The Philosophers' Cocoon

This is a guest post by Adriel M. Trott, Department Chair at Wabash College. 

I grew up working class. One sign of my having grown up working class is that I don’t think it is a badge of honor. In the academy, it is generally something I hide. I’m writing this post to describe some of my experiences in the academy that I think come from being working class in the hopes that others might be able to learn from my experience. Another sign of my having grown up working class is that I tend to think of all the reasons not to think of myself as working class rather than all the reasons to think of myself in this way. When I posted something on Facebook about being working class – the post that led to this blogpost – a number of people responded by noting one or two factors that made their experience not working class, but then went on to say they were working class in the sense that their families did not make much money. It strikes me as odd, even though I do it, that people think that they are claiming a title to working class unfairly. I take it to be very working class not to want to get some unfair allowance for one’s situation, and very American, in the sense that Sartre observed when he said “here a worker never considers himself a ‘proletarian’ in the European sense of the word.” Even as a socialist movement in the United States is gaining momentum, it strikes me that so many workers and their families don’t want to think of themselves as sharing experiences or interests that might bind them together, particularly in the sense of being oppressed. Fortunately, I think that is changing. The first thing I want to say then is that it is fine to consider yourself working class even if there are various factors in your background that don’t stand up to the ideal of the working class.

Both of my parents went to college. To very good colleges. And three of my four grandparents finished college, while the fourth had some college. So I knew what the good books to read were. My dad enlisted in the army in the early seventies to avoid the draft. When my parents came back from Japan where my dad was stationed, my dad became a mechanic, and then later a roofer and a sider, and then later, a self-employed subcontractor. My mother was a homemaker. My family income was under the poverty line. I was Pell-eligible. My parents trash-picked and my mother got food at a food bank. We shopped almost exclusively at thrift stores (which I still do). I distinctly remember my older sister’s birthday one year when my parents didn’t have money for ice cream. One of my parents found a box in someone’s trash that had a bunch of things including a canister of tennis balls. I think my mom was thinking about giving the tennis balls to my sister as a birthday present. My mom opened the can to see what shape they were in and found 14 dollars at the bottom of the can. So the birthday cake had icing and ice cream.

I grew up the second of six kids. When there were only five kids, we lived in a small twin in Olney, which was then an Irish-Catholic working class neighborhood in Philadelphia. We weren’t Irish, or Catholic, and the other kids called us “publics” because we went to public school. My parents were conservative Presbyterians, which I mention, because I think I became a philosopher in conversations around the dinner table about theology. Calvinism is systematic if nothing else, and I learned how to be a systematic thinker talking and thinking about Calvinism. I mention this also because despite what Aristotle seems to think of farmers and “vulgar craftsmen”—that they do not have the leisure for the kind of thinking and reflection necessary to be citizens or philosophers—my experience observing my dad and my own experience in working on projects around my house is that there is a certain kind of reflection and thoughtfulness made possible by working with one’s hands. I think we should hesitate about considering the working class without thought and reflection both on their own lives and on big ideas. Often I hear people say things like, well my parents are well-educated or thoughtful so I’m not really working class as if those things are mutually exclusive. While it can be the case that a college degree is a steppingstone to the middle class, I think it is more and more the case that it is not necessarily so. Cultural capital does accrue to the experience of college and reading good books and thinking that museums are better culture than television, something my parents knew – we didn’t have a television, but I only went to museums on field trips as a kid. But I think there are mindset issues at work in being a poor kid even if you did have some access to cultural capital. As I say at the outset, I caution against talking yourself out of being working class if you did grow up poor.

I paid for college on my own with the help of some grants and loans and working during the summers and over winter breaks. I went to the College of William and Mary, a public liberal arts college in Virginia, but I was out of state. I didn’t study abroad because I couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t afford the plane tickets, I couldn’t afford not working during the school year, which I couldn’t do abroad. I didn’t join a sorority because I couldn’t afford dues. It didn’t even occur to me because I knew it would cost more money. I have heard since that dues can be prorated, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask. I interned for a U.S. Senator in 1997 and had no idea that I could have received college credit for the 10-week internship until long after the fact.

That’s one thing that I think was a marker of my constant concern about money and the feelings of inadequacy that came from not having it—I didn’t think to ask for things like support for various school-related projects, not just for financial support, but other support as well. I didn’t understand office hours, because it never occurred to me to just go have a conversation with a professor. I had a vague sense that I would be being a nuisance and more generally to ask for help indicated that I was lacking in some way. I remember really struggling to write a research paper for an ancient Greek history class. I remember feeling like I just didn’t know what to do. And I felt like to admit that suggested I didn’t belong. I didn’t do very well on that paper and I never went to ask what I could do to do better. It just didn’t occur to me. I did go talk to one professor about a poor grade I received on an exam, which I found unjust because I thought my answers made sense and that the professor was looking for something very specific that wasn’t indicated by the questions. I remember being really upset about it because it felt unjust. I think I might have been about to cry. This professor then told another student that I came to his office almost crying and the student mentioned it to me. I was mortified and it furthered my sense that seeking help was a sign of weakness that wouldn’t ultimate help you. I think the fear of being perceived as weak ran strongly through my urban working class youth.

