Institutional racism in the form of redlining and unequal access to educational and housing opportunities have left generations of students without equitable access to higher education. In this episode, Anthony Abraham Jack joins us to discuss the challenges that first-gen students face and what colleges and faculty can do to reduce these inequities.
Tony is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Boston University Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University. Tony’s research has appeared in numerous scholarly publications and he is the recipient of numerous awards from the American Sociological Association, American Educational Studies Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He is the author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students and Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price.
Show Notes
- Jack, A. A. (2019). The privileged poor: How elite colleges are failing disadvantaged students. Harvard University Press.
- Jack, A. A. (2024). Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price. Princeton University Press
- Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. University of Richmond
- Harlan, Chico (2014). “In St. Louis, Delmar Boulevard is the line that divides a city by race and perspective.” Washington Post.
- Prep for Prep
- A Better Chance
- Wight Foundation
- Take Five Program at the University of Rochester
Transcript
John: Institutional racism in the form of redlining and unequal access to educational and housing opportunities have left generations of students without equitable access to higher education. In this episode, we examine the challenges that first-gen students face and what colleges and faculty can do to reduce these inequities.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guest today is Anthony Abraham Jack. He is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Boston University Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University. Tony’s research has appeared in numerous scholarly publications and he is the recipient of numerous awards from the American Sociological Association, American Educational Studies Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He is the author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. His new book, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price is scheduled for release in August. Welcome Tony.
Tony: Hi. Thank you all for having me.
John: Our teas today are:… Tony, are you drinking tea?
Tony: I’m actually drinking water, but I was actually thinking about going to get the Bengal spice tea that’s in my cabinet right now.
Rebecca: That sounds yummy, maybe afterwards, huh?
Tony: Indeed.
Rebecca: I have a new tea John that I got when I was in Scotland. So this is a 1903 blend from Pekoe Tea Edinburgh.
John: Wow. Yeah, I saw some of the photos from your world tour there while I’ve been in the classroom here, so just rub it in a little bit.
Rebecca: I’m trying. [LAUGHTER]
John: …and I am drinking an Irish Breakfast tea..
Rebecca: that’s on theme
John: …from Wegmans [LAUGHTER] here in Durham, North Carolina.
Rebecca: So, Tony, we invited you here today to discuss your forthcoming book, Class Dismissed. But first, maybe it’d be helpful if you tell us a little bit about your own educational journey.
Tony: There are two things that I always share about getting to this spot of being an educator and being an academic is: I’m a head start kid and I’m a first generation college student. Those two things are central to who I am and the work that I do. If it were not for Head Start, I would have a very different educational trajectory. Head Start put me in a school across the tracks, literally, in Miami. I went to a school that I wasn’t zoned for, because that dividing line that was McDonald’s Street. I was supposed to go to that dividing line of McDonald’s separated West Grove from Coconut Grove, where the Bahamian settlers were who cleaned up behind the white, wealthier families that live on the other side, and the schools were night and day in many respects, from the resources that they had, even class sizes were a little bit different. It was just a very different place. And what’s interesting is, if you were to come to my office right now, I actually have a map of Coconut Grove, and it literally says Coconut Grove Negro district, and on this official city map, you actually see the line that was drawn by city officials to say where black people could and could not live. That was fundamental. Head Start, it didn’t remove me from that history, but it didn’t make me travel the same path that that history would force me to any other way. And I’m a first-generation college student. I’m the son of a security guard. My mom actually helped segregate her middle school that she then worked at for 31 years as a school monitor, and my brother is a janitor who actually works at my old elementary school. No one in my family extended learning beyond college, but they made it possible through everything that life could throw at us, that made it possible for me to go to college, and those two things fundamentally shape who I am. As a Head Start kid, I can’t help but think about being from Coconut Grove. Every city in America has their Del Mar divide, that street that separates the richest and the poorest. Thinking about like it is in St Louis, I live very close to ours, and my education trajectory looks very different from everybody else who I went to school with. So many people who I live next to had a very different trajectory. So those two things really speak. And I was very fortunate to end up at Amherst College for undergrad, and then I came over to Harvard University to pursue my PhD. And to be honest with you, I haven’t left school yet. Since the moment I entered through Head Start, I have not left school. It’s been a lifelong dream to be a forever student, and I’m living it.
