from mediocre school!" It was my second lesson in real-world economics: You don't get any help if you're poor. No one knew I was Native Alaskan, but I had to attend a "mediocre school" because my father was Native Alaskan and poor. At Michigan, I suffered from a lack of confidence, meaning I was reluctant to speak up in seminars and depended on the strength of my written work. My dissertation and publications got me a tenure-track job at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. My new colleagues were delighted to discover they had unwittingly made a minority hire, and a rather exotic one at that. Being a minority had no impact on my time at Wisconsin. Coming from a poor, working-class background did. I got early tenure but always felt like an outsider, waiting to be "found out" as an impostor who did not belong at such a prestigious university. I compensated by living in a neighborhood that was not fashionable to faculty, among working people with little sense of entitlement. Today, I still feel that my current university is a foreign country. I have little in common with most colleagues. I still live in a part of town where few academics live. Two of my dearest friends are in solitary confinement at a supermax prison in Ohio. Another is an activist, the banished Yale professor Staughton Lynd, who was coordinator of the Mississippi Freedom Schools in 1964. He witnessed racism in what most people consider its rawest form. Yet he has often told me that the African-Americans he meets today in Youngstown, Ohio, are far worse off than the young people he knew in Mississippi in 1964. Young blacks then had hope. They lived in communities that included doctors and teachers. The future looked better, despite killings and overt racism. African-Americans or even whites in poor areas today have little hope. Colleges once pulled the best and brightest out of the ghetto. Today they do not have to reach into those communities because there are plenty of talented women and people of color from the middle classes. Even though we have made some progress in class diversity among students, I do not see the same diversity among my faculty colleagues. I asked the authors of our diversity report why it did not mention class. They said that their remit was to study only race and gender. College departments remain alien patches of privilege that pretend they can teach young people about poverty even though few professors have actually experienced it. Yes, we hire more women and people of color; there is more diversity of sexual orientation. Yet how can we claim to be serious about diversity when we produce reports that cover race and gender but not class, nor the intersection of class with race and gender? What kind of diversity efforts focus on luring the "right kind" of women and minorities while doing nothing to attract poor women and minorities onto our faculties? And who represents people like me, who live as oddities in institutions where we do not feel like we belong and where we meet few people with life experiences we recognize? To look at me, you would consider me white. To look at my job, you would consider me a successful professional from the great middle class. Yet I still feel more at home with working-class friends. I can talk to them about life because they have lived it. I would love to be able to talk to more university colleagues that way. That would be my definition of diversity. Denis O'Hearn is professor and chair of the sociology department at Binghamton University. SANDRA M. PHOENIX Executive Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 800-999-8558, ext. 4820 404-702-5854 Skype: sandra.phoenix1 1438 West Peachtree NW Suite 200 Atlanta,GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (LYRASIS) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children.