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

Admittedly, it will be difficult to overcome a national mythology that
insists we are all created equal and that with enough Horatio Algeresque effort,
even those starting from far behind can win the race. Maybe someday we will
appreciate structural nepotism as much as we have come to recognize other
dysfunctional isms.
I see Knupfer’s work playing out around me every day, episodes that remind
me of how much class mattered and matters. I see it in my local newspaper when
I notice how many of the college scholarship winners were born of comfortable
circumstances. I see it in general empirical terms when I read Hart and Risley’s
(1995) Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children,
and when Kevin Kniffin (2007) sends me a reprint of his “Accessibility to the
PhD and Professoriate for First-Generation College Graduates” in The Uneven
Road to College Opportunity. Finally, friends, former students, and colleagues
constantly send me materials to feed my habit with titles such as “EEGs Show Brain
Differences between Poor and Rich Kids,” an article with an ominous warning:
This is a wake-up call. . . . It’s not just that these kids are poor and more
likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting
full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished
environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books,
less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums. (Sanders, 2008,
quoting Knight)
Class Rooms
Why am I so interested in the effects of social class inequalities? After all,
I am a paradigm of social mobility. I beat the odds, earned a PhD, and spent
most of my life breathing the rarified air of academe. I never buy lottery tickets,
because the chances of winning are too long. States advertise lottery winners,
not those who purchase innumerable tickets yet never claim a prize, or at least
receive enough money worth noting. I view my life that way. I am an anomaly
who found his way through the academic maze notwithstanding the probabilities
against it happening. Many things broke in my direction, including a heavy
dose of “government intervention” in the form of a publicly supported higher
education system that granted me assistantships and fellowships and then a
lifetime job in a public university. My family, professors, and friends helped
smooth the way. My grandmother’s laissez-faire parenting style paid off in the
end. She anchored me in rich soil with both a silent commandment never to
disappoint her and an unchaperoned childhood that taught me self-discipline.
Still, if only a few things had fallen the other way, I would not have received that
lucky lottery ticket. Ideally, the discussion and reforms this paper presents will be
an invisible audience encouraging all PA students, faculty, and practitioners to
include social class inequalities among their diversity concerns. Unless and until
more of us join this effort, our field will never reverse the classism and structural
nepotism that got us into this fix in the first place.
Journal of Public Affairs Education 45