On Tue, 26 Jan 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Maybe Kelley thinks that we college teachers are 'middle-class
> professionals' whereas I think that we--with the exception of stars--are
> objectively part of the working class doing service labor (mainly teaching
> + grading, while a minority of us get to do research + writing
> occasionally). Only in ideology are we 'middle-class professionals.' Maybe
> she doesn't think that but just writes as if she did.
I tend to be a bit suspicious when I hear leftist academics insisting that teaching makes them a part of the working class. I wonder if they are perhaps making this claim simply to deny their own privileged position. Must say I thought the same thing when Michael Moore was here and called us a bunch of bourgeois smarty pants, or however he phrased it--I was somewhat shocked by how many of us began talking about our own working class backgrounds--you'd think from hearing us that no one on the left is from a middle class background, when, in fact, since the New Left, we've been disproportionately middle class. While I'm at it, I'll throw in those middle class white boys who insist that they are bisexual so as to avoid the onus of being straight white males.
frances