Rebecca: I’m living that lifelong student trajectory as well. [LAUGHTER]
John: Me too. The history of redlining and dividing districts and federal funding and loan availability in terms of those redlined districts, which weren’t always labeled that way, but they were still treated that way in terms of the availability of FHA loans and so forth…
Tony: Exactly.
John: …for a remarkably Long time, led to some horrible inequalities in terms of school financing.
Tony: Yeah, how the United States did policy for transportation. When you think about I-95 they literally drove highways through neighborhoods and say, “Okay, black people live over here, white people can live over here”. Even, how we handled the GI Bill, even though it was supposed to be one of the most universal policies. One, it wasn’t universal because so many women were not available for it, and then yet, the racialization of it was also a major aspect. So yeah, between redlining and blockbusting. So actions that real estate agents would say they would purposely introduce a black family in a neighborhood selling a house at like 125% of its value. But then when those whites who did not want to have a black neighbor, they were quick to sell and leave, and neighborhoods began going from all white to all black in that very short period of time. And you think about the resources that left because of income differences and segregation, weighed down by racism with income, I was removed from some of that, because Head Start placed me at Coconut Grove Elementary, and the principal there, Don Beebe, said he gets to stay. Not everybody had that opportunity.
John: And you talked about some of this in The Privileged Poor, where you talked about some of the inequities in colleges based on the amount of privilege that students had. Could you talk a little bit about the thesis of that to help set the stage for your more recent book?
Tony: Yeah, The Privileged Poor came about because of two things, and very much personal experience, but in two ways, experiential personal experience, how I experienced as a student, but it also what I had to grapple with as a graduate student, because as a student, I was trying to figure out what was going on when I got to Amherst, because so many people had gone to boarding school like Andover and Exeter and Saint Paul, or these really, really ritzy prep schools like Hackaday and Sidwell Friends and Nightingale I had graduated from a prep school in Miami, but from Head Start to 11th grade, I was a public school student. I had a football coach who liked athlete students but didn’t like student athletes, and so I transferred schools my senior year because I didn’t want to be under that kind of regime. And then Amherst called that football coach and said, “Hey, do you got a student who can pass our test?” He said, “Yeah, we got a kid this year,” and the rest was kind of history. The reason why I tell that story is because when I got to Amherst, I discovered that my individual detour through a private school was actually a well established on-ramp to elite colleges because of programs like Prep for Prep, A Better Chance, the Wight Foundation (W, I, G, H, T), and all these other programs that place lower income and sometimes lower income students of color into boarding day and preparatory high schools. So I’m like, “Okay, this is different.” This is people come from all over the place. It’s not just the rich people who are coming from these ritz y places. But then I got to graduate school, and as a sociologist, I’m reading about these inequalities and cultural inequality and race and all that stuff, but no one who’s writing about education is speaking about these students. They kept speaking about students as a monolithic group, really like they were painting with one brush stroke, and I was like, “Well, they got half the story right.” A lot of the people who I knew did struggle with isolation and difference and culture shock, but the other half of students, roughly, did not, like I had friends who studied abroad in high school for a year. I had friends who had flown on private jets. I had friends who had experiences that I only saw on movies and TV shows, like Gossip Girl. And so I put my experience as an undergrad in conversation with what I was learning as a graduate student and say, “Hey, something’s going on here.” And what I learned is colleges were hedging their bets. They were getting their new diversity from old sources. They were increasing the number of lower income students, but they were not saying was that they were going to private schools to get those students. And my research show that one half of lower income black students at elite colleges like Amherst and Harvard are actually the alumni of those boarding, day, and preparatory high schools. And so when I was dealing with all of that, that’s what came up with the privileged poor. Privileged poor is an oxymoron. It’s about somebody having little economic capital but having high stocks of cultural capital. They had been to elite places before. They had traveled to Tulum, they had traveled to Martha’s Vineyard, they had traveled to Nantucket, all of these very, very ritzy places. And when they got to college, they were in their fifth year of boarding school, really, and I contrast their experiences to the doubly disadvantaged, those lower income students who don’t have that