It's old, but start with a look at _Working Class in the Academy_ and see where it leads you--if others have done follow up work. A mentor, Judy Long, recommended it to me. Also, a friend, Renee Spraggins, may have some updated numbers. She did her dissertation on black graduate students' experiences. Last I knew, she was working at the Census Bureau and produced a report on gender/labor issues back in 2001.
When discussing the book with someone else, she told me that, for a time during the 60s/70s, she remembers when there was a kind of politics of authenticty among male, left academics who wore their working class backgrounds as a badge of identity. It was a macho game of moral entrepreneurialism, as she described it.
Most people who go into academia come from fairly well-to-do backgrounds in general. So, to say there was anything _special_ about leftists, you'd have to say something first about the broader population of academics.
I'd say that, of the folks I knew, btw, very few were from privileged, wealthy backgrounds. They were the children of doctors, lawyers, successful business people, engineers. People from the professional-managerial strata, IOW, who's families could afford private school educations. I knew very few from state schools. No one had parents who were teachers, police officers, or hair dressers. I only knew one person from a privileged background--a Mayflower blueblood--who was from a long line of New England college presidents.
The only person I'd ever heard of being from a well-to-do background was... hmmm.... I was at SU's retreat up near Blue Mountain Lake where the Hochschild's was it (?) had some property... We were on the obligatory tour of the way the Adirondacks had been used as a retreat by the elite escaping NYC and someone mentioned the Hochschilds or maybe it was Arlie's family. Pugliese? Anyone else familiar with left pedigrees help me out here?
It is an asinine issue Cooper's on about. As I recall, only about 1 percent of the population obtains a Ph.D. to begin with. Maybe it's up to 2-3% since I looked up the numbers in the mid-90s. Like you can say something significant--statistically speaking--about that population and then try to make comparisons between academics in general and left academics in particular? Aside from which, given it's Poo..I mean Cooper, what does he mean by leftist? Like him? Marxists? Heavy Users of Marx?
The moral entrepreneurialism on the part of people like Cooper who is, himself, _using_ people as if he's speaking _for_ them. If he's so burned up about it people not being represented, why is he speaking for them as if that's his right? It's a stupid little game of moral entrepreneurialism.
Grrrrrrrrrrr.
kelley
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling