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.