same experience. And the reason why it was important to me to draw out this distinction was because any program that we created to help students in college, especially lower income and first year in college students, it would miss the mark, because if we had these two modal groups, these two people who are on different sides of the coin, if we try to navigate right down the middle, we will miss out on so many students. And so I use the privilege poor and the doubly disadvantaged, kind of like the miners’ canary, I’m able to show when and how class matters in college, both symbolically through cultural capital, those taken for granted ways of being that are valued by colleges and universities, but then also economic capital. I’ll give you just two quick examples. One, who knows what office hours are? Who’s comfortable using them? And who knows how valuable they can be, not just for your present but also your future? Usually, the literature and other people say, it’s usually the wealthier students, people whose fam went to college, I show that it wasn’t just those from money who felt comfortable, but those who had experience that only money could buy, the privileged poor and the middle class were more comfortable, the doubly disadvantaged were not. They got access to the letters recommendation. They got access to institutional resources at a higher rate than their lower income peers. But when campus closed during spring breaks, and it was about how much money you had in your pocket, now how much cultural capital you have in your mind, it didn’t matter whether you were privileged poor or doubly disadvantaged, you went hungry. And so I was able to show how students’ trajectories to college shape their pathways through college in a new and novel way. And so The Privileged Poor allowed me to engage with policy as well as academics and reducing some of the inequalities on campus.
John: The Privileged Poor was written before the pandemic, but then the pandemic hit and you started working on this new book. Could you talk a little bit about what you observed there and how that led to Class Dismissed?
Tony: Yes. So The Privileged Poor was published in 2019 and I was very fortunate that in the years in between now and 2019 I got to visit a lot of college and universities that have begun working with them to change their policies, and to date, over 80 universities have changed their dining hall policies to account for food insecurity on their campuses, both from small liberal arts colleges to large public institutions and every institution in between. And so I was having this good rapport. And The Privileged Poor also focuses on life on campus. It tries to understand how class shapes students’ engagement with their peers, professors, and the policies that govern campus life. And one thing that kept gnawing at me was that a question that The Privileged Poor cannot answer head on because of what wanted to focus on then was about students’ lives off campus, especially their families in their neighborhoods, and how that continues to shape how they move through campus. Class Dismissed came about because I was asked to do a project about how black students were experiencing inequalities on campus, especially during the pandemic, and I said I like the premise, but to fully understand how inequality shapes how students move through campus, I want to expand who I’m speaking to and the questions that I’m asking with a particular focus: how does the inequalities off campus shape daily life on campus? And that’s how this project began. I was invited to do this study by William Julius Wilson, a preeminent sociologist, and I interviewed 125 Asian, Black, Latino, Native, white and mixed students to understand truly how COVID exacerbated the very inequalities that universities were ignoring, especially how structural inequalities like poverty, segregation, the lasting legacy of redlining and blockbusting, which we already talked about at the beginning of this conversation, continues to shape how students move through campus, and I was very excited and intentional about including more groups to study, because I want to show you just how different their experiences are, especially by inclusion of Native students, who are sadly one of the most overlooked groups of college students that we have, to be able to show not just the lasting legacy of redlining and blockbusting, but the lasting legacy of land theft and disenfranchisement, deepens our understanding of what universities need to do to prepare for these students. I know we probably want to get into it, but there’s something about understanding where students come from that really shapes our understanding of where they return to and when COVID shut down campus, even if the policies for these closures were correct, we show just how ill prepared we were to help students navigate that transition. And again, and I say this in the book, this book is not a COVID book. This book is not about COVID. This book is about the inequalities that existed before that were worsened by campus closures and the pandemic. Because I really wanted us to understand where students come from and how that continues to shape their life, both as a springboard into more opportunity, because in the book, I talk about students who were able to take on unpaid internships during the pandemic. Even as the pandemic