What? I Am Part of the Cultural Elite? No Way!
The morning after the election results of November 2016 I was standing outside my apartment talking with a neighbor and knocking around our new world order. He was waxing lyrical about the phrase “Eastern Cultural Elite,” waving his arms inclusively and stating what was obvious to him—that we were both part of that newly criticized and chastised fraction of America. It stopped me. I had never thought of myself as belonging to any politically defined group beyond white and female and someone who votes, and certainly never considered myself elitist. As an anthropologist, I was also sure that the use of the word “Cultural” in Cultural Elite was nothing like what “culture” means to me.
More confusing, I don’t fit neatly into that cultural elite group. My parents came from nothing and worked their way into the middle class and weren’t elitists in any way. We moved about every three years, all over the country, so I can’t even call myself an Easterner. I did go to college, but to San Diego State University, an inexpensive state school, and paid for almost all of it myself by working as I was going to school. But here’s what pushes me face-first into the now hated category—I have spent my working life at the very epicenter of the Eastern Cultural Elite as an Ivy League professor. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
That modest background and later acquired Ivy League status allowed me to look at this so-called Cultural Elite business from the inside and the outside, much like how an anthropologist would study a foreign group. Anthropologists live for some years in a foreign culture, learn the nuances of their language, and participate in the daily rituals of the group. As best they can as strangers, these scholars then try to write about that culture’s belief system, patterns of interpersonal interaction, and their social and economic organization. As such, I find there is a major disconnect between how universities and academics have been folded into the new term “Cultural Elite” by the haters in contrast with what happens on campus, especially at Ivy League and other expensive schools.
The assumption by the right-wing harridans is that people with “fancy” degrees have a sense of entitlement that has granted them all the power and voice in America up until now and that this power is passed on by whole cloth to their offspring, thus forming an expensively educated, culturally snotty cabal, as it were. Professors are seen as culpable in this process because they are members of the cabal themselves and partly responsible for continuing the line of succession of the Cultural Elite.
I agree that at these universities, certainly at mine, some academics are elitist and full of themselves, and think they are God’s gift to intelligence, but in my experience, there are puffed-up know-it-alls in all walks of life, and everyone finds them irritating, and boring. These people waste a lot of time showing off, trying to get others to bow to their brilliance, but everyone tends to ignore them and dislike them. I know this because I am often one of those know-it-alls, at least on certain subjects such as the human skeleton, the human fossil record, or how nonhuman primates behave. My daughter often complains that I am answering her questions in my “teacher voice,” meaning I am pontificating from this know-it-all throne as a cultural elitist would do. The good news is that she seems to understand that I am not just talking to hear my voice but trying to teach her something, even as she rolls her eyes. This kind of talking about a subject someone knows well is common. Ask a mechanic why your car has died or a plumber why there is hot water all over your floor and you’ll hear the same elitist voice, one that speaks patiently, and just a little down to you, from a high horse of special knowledge and long experience. It’s the tone you hear from anyone who knows what they are doing.
The imprint of the pejorative label Cultural Elitist on professors, or anyone who teaches or reads a lot, suggests that being an educated person is, a priori, a bad thing. But it’s debatable if that extra education makes any of us smarter or better than anyone else, except for our narrow subject matter. Education at the graduate school level is so focused and esoteric that non-academics are not impressed, and often just bored when we spout our arcane knowledge. If someone, anyone please, would stand still long enough for me to write and then explain the entire primate taxonomy on a blackboard, they might be floored by my brilliance. But they would probably fall asleep first. This I know from all the heads falling forward and the snoring that sometimes greets my lectures. Even if we are cultural elites, not many of our so-called vulnerable victims aren’t listening to us. You can’t indoctrinate people if they have a hangover, are asleep as you lecture, are only interested in getting an A, are absent from class once again, or totally bored.
The word elite also implies that members of that group think they are, in Sarah Palin’s words, “Better than anyone else.” To be sure, there are students of wealth and privilege who show up at expensive campuses, and others who don’t come from money but from families that worship and spoil them, but once these Freshman arrive they are on their own, and all the money in the world, all the privilege they have experienced, and all the helicopter parents hovering above can’t save them from blowing an exam. There’s no point trying to impress teachers with some kind of high-class heritage (and I have to say no one has ever tried this with me) because even if your last name is Trump, Bush, or Kennedy if you don’t come to lecture, and don’t do the reading and assignments you won’t pass the class. Period.
