WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Class Rooms
Kenneth Oldfield
University of Illinois-Springfield
ABSTRACT
This paper uses a personal narrative format to recount an emeritus professor of
public administration’s ongoing study of how social class and socioeconomic
origins shape various aspects of bureaucracy, with special emphasis on the sorting
function of formal education and its subsequent effects on personnel selection.
Following an account of his family background, he summarizes his recent findings
on the relationship between class and administration, followed by a sampling
of remedies he proposes for bringing socioeconomic issues, especially the effects
of inherited social, financial, and cultural capital, into the mainstream of our
discipline. The author argues that by implementing these changes, we will not
only prove we are the “cutting edge” enterprise we claim to be, but our actions
will provoke other fields to enact similar democratic and egalitarian reforms.
My father died of leukemia in 1948. 1 I was 16 months old. Dad had been
working as a truck driver making deliveries around Moundsville, a small mill
town in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. My mother, an illegitimate
child, as people said then, and I moved in with my grandmother and her elderly
father right after my dad’s death. We all lived together for a couple of years until
my mother remarried and moved away, leaving me with my grandmother and
great-grandfather. My grandmother’s husband, not my mother’s biological father,
had been committed to a mental institution several years before. As I understood
it, he was shell-shocked, the description in vogue at the time, in World War I
and his doctors eventually sent him to the state mental institution in Weston,
West Virginia. My grandmother had, at best, an eighth-grade education and
worked as a cook at a local greasy spoon restaurant six days a week from 5:30
a.m. until 1:30 p.m. She always came home smelling of grease and sweat, more
than ever in the summer when the kitchen was unbelievably hot. When she got
home, she immediately took a bath and a short nap. She retired at age 65 and
despite her long years of hard work, lived to age 91. I am guessing her father, a
retired farmer she cared for over the course of several years and who died in his
mid 80s, went as far as sixth grade, if that.
JPAE 18(1), 29–50
Journal of Public Affairs Education 29