shut most of the world down, crippled some countries to the brink of bankruptcy and collapse, there were students who were taking on unpaid internships at venture capital firms, compared to then being able to show well, yeah, lower income students also took on unpaid labor, but it took on a very different form, and yet new is I’m actually going beyond just saying that both groups of students took on unpaid internships or unpaid labor, I actually show that the skill sets that are used by lower income students to carry out the work that are thrust upon them often requires a higher level skill set than those used by those in unpaid internships who complained about the grunt work and the busy work that they were able to do. But here’s the rub, whose CV is going to say what? Whose CV is going to have the right title? Whose CV is going to have the right employer? Whose CV is going to have the right detailed job description? And whose CV is going to remain silent about all the extra work that they did in addition to classes, in addition to other familiar responsibilities? So that’s why I said, to me, I hope people take away from the book that yes, COVID had a different effect on students. But I really want us to pay concrete attention to the way in which so much of what I talk about existed before March 2020, before campus closed, and these processes were continued for generations because that black box of unpaid labor that happens for lower income students, that wasn’t created four years ago, that has already existed. But then I try to also offer concrete things that we can do to begin to understand this. Because I don’t know if you all remember, in the early 2000s the Common Application introduced the familiar responsibility question to understand why students are, for example, not part of Glee Club and key society and playing a sport. And some people like, “well, I work,” or “I take care of my grandparents, “and they saw this familiar responsibility question really changed the way in which admissions officers were able to get a texture of students’ life. I asked a simple but a fundamental question in the book, Why do we have this at the end of high school, beginning of college, to help students get into college, but we have nothing like it on the way out? What are employers missing by not understanding the unpaid labor that all students do, and not just those who go to familiar places, by venture capital firms or a senator’s office or some of the other things, knowing that the work they do is mostly grunt work that doesn’t give them any kind of true experience.
Rebecca: It’s interesting that all of these inequities have existed forever, and COVID did make things more visible, but that doesn’t mean that a lot of change has occurred. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that colleges continue to fall short?
Tony: Yeah, one of the things that I highlight in my work is, oftentimes, I don’t want to say the actions, but the happenings of the most overlooked offices on campus. And I’ll talk about like, you know, the Dean of Students Office and other places like that. And to give you an example, I talk a lot about academic leave policies in the book, and the reason why is because it often shows both the class biases and the, quite frankly, ignorance that colleges have about where students come from, and I talk a lot about where students come from, because we’re talking about universities that are reaching out and saying, “We want you. We want a student from every state and every type of community, like we want to diversify our campuses along all of these lines.” But are you ready for it? If you want it, you get credit for recruiting it. But are you ready? Do you actually know what students need? The reason why I talk about leave policies is because I exposed in the book the very class and paternalistic approach that we take to it. When a student wants to take a year off and do an internship or just take a year off just to travel, the only thing they have to do is email that Dean and say, “Hey, I’m not coming back next semester.” They fill out something, but it’s usually very light work. If a student is asked to take the time off, and a lot of people will say, “Well, it’s probably because they cheated, or that something like that,” it’s often not because of the work. It’s because they are struggling to manage the expectations of home and the reality of college. When universities tell students that they need to leave campus for academic leave, they almost act like parole officers and put a whole bunch of responsibilities on students, new responsibilities on students as they are going home. So even though a student is at their most vulnerable, many universities require students to work a full-time job and take class at a local university while they are away from campus. There are some universities that require letters of recommendation from that employer. Now to middle-class America, that may not sound so outrageous, but what if you come from a community where 50% population have jobs and the other half do not? What if you come from a community where you’re not only the first person in your family to go to college, you one of a few people in the entire community to go to college. Who is comfortable and familiar with writing the types of letter of recommendation to assess your mental ability when you are