We professors don’t even know the names of students in large classes, and it takes us a while to memorize names in smaller classes where we use first names only. Kids stand out because of what they say and write, not by where they come from. In any case, to us, a particular student is just one among many filling a class, every semester, year after year, and they sort of blend together after a while.
These essential facts of higher education seem to have also escaped the current atmosphere of competitive college applications that make Freshmen, and many of their parents, very confused about what goes on during those four years. Going to college is the last, and sometimes the first and only, level field that privileged and spoiled kids will experience. They might get away with lording their privilege over their peers during those college years, but inside a classroom, we teachers are only concerned about what these students learn. As for an elite education being handed down, like a sinecure, over generations, that’s just silly. Sure, there might be kids who get into expensive places because their parents went there and funded buildings, but if I’ve taught these students they didn’t stand out in any way.
More importantly, accusing campuses of being defenders of some snotty elitism is especially inaccurate today as campuses, by and large, are working to become more diverse, and more reflective of the population, and as a college education has become a prerequisite for economic success for everyone in this country. Colleges and universities are devoted to a diverse campus, rather than being elite, not because of some hippy-dippy-liberal-political-correctness but because we know, firsthand, that becoming an educated person means stepping out of yourself and listening to what others have to say, and that conversation is much more interesting for everyone, even life-changing, when the other voices come from a variety of experiences. That’s also why the best campuses are trying, during these tense times, to uphold free speech without violence.
In any case, my job as a professor is not to imprint my opinions on young people (any parent knows this is impossible anyway) or to recruit them into the so-called Cultural Elite. My job is to teach young people how to think, how to read, how to analyze and write, and how to express themselves. As an anthropologist, the lens I use refracts the panoply of cultures in the world and puts humans into a context of one among many species in nature. If you are a rich kid from some Eastern WASPY family you are going to learn that your way and your ideas are shared with a minuscule number of people on the planet and that across the globe people think differently, live differently, and are motivated by very different belief systems than yours. And that their ways might just be better than what you have experienced. I’ve spent four decades watching the faces of students change as they realize these facts. I’ve also listened to them talk about an awakening realization that the world is much bigger than they thought. If some student comes up to the podium after a class and says to me, “That’s amazing. I never thought of that,” my job is done.
The idea that a faculty, as a collective, is bent on serving only the upper classes is also hilariously funny. If anyone thinks a bunch of professors can be grouped into a like-minded elitist club that works to keep others out, they should come to a faculty meeting sometime where no one, ever, can agree on anything. It’s even worse than Congress because there are only vague alliances based on nothing that gains nobody anything. The most contentious issue in departmental politics is usually office space and how many windows and square feet someone got, and someone didn’t.
Academics is the place where people who want to work alone, quietly, without having to share a single thought with anyone over the age of twenty-one will find happiness. We are the ones who would rather be in the library than doing anything that looks even remotely like power broking because power is not our thing. We don’t even get it. The only power I’ve ever had in my life is when I’ve decided to give a B+ instead of a B.
Not so long ago, let’s say four years ago, becoming educated, and even being smart, were considered good things. Now, being an educated person carries a stigma. Yes, we who teach at universities and colleges are the eggheads who read the printed word and like books. But anybody can read and learn things, and they do. Years ago, I was in the check-out line at my local grocery store and an exuberantly tattooed man wearing a leather motorcycle jacket was just in front of me. He pointed to the magazine he was buying and said to the clerk, “I don’t know why I like this stuff, but I do.” The magazine cover announced some new Neanderthal discoveries and at that moment I had more in common with him than anyone on my campus. I, too, don’t know why I like that stuff, but I do, and I bet we could have had a great conversation about where Neanderthals came from and where they went 40,000 years ago.
Fear of intellectuals and the universities has happened before when a growing plague of destructive nationalism was afraid of voices that differed from the party line. Those times also made it clear that being educated was dangerous and that being around those “free-thinking-liberal” professors was damaging to The State. As a member of the phantom Cultural Elite, let me reassure you that we aren’t there yet, but the idea that being uneducated is better, more righteous, and more real than being educated is distressingly close at hand.
Also published on Medium.com