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

Blue-Collar Teaching in a
White-Collar University
David Schultz
Hamline University
ABSTRACT
Blue-collar students and faculty are a decreasing population in American
higher education. Drawing upon my working-class roots and experiences as
a first-generation college student and faculty member, this article explains
how class biases and the creation of a market-driven corporate university are
increasingly closing out all but the most privileged. If the goal of education is
to offer diverse perspectives as essential to the pursuit of knowledge and truth,
and to provide training to promote social mobility and advancement, this
class bias compromises the basic goals of what higher education should offer.
There is a spectre haunting American higher education. It is the spectre of
class and economic privilege, enveloping American politics, higher education,
and the teaching of public administration and affairs. For most Americans and
faculty, class remains largely hidden, unseen, or willfully ignored. Yet it exists, and
it structurally affects the teaching of public affairs in innumerable ways in terms
of who is admitted to colleges and universities and who teaches in and runs these
institutions. This class bias reinforces the status quo and compromises the goal
of education, which is to provide a diversity of perspectives and voices in the
search for truth. As F. Scott Fitzgerald (1989, p. 318) once stated: “Let me tell
you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” Yes, they are; they
have their biases; and they define the reigning perspective of higher education.
Public affairs teaching and faculty should be lauded in many ways. For a
field defined by dead white guys such as Woodrow Wilson, Frank Goodnow,
and Max Weber, efforts in the last few years to inject diversity into the canon
have demonstrated promise. Camila Stivers (2002a, 2002b) has mined the male
bias of the field in her pioneering work on women and public administration.
The literature on cultural competence—the current approach to exploring
difference, or seeking what Husserl (1962, 1977) and other philosophers
called intersubjective understanding of the other—has preached the need to
incorporate it into the curriculum (Bailey, 2005; Benavides & Hernandez,
2007; Brintnall, 2008; Carrizales, 2010; Hewins-Maroney & Williams, 2007;
JPAE 18(1), 67–86
Journal of Public Affairs Education 67