fighting to get a job at the local fast food joint or Walgreens or CVS or Duane Reade, because that’s all the jobs that you could possibly apply for in your area. If we don’t understand the geography of inequality, especially as it pertains to access to employment, access to schools, access to mental health counselors or individuals who can assess that, are we truly helping students when we’re giving them a task that can’t be done, not while they’re home? There are some students who had to leave home after they have left college to go to a place to be able to fulfill that because they live on the reservation and finding work in that way was impossible? What about our students who come from more rural communities where jobs aren’t as available as the apples on trees? There are so many things, and so I use students’ experiences to not only show how different those who come from privilege and those who do not, how different their college times are. But I also relate that to policies that we could actually change on the college campus to address the inequalities. It’s heartening that the University of Rochester, for example, has a program that they’ve had for years called the Take Five program, because they know that lower income students disproportionately have more disruptive life events that undercut their academic experience. They were like, you are admitted under this take five program, because we know that this time that you are investing in higher education is often going to be punctured with moments that leave you so broken and bruised you might take a week or two slower. And so I try to highlight those other things. And the reason why I talk about policy here is because, as I was doing this book, I was inspired by the work in The Privileged Poor, where I was able to get universities, for example, to change their dining hall policy. And so I sent out a theme for the book. I said, “Well, now that we know what we know, what are we going to do about it? What’s the point in just writing about inequality if we’re not going to address it? If students’ stories give the general scaffolding of policies that can be adopted, why not listen to them? Why not let that inform the universities that govern campus life?” I just want to bring attention to that because the fact of the matter is, as our communities become ever more diverse, by geography, by race, by class, we must pay attention to those sending communities in the same way how any immigration scholar will tell you country of origin matters because US policy differs, differs because of their relationship with each country. The same thing applies. Harvard and BU and Amherst have real nice diplomatic relations with Greenwich Village, with the Upper West Side, with Palo Alto, very great diplomatic relationships; from Coconut Grove, from Detroit, from parts of Brooklyn, from parts of Cleveland, St Louis, not so much. We don’t understand, and because we don’t have an understanding of that inequality, it’s hard for us to adopt policy that is receptive to it, because, again, to ask a student to take on a full- time job when they come from a community where jobs have been gone for a generation, is giving them a task that they cannot complete. The sad part about it is those requirements were not always relaxed during COVID19, some universities still required students to work during it. One student told me that she had to petition to get two part-time jobs to count because that was all she was able to find during the pandemic. And because what she come from, there weren’t a lot of jobs, and then she had to take on these two part time. Now, this is the same person who lived in a house with a family member who was on dialysis. This is the same person who lived with immunocompromised people, and she had to petition yet again and say, “Hey, I am afraid, deathly afraid, to go out to work. Please don’t make me because I’m fearful of hurting my family member.” She had to petition for it, because universities weren’t flexible enough to actually realize the consequences of it, or they were so rigid in their policy. And this book is not a book that is organized by, “Oh, this is policy, let me see the effect, right?” No, the book is organized by understanding how students dealt with the inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic in their families, finances, in the fault lines along race on campus. And when you look at the family dynamics and the consequences of it., you just see how it’s important to understand that students, especially lower income and first-gen college students, they’re not running away from home. They’re trying to get away from the things that make home hard. That’s why so many first gens are driven. It’s not because they don’t like home, it’s that they don’t like aspects of home that make life hell, whether that means having to do, as I talk about myself, whether that means having to do homework by candlelight because the power was out more often than not, whether it was not having your own bed or your own space to be, or enough to eat, those are very real thing. But I also want to highlight the ways in which university policies make coming from those spaces even harder, and to some students, they almost felt intentional.
John: So far, we’ve mostly been talking about institutional policies. But what role do individual faculty members play in this?
