This panel comprises three perspectives on how class issues affect the experiences of graduate students and recent PhDs as they move through graduate school and eventually enter the academic job market. Sharon O’Dair, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Alabama, ran the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies for many years, along the way mentoring many working-class, first-generation graduate students. From the working class herself, she knows firsthand the acute challenges that these students face in academia. O’Dair will present a talk in three parts titled, “From Working-Class Kid to Tenured Shakespearean: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Despite 40 years or more of democratization, O’Dair will discuss (drawing on Bourdieu and other sociologists) how the upwardly mobile person never really owns the upper middle-class affect that characterizes higher education. One never completely assimilates, markers of working- and lower-class life never fade. As O’Dair has argued elsewhere (and as W.B. Michaels has argued, too), bad faith occurs for both the working-class student or professor and for his or her upper middle-class peers; the latter aim to be inclusive, but class is the identity that cannot be included. As a result, the working-class academic tends not to be “all in” with upward mobility and tends to be alienated from the profession she enters, its elite spaces and behaviors. But O’Dair argues that an alienated intellectual is a good intellectual. For O’Dair, distance affords the possibility of both critique and independence: the alienated intellectual’s research and writing isn’t bound tightly to the approval of the profession or of peers.
Rachel Balko, a PhD fellow at Idaho State University, will extend a literary case study of a Tara Westover’s Educated: A Memoir (2018) to show how it represents the broader plight of working-class graduate students as they negotiate multiple identities. Westover’s memoir is about her ongoing internal struggles surrounding her changing identity from uneducated country girl to rising academic after earning a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University. Balko’s talked titled, “Becoming Educated: Tara Westover as a Case Study of the Working-Class Academic,” will use Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality as an analytical tool to explore how Westover’s memoir provides one model for how graduate students and early-career academics who come from financially, and sometimes educationally, impoverished backgrounds can negotiate their own shifting identities as they make their way in academia. “I wanted the mind of a scholar, but it seemed that Dr. Kerry saw in me the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in a library; I belonged in a crane” (Westover 236). While the specific circumstances of Westover’s unusually isolated upbringing seem extraordinary, Balko will argue that Westover faced a similar journey that many graduate students who come from the working class do, as they ask themselves: “How do I establish my personal and professional identity as an intellectual without betraying the working-class values of my family of origin?”
Sara Appel, an adjunct humanities professor at Lewis & Clark College, like Westover, has also understood the struggles that go along with what it means to be upwardly mobile. Her talk, “Working-Class Again, and Always: Lessons from a Lower Rung,” will relate the intertwining of her class background and her academic journey up to and down from the academic summit. A first-generation college student who went on to complete a PhD in Literature from Duke University, Appel “jumped” a class while a graduate student at an elite institution only to find herself in a perilous professional and financial situation after graduate school as she slid away from her dream of a tenure-track job in the humanities and experienced working-class precarity all over again. She returned to a parental home, to unemployment, and to precarious adjunct positions—a story that is indeed part of a broader story of socioeconomic precarity. Appel will focus her presentation on discussing what the tumble back down “the mountain,” to borrow scholar-activist Eli Clare’s metaphor, has taught her about what it means to be working class. She will explore how her “failure” to achieve her ultimate goal (a tenure-track position) allowed her to reclaim a core sense of working-class resilience and how her experience—full of bumpy, often painful reckonings—allowed her to grow in ways that would not have been possible within the constraints of academia.
The conveners of the panel, Gerard Holmes and Amir Hussain, are members of the MLA’s Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities, and this panel aligns with that Committee’s mandate to “consider a range of curricular, intellectual, and labor issues that affect master’s and doctoral students and workers in the humanities…[...] advocate for the well-being of graduate students [and] organize convention sessions [...] that will support students while they pursue their educations, gain work experience, seek employment, and make a transition to a wide range of workplaces” (Committee web page).