Why do campus leaders ignore social class?

Will Barratt, PhD.
Adventurer

Organizations are composed of people. Looking at the people in an organization is instructive and subverts the dominant paradigm. Organizational psychology and sociology sometimes uses their dominant paradigm to divided analysis into two camps: structuralists and interpersonal relationists. While this bifurcation is a convenient simplification, both camps are wrong. First there are people, then are interpersonal relationships, and then there are codified interpersonal relationships (called policies and practices). Even manufacturing processes reflect a dominant paradigm of people as objects, not as subjects. Automating manufacturing is proof that work and workers can be objectified. If a worker has been replaced by a an automated process, then the worker was only carrying out a repetitive set of instructions. Automating management, well that is another discussion. On the third hand, automating management can be seen as the operations manual. 

It's all about people

• "Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time." Fictional character Quellcrist Falconer, by Richard Morgan
• "The personal is political." 
• "You are part of the problem or part of the solution."
  

Structural classism, or racism, or sexism, or . . . well, you know the rest, is the result of collective personal action and inaction. Soylent Green is made of people, so is structural classism.

So why do campus leaders ignore social class? I think there are no accurate generalizations to be made. I think the reasons that campus leaders ignore social class are complex interactions of complex thoughts and feelings. That being said, I will apply the western analytical system here and identify some of the bigger reasons. 

General ignorance

Awareness, knowledge, and skills has been the holy trinity (dominant paradigm) in the multicultural industry for years. Of course each of those three ideas need to be closely examined. It would be simple here to say that campus leaders just lack awareness, knowledge, and skills about social class on campus. that answer is both convenient and wrong. Every campus leader in the US has attended a myriad of multicultural seminars and workshops. And if a campus leader has not had their ignorance cured around multicultural issues, why are they a campus leader? For me, general ignorance is probably not high on the list of reasons to ignore social class. On the other other hand, I used to do a lot of on-campus social class awareness, knowledge, and skills workshops for campus leaders since I am in the ignorance curing business.

Willful ignorance

A colleague, I. Michael Shuff, used to equate willful ignorance and bigotry. While he was referring to racial issues, the same concept works with social class. Why would someone be willfully ignorant? How is willful ignorance different from being misinformed, or rather misinformation informed? Again, this is a complicated process. Willful ignorance takes conscious and unconscious effort in the face of the evidence around us.

False Knowledge

Can you add tea to a cup already full? When I was doing on-campus workshops on social class, one of my first learning goals was to move participants away from their simple social class equals money dominant paradigm. Social Status measures, a proxy for social class, most commonly uses EIO - Education, Income, and Occupation (The APA has a nice paper on this). These three measures are for social status based on collective (dominant paradigm) ideas about prestige. Bourdieu posited economic, cultural, and social capital to update Marx's idea only about economic capital as another way to look at social class. Contemporary authors, like Sonja Ardoin and Georgianna Martin, are exploring social class identity in new and refreshing ways.

Homeostasis

Achieving a stable equilibrium with the world around us, and within our selves, is part of the human experience. Our bodies adjust to the weather and our minds adjust to our psychological environment. Part of promoting learning is creating an imbalance, some cognitive dissonance, in what learners think they know. People will, because of homeostasis, either retreat from this imbalance (denial) or embrace it and create a new homeostasis. Carl Rogers' Propositions 16-19 cover this very well indeed from a psychological perspective.

Discomfort

Learning is painful. Avoiding learning is avoiding pain. One interpretation of the current disagreement over school curricula about slavery in the USA is how we choose to deal with discomfort. Learning about Critical Race Theory is one way to deal with discomfort about the history of racial inequality in the USA. Denying Critical Race Theory in another. 

Wait until people learn about Critical Class Theory and the history of social class in the USA, for example how post-secondary has always been used as a class divide and divider. Wait until people learn about the ongoing colonization and oppression of first-generation students on campus. Does that make you uncomfortable? How are you going to deal with your discomfort? Move forward or deny it?