Tony: Individual faculty and staff are also important players in this, So, I’ll give you an example from the book. In the book, I show how universities have a segregated on-campus labor market where students are almost divided by social class in what jobs they go after and what jobs they get. What I show is that middle class students, or rather, students who are comfortable engaging with faculty were more likely to get research, teaching, and course assistantships. They were more likely to be in quote, unquote, those like life of the mind positions, the academic kind of heavy lifting work of the University. Students from lower income backgrounds who were not comfortable engaging with adults were more likely to be in manual labor positions like barista, grounds keeping, janitorial. That was happening long before the pandemic hit, and then when campus closed, and what I’m able to show in the book, is that lower income students who weren’t comfortable lost their jobs, those who were comfortable with faculty kept their jobs, and even increased their hours. I talk about this being directly about what faculty can and cannot do because so often assistantship jobs, whether it’s course, teaching, or research, those jobs aren’t even posted. Those jobs are doled out in office hours. Those jobs are people who are tapped for those positions. But if you are not in those spaces, even if you’re the best qualified because you know the material, you don’t get that job. In the end, what I show is the students who needed more were given less. The students who needed to earn more money to support themselves and their family were given fewer hours, less resources, and less support. The students who needed less, at least financially, were given more: more hours, more money, more support. It increased the disparity that what these jobs can do, and importantly, let’s then move beyond the pandemic. If you have a job when you have high faculty interactions, you not only get paid today, but you get a letter recommendation tomorrow. But if you have a transactional job where it’s pay for services rendered, that’s all you really get, is the pay today, there aren’t readily available opportunities for you to use your job to fully access institutional resources. Yet, if you work for me or any faculty member, there’s a greater likelihood that you will be able to access something from our networks, whether it’s, “Oh, I’m going to be meeting with the Director of HUD,” or “I’m meeting with this Director of a movie, they’re giving me three extra tickets. why don’t you come with me?” All of a sudden, you’re meeting people in different kind of ways. Or I. can put you on to say,”Hey, this person’s hiring next year. You should think about interning there.” These are just like very, very real opportunities that students who are connected to faculty members who are in the know or who can connect them with it, do more. They get more and so that’s why I want to challenge faculty. And faculty have great autonomy and greater access. One chemistry professor, for example, can hire as many students as an entire office like a dean of students. Some chemistry professors’ labs are 20 or 30 people strong, and half of them are undergraduates. So we have power within ourselves. I was doing a professional development program this weekend, and I met a Dean, and he said that he just changed the rule that if a faculty member does not list the job on the university’s website, they will not be eligible for a benefit that the college gives for hiring undergraduates. And I applauded them for that, because that is a step in the direction that I think we all should go. Because, as I also show in the book, when you make explicit the hiring process, lower income students from all backgrounds, whether it’s public or public school or private school, or their familiarity with elite environments, they’re more likely to apply or feel that it’s an opportunity that is available to them.
Rebecca: I think in this example and the previous example, you’re really highlighting the relational aspects that are really important for students to be successful in various ways, both on campus and in the next steps after campus. And you’ve really highlighted the idea of both in the example of the petitioning, and even knowing that petitioning is an option or building relationships with faculty, and even knowing that’s an option to get opportunities and highlighting the idea of making things more explicit. Is that the direction that institutions need to go in is developing policies that really highlight transparency, or are there other suggestions that you have for institutions?
