> Anyone know some good sources on class backround of profs, especially
> left leaning profs? On the Marc Cooper discussion blog, he and others
> are trying to claim that professors who are left leaning are mostly
> priveleged wealthy elitists with no working class background to speak of.
> Of course, that they are mostly still working class, tenure, perks and
> all is a point entirely lost on this kind of person...
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Depends on how one understands "working class", I guess. For myself, it's
anyone working for a wage or salary who doesn't exercise effective control
over hiring and firing and other executive decisions in an enterprise. By
that definition, I suppose profs would be workers and deans would not. At
any rate, that's how the bourgeoisie also sees it - at least everywhere
outside the US (natch). Labour boards have broadly used this definition in
extending the right to unionize and bargain collectively to a wide range of
white collar, technical, and professional "employees". Not out of altruism,
to be sure. Government employees, teachers, journalists, nurses, and
others - including professors in Canada and abroad - won these rights after
engaging in various forms of workplace unrest (petitions, slowdowns, illegal
strikes, etc.) pioneered by craft and industrial workers before them.
Naturally, the working class is divided into more and less privileged
strata, depending on income and status. But that's always been the case.
Some on the left echo the popular media and status-conscious American workers in seeing a vast "middle class" sitting atop a narrow statum of poorly educated and low income industrial workers. But if the "proletariat" consists only of blue collar workers engaged in manufacturing and resource extraction, that would seem to make a hash out of Marxism, which is based on the working class becoming the vast majority of the population, progressively displacing self-employed professionals, small artisans, and farmers - and thereby laying the material basis for socialism. Marx's understanding of the evolving social and economic structure of capitalism has been confirmed, even if the political conclusions he and his supporters drew from this remain, at best, an open question. The shrinking industrial proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries has been replaced by newer generations of wage- and salary-earners employed in newer sectors of the economy, including mass education.
MG