Embarrassment

In The History of White People in America book, authors Martin Mull and Allen Rucker have a wonderful image that encapsulates White Fear - a picture of the Principal's door in a school. On the other hand in the movie The Wild One Lee Marvin's character is hauled off to jail with sarcastic comments about what his mother may think. People in power don't like people who are not embarrassed easily because embarrassment is a wonderful motivator. Just think about the blackmail process.

Are you embarrassed about your social class? Do you freely talk about money and income? One of the normative rules for people in the Upper-Middle Class is don't talk about money. Most people in the underclasses have no embarrassment about money and income discussions.

So what?

Being a campus leader means many things. Since campus has a focus on learning and development then it is imperative that all members of the campus actively participate in learning and development. This coming Monday may be learning about new technology and Tuesday learning about social class diversity. Both are important.

Unless I adopt a multiparadigmatic world view I am going to leave out something important about social class.

tl;dr It is ethically reprehensible to ignore one of the dominant diversities on campus, yet ignoring it is the dominant paradigm.

College, first-generation students, colonization, and social class

Will Barratt, Ph.D.
Adventurer

Lets think about the role of college in social mobility.  College may be seen as a socializing experience - a conversion experience for students in the social class below the normative / dominant class on a campus. This thought, this idea of college as a conversion experience, brings up a different perspective on first generation students on campus. College students already participating in the dominant social class on campus find the college experience class-confirming and are generally unaware of their role in colonizing underclass students.

Orientation, class-conversion, enculturation, assimilation, socialization, and on-boarding are other names for colonization.

The dominant cultural and class paradigm uses the power of socio-semiotics to colonize the underclass, to assimilate them, Borg like, into the Upper-Middle Class. After college graduation, a ceremony certifying full assimilation, first generation students return to their communities as zealots for Upper-Middle Class values.

"Socio-semiotics, in brief, is everything that is not material. Thus, all beliefs, attitudes, religions, languages, histories, cultures, economics are examples of socio-semiotic systems. Socio-semiotic systems, or the non-material world, operate through symbols. And, symbols are inherently dynamic, variable, and unstable." (Maahboob, https://wemountains.com/05/12/1596/)

While the borders of college are semi-permeable to academically talented and economically disadvantaged students (the 'smart poor'), the permeability varies by campus prestige, with low prestige campuses allowing (yes, I use that word intentionally) greater access to the smart poor, and high prestige disallowing access to all but the chosen few. 

Writing about colonization on a global scale Mahboob noted that: 

"This, something that no other “empire” had ever done before, is what the European colonisation did: they changed the socio-semiotics of their subjects around the world and therefore changed how people interpret the present, hope for the future, and take actions based on those beliefs."

Success in college requires fluency in the dominant class paradigms, the socio-semiotics of the dominant class. First-generation students, as with those colonized by Europeans, are changed. That first generation students are changed, are colonized with the socio-semiotics of the Upper-Middle Class, is not in question. and the morality of this colonization is seldom questioned. The people in the dominant campus social class are co-opting the socio-semiotics of people in the underclass with Upper-Middle Class narratives. This is not always an intentional practice. 

How do we resist colonization?

Attending to the needs of first-generation students has become an industry, and I celebrate that. The question should properly be, as with any minority group on campus, should we assimilate the other or accommodate the other? This is not an easy question to answer. The obvious solution is some assimilation and some accommodation. But, of course, assimilate to what socio-semiotic boundary keeping standards? Do we insist on APA, MLA, Chicago, or other writing styles? And if so why? Do we insist on dress codes? Behavior / Civility codes? Challenging, and hopefully subverting, the dominant paradigm is a beginning.

What is a good majority class-based rationale for any campus rule? We must question the dubious authority of the majority class culture to set the standards for colonizing lower class students on campus.

Colonizing the other

It has not escaped my notice that 'class' can be replace with any of the list of identities we have - ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion, or whatever. College is a process of normalization (read being colonized into the dominant culture represented by the campus). How we resist this colonization, this enculturation, and how to respect diverse world views, how to accommodate the non-normative, is an ongoing struggle.

tl;dr college culture colonizes people from the underclass with socio-semiotic influences.