Tony: I mean, transparency is huge, but it’s not just transparency. I think it’s also translation, because the more we leave to random connections, random conversations, or random moments of, “Hey, you look familiar,” or “Hey, do you take my class?” …the more we will see these class processes to continue, because students who are comfortable will avail themselves to more resources because they know how the college works, students who are not especially lower-income students think that hiring, grades, internships, fellowships, should be about the work, and yet, sometimes doing the best is not what gets noticed. It’s being present. It’s being in the room. I always tell the story of, when you apply for the Rhode to go to Oxford for study, you need eight letters of recommendation, eight. Who knows eight people, and not just know them, but who knows eight people who know them well enough to write true letters of recommendation for them, to endorse them for one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious, undergraduate award you can receive? You can be a 4.0 student, but if you’re a 4.0 student who has never been to office hours, who has never attended a faculty and student-faculty dinner, that has never worked for someone in their lab, do you have an advocate on campus for you who can say anything else, other than they were the top performer? But if you were a student who got like a 3.85, not quite 4.0, but still A range person, but you went to office hours because you didn’t do as well on your first exam, and you started going, and you develop a rapport with a faculty member, and you begin to work with that faculty member on their project. And then when that faculty member goes away for a week, sometimes you babysit their dog, or you become a member of their lab and their family, that letter is going to reflect that connection. But we leave so much in that black box of the hidden curriculum about how you should navigate college, and we almost never talk about employment. As a matter of fact, as I argue in the book, university takes a very hands-off approach to on-campus employment. We were like, “Just use this website or attend this job fair.” Job fairs are not neutral ground. We say “wear business casual.” What does that mean? As one student told me, “I don’t know what business casual was.” Some people may hear us talk in this conversation and be “Well, like, this is duh, like, it’s business casual. Get some loafers, get a jacket. Of course, you’re going to go and talk to a faculty member.” If anyone is having that thought right now, I would want them to ask themselves three questions: “What’s the highest level of education of the person who raised me? What job do they have? and how similar or different was my high school to the college that I went?” We have to remember, people with PhDs are 12 to 25 times more likely to have a PhD parent. Faculty members are like doctors, dentists, and the vets. It’s a hereditary position. So many faculty members have not only family members who have PhDs, but who are the children of PhDs. Again, through studying students’ experiences, through their families, finances, and the fault lines along race on campus, I was able to expose the way in which students move through campus on uneven and unequal grounds, long before the pandemic, and was able to chart how much rockier it got.
John: So, we’ve talked quite a bit about institutional issues and institutional policies, as well as some things specific to faculty. One of the things that happened with the pandemic, though, is faculty, often for the first time, recognized the extent of some of the inequities that their students were facing when they were seeing students who had trouble accessing wireless networks, or accessing Zoom, and struggling to share a computer, or being busy taking care of sick relatives or other issues, and there was at least a bit of recognition of some of these inequities. But I’m wondering if maybe faculty are backing a little bit away from that now as we’ve moved a bit further from the pandemic. A lot of people were a little bit more relaxed about deadlines and other policies and were a little more aware of the role of the hidden curriculum and so forth, but I’m not sure that that’s continued at the same level we’d like.
Tony: And that’s one of the reasons why I hope that this book doesn’t take us back to COVID, but it resurfaces the lessons that we learned through it, with some new ones, of course, because for me, I don’t want us to have this “get back to normal,” this post-pandemic normal, this new normal. The new normal is too easy. It will all too easy become a replication of what we had before if we don’t take these inequalities into consideration. If we don’t understand the way in which class shapes how students move through campus, and how race often exacerbates those differences, we just go back to what we had. We need to strive for something more like an equitable campus. We haven’t seen that.
Rebecca: Moving towards an equitable campus requires some hard work and change, and sometimes that’s something that people are really afraid of.
Tony: Yeah, I was thinking about something I said, it was like: “Simply following the impulse to get back to normal will only be a setback. If we return to normal, we will return to what was. We will once again be held hostage to the inequities that plague higher education and society alike. We will once again hold ourselves and our institutions back from being what we could be, what we should be. Let us not yearn for normalcy. I don’t want to be normal in the sense of the normal operating procedure. We need things to disrupt the normal operating procedure, unless our intention is to harm the very students who we are paying millions to recruit, retain, and graduate. If your intention is to do that harm, then you can go back with the new normal that’s basically going to be what we had part two. But that is not your intention, then you need to rethink and reframe many policies.”
John: In addition to the need for institutional change, are there some specific things that faculty can do in their classes to help reduce some of the effects of the inequities that our students face?