I felt similarly when I first started out in graduate school. I was not a philosophy major in college, so I already felt behind, but I think my not knowing was more profound – I didn’t know what it was ok to admit not knowing how to do things like how to read Hegel or how to write a graduate level research paper on Heidegger. Was it enough to just explain one particular thing I found difficult or did I have to say something new and original? And how could I possibly say something new and original? What did I need to reference? How would I know whether I needed to reference something or not? I remember when I submitted my dissertation my director said, wow, it’s really well-footnoted. Perhaps that is part of being a woman in the academy, but I think it was also my sense that I had to prove I knew things, a feeling that has not gone away with time. I remember getting an assignment back early in graduate school and it was an A- with no explanation of why. Again, I didn’t go ask the professor because I thought I was just supposed to figure out why it was unsatisfactory. I hesitate to call this imposter syndrome, because it wasn’t that I thought I was an imposter. I thought I was smart. But I thought that others knew things I didn’t know and I didn’t know what they knew or how to come to know it. My response to this cyclone of uncertainty was to work really hard, but I wish I hadn’t tried to be so self-sufficient about it. I had some mentors in graduate school who were very helpful. They spent time with me explicitly talking about how to improve my writing, but I think other professors assumed I knew what I was doing and so might have been harsher to me because I put up a good front. Perhaps that was good—they didn’t think I needed support because I seemed to be doing well. But that made criticism feel very upsetting, and it felt like that when I didn’t know what to do about it. One professor told me that something I submitted read like a draft of a paper and not a finished paper, and I wondered, how can I know that it is finished? I never asked. Even writing this now I worry about sharing all of this, because I think in philosophy, we are brilliant. In philosophy, we suppose we are all supposed to know already how to read and understand and write. I’m not sure this is about being working class, and I’m also not sure that anyone in graduate school doesn’t feel like this, but most of my peers seemed to have a better grasp on what they were doing than I felt like I did. I think what is working class is that I didn’t take it for granted that people wanted to help me.

At some point, I felt like I figured things out—after coursework when I was working on my own research. And it turned out that I developed useful skills from growing up without much support and without the sense that I had safety nets. I was a planner, a skill I developed from having to plan how to get rides to things or pay for things when I was younger, since my parents mostly expected us to get around on our own and with our own money (I started working when I was 16). I could map out where I wanted to be in my career five years into the future and then consider what I needed to get done in order to get there. I was also hungry—I knew that I needed to do well because I needed a job because I had nothing to fall back on. I was resourceful—finding pockets of money in various places in graduate school. I got on the low-income health insurance plan offered by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which cost $100 a month, which was a pretty big dent in my monthly income. Even though I was on a stipend, I had to find summer work to live, which slowed me down in time to degree (a reason I think people should not look at time to degree when making hiring decisions). I spent two summers studying German in Germany, but I had to work before and after I went in order to be able to afford it, even though both trips were covered by grants and university support—I still needed money for living when I returned. I ended up moving out of my apartment one of those times so that I didn’t have to pay rent over the summer, which also meant I felt like I was doing a lot of moving. I racked up credit card debt just to be social and to live in a big city. Then I would take out more student loans to pay off the credit card debt. Don’t do this. Credit card debt can be negotiated or even cancelled in a bankruptcy filing. Student loans can’t. But I didn’t know this. My parents didn’t have credit cards, and in fact, I don’t have credit cards now. As a kid from a poor family, credit cards seemed like a dream. I never had to say no. But also, I never learned how they worked and how they could be a pitfall. Eventually, I signed up with a credit card debt negotiator and negotiated the debt significantly down and finally paid it off early in my career. But not before paying a lot of it off with student loans, which I am still paying off.

I remember thinking about which job to take in terms of which city I could afford and whether I would be able to use public transportation because I didn’t have a car. When I finally moved to my first tenure-track job, I ended putting all my possessions in a mini-van I bought from my brother, which had been stolen by one of his students who joy-rode around North Philadelphia in it before abandoning it somewhere where it was eventually found and returned to my brother. I think I paid him $800 for it. The blue book value was half that. I didn’t have much money to move and I had started the credit card debt reduction process so I no longer had credit cards so I had to borrow money from my siblings to pay for gas to move. I had saved money for the move but I hadn’t considered that I wouldn’t have my deposit back from my apartment yet, so I wasn’t able to just roll that over to the deposit for my new apartment so I was scrounging for the first and last month and deposit to get the apartment. Then I didn’t get paid, reimbursed for moving, or put on health insurance at my new job until at least the end of September, when I had moved in early August. I had no furniture really to speak of. I slept on a pallet on the floor for the first six weeks before I got paid.

I have found the most difficult thing for me to cope with is acknowledging need. I’m a mid-career faculty member now. I published two books and a respectable number of articles. I’m chairing my department. I am on two APA committees. I feel respected by my peers. I am pleased with my ongoing research. I like my students and they generally seem to like me. But it doesn’t occur to me to ask senior faculty for advice. Not just advice like what should I do about x, but advice along the lines of, what do you think I should be thinking about at this point in my career? What are the pitfalls that I should avoid? It still feels to me that this would acknowledge that I don’t know something I should know. I know this is absurd, because how can I know it now when I haven’t yet done this before? There’s no way I can. And there’s no way that other faculty could perceive asking as somehow being an admission of lack. And yet there it is – I don’t ask. I think the field in general could use more active support for mid-career folks so I’m glad the Philosophers’ Cocoon is doing this series. I wonder if being mid-career in this way is a lot like being early on in graduate school—there are some things I feel like others know that I don’t know that I don’t quite know how to learn. I know for one it makes me want to be more honest about my own experience and to make myself available for more junior faculty seeking support about all manner of things. We shouldn’t all have to figure it out for ourselves.