“In class I emphasize the value of a degree as a means to avoid the sort of jobs that I myself go to when those hours in the classroom are over. A colleague in my department labeled these jobs (food and beverage, retail and customer service — the only legal work in abundance in Las Vegas) as “survival jobs.” He tells our students they need to learn that survival work will not grant them the economic security of white-collar careers. I never told him that I myself had such a job, that I needed our meeting to end within the next 10 minutes or I’d be late to a seven-hour shift serving drunk, needy tourists, worsening my premature back problem while getting hit on repeatedly… It is a shame I share with many of my blue-collar colleagues, a belief that society deems our work inferior, that we have settled on or chosen these paths because we do not have the skills necessary to acquire something better. It is certainly a belief I held for the majority of my undergraduate experience.”
I have this persistent elitism that I sometimes realize is never going to be conquered until I know people who aren’t graduates of elite institutions. I recognize in my elitism the limits of ‘awareness’ to overcome a problem, and the fact that I need to actually sit down and learn and meet and struggle with myself. In essence, I sort of wish I could take this woman’s class.
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