Tony: I’m a sociologist, and I already get in trouble for being as prescriptive as I am in the sense that “you’re too applied,” I’m like, “Well, again, now that we know, we know what we’re going to do about it,” but I don’t want to be so prescriptive that I limit the imagination of faculty. I’ll give you an example: in reading The Privileged Poor. I talk about the fact that we always say when office hours are. We almost never say what they are. And my work on office hours has spurred hundreds of faculty to begin to define office hours on their syllabi and on the first day of class. I want them to be similarly inspired. And here’s where it gets fun. Some people were in class 10 minutes early, and walked the class to their office to show people where they are. I never said to do that. I want to put people on the path to understanding the nature of America and how it comes to campus. We all don’t have the same streets to walk down. Some people gladly take a walk at night and stretch their legs. Other people know that that is a luxury that could cost them their life. And I say America, not saying that we are not global institutions, but we also know the larger context of the recruitment of lower-income students, especially in no-loan financial aid policies that are at nearly 80 no-loan schools in America. The vast majority of them only have no-loan policies for U.S. students. For me, that’s why I say America. And so I don’t want to be so prescriptive and tell fabrics what they need to do, but I do wish more people knew about redlining and blockbusting. I do wish more people knew about land theft and settler colonialism, and not just in the historical context, because we love to say that happened a long time ago, like Jim Crow laws were a long time ago. I’m like, “No, they weren’t.” I wish we understood the present-day manifestations of those inherently disenfranchising practices, because if we did, I think we would come to understand the reality that the greatest determining factor of an individual’s life chances in this country is a zip code in which you are born. In the land of the free, home of the brave, the place of unbound opportunity, if I know your zip code, I can predict how old you are going to be when you die, if you go to school, if you will graduate from high school, what college you would go to. Neighborhood isn’t destiny, but it almost feels sometimes that those who make it out took a detour that was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. There was a moment, there was a broken light that said, “turn here” instead of keep going and getting stuck into a different path. And so I just hope that this book spurs conversations on campus, not only to revisit some of the most invisible policies that have rather large impacts on student life, but also thinking about how we move through campus.
Rebecca: I hope a lot of faculty and administrators and other folks involved with our institutions read your book and really come together with creativity and have some interesting solutions or experiments to make change happen. We always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”
Tony: What’s next? That is a great question. I told you I’m first-gen. I never got to do a college tour when I was in high school. I didn’t know what a college tour was when I went to the prep school, you know, I was around a whole bunch of rich people, and they were like, “Oh, well, we’re gonna take a week through the California schools and a week through the New England Schools.” And I was like, “whatever I can’t see online when I’m at school on a computer because I don’t have internet at home, it won’t be seen.” And so I always say that when I go and share the work with people, as I’m invited to campus. This is my college tour. And so one thing that I look forward to about what’s next is visiting campuses to share the book. And also I am knitting another baby blanket for my graduate advisee, who just welcomed his first child into the world with his wife. And so that’s what’s next for me, is the book tour and a baby blanket. I actually just went and got the yarn this weekend, and I chose a pattern.
Rebecca: That sounds really exciting, a nice balance.
Tony: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
John: And we do appreciate your book tours. In fact, we very much appreciated when you visited Oswego after your previous book. And I know shortly after that visit, a lot of people stopped calling office hours, office hours, and started using other names and moved them to other places to make them a little bit more welcoming. So I know that was a fairly immediate effect of one of those college tour visits.
Tony: Actually, Oswego was my last in-person visit before campus closed.
John: Yeah, we closed just a week or two after that. I think. I remember that, yeah,
Tony: I think I came up on March, 7th or 8th, I believe, and campus closed on March 10. [LAUGHTER] It was my last visit. I got off the plane, I was like, “Yeah, this is a different world we are living in.
John: Well, we were glad you made it before everything shut down.
Tony: I am too
Rebecca: …extra memorable. [LAUGHTER]
John: Well, thank you. We really enjoyed talking to you, and we’re looking forward to sharing this episode and to reading the book, which should be arriving shortly, my pre-order went in a couple months ago.
Tony: Awesome. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: Thanks for joining us.
Tony: Thank you all so much.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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