blog.postmodernvillage.com

Ever on the lips of the right wing are excoriating words for the so-called “liberal elite,” those latté-swilling, Volvo-driving Hollywood producers, college professors, and Washington bureaucrats who supposedly run the lives of poor everyman U.S.A. Whenever I hear this list, the first thing I think is “Yeah, right.” Then I think “College professors?”

You see, I am a member of that last category, or at least I’m an academic, an instructor (non-tenure track I assure you) at a small private college. The liberal part fits in my case, but the elite part and especially the part about running things are just absurd. Anyone who really thinks academics have an undue influence on American culture have obviously never tried to get a group of 20 or so college freshmen to listen to anything at all, much less be influenced by what you say. It’s hard enough to have due influence over most of these kids – er “young adults” – much less to sucker them into our gay-loving, evolution-spouting, Marxist-influenced worldview.

Here’s a good test for how much influence we who teach at institutes of higher learning really have. Ask yourself when the last time was you read a book, that was not a textbook for a class you were taking, that was written by a college professor. Can’t remember? You’re not alone. The books we write primarily get read by other academics and tend to be narrowly focused on our fields of study – like 600 pages on the function of lipids in the human cell or a 1,000 page overview of recent scholarship on James Joyce. If we teach at a research institution, we have to write those books to keep our jobs. Occasionally a title like Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld will spark the popular imagination, but for the most part, the only people we influence are each other*. The sad truth is, as far as most intellectual output from colleges and universities goes, nobody cares.

Indeed, when the insufferably influential critical theorist Jacques Derrida died recently, the only national broadcast venue to even mention it was National Public Radio, and their reach is not nearly what Bill O’Reilly’s is, much less CBS’s or ABC’s. Derrida was the guy who formulated the notion of deconstruction, an idea that the right wing used to consider quite dangerous, and a notion often put at the heart of postmodernism, scourge of right wing intellectuals everywhere. In terms most people know or care about, Derrida’s passing registered not even a blip.

Speaking of right-wing intellectuals, the notion that all academics are lefties is itself absurd. Many of us are, sure, but business and economics departments tend to be filled with laissez-faire libertarian types, and, lest we forget, Newt Gingerich, darling of the liberal-bashing Republican Revolution of 1994, was a history professor.

The idea that we’re elite is also pretty specious. The average college professor’s starting salary is, well, pretty average, in the $40,000 range when those who earn less (like the ones who work at small private colleges and adjuncts and instructors) are included. That puts it about in line with what a blue-collar manufacturing worker would have earned, way back when America had any of those, and pretty close to the median income in America right now. Even the “celebrity” professors (think Toni Morrison or Cornell West) may earn only in the low six-figures, which may seem like a lot until you stack it up against the $1.5 million+ your Division I football coach is likely to make.

We’re not even taking into account that most college professors can’t even begin their careers until relatively late because of all the extra schooling they go through. They’ve lived on next-to-nothing as graduate students or adjuncts for a decade or more by the time they manage to get their supposedly elite jobs. As a new professor, they’ll do well to service their student loan debt, much less go out an spring for a new Volvo. There are a lot more Toyota Corollas and Chevy Malibus in the faculty lot than Volvos. In fact, the students’ cars are often a lot nicer and newer than our own. And while it is true that I drive a Volvo, it’s an 18-year old Volvo with a rebuilt engine and 312,000 miles on the odometer, not exactly an elite ride.

We like our coffee black.

I have known professors who were taxi drivers and farmers, pool sharks and carpenters before they entered the hallowed halls of academe. I’ve known stay-at-home moms and navy men, engineers and restauranteurs who eventually climbed that ivory tower. In other words, we academic “elites” are a whole lot like everybody else, but through luck and hard work, but mostly through a deep love for the subjects we study and teach, we have managed to get into positions in which we can share our enthusiasm with our students. And that, in fact, may be why we tend to be more liberal than the population as a whole: the sense of duty and a certain idealism drive us to teach, and that carries over into the voting booth.