Our work and why we do it

[lolaraincoat]

I'm sitting here surrounded by towering stacks of admissions files to a graduate program, which are more than a bit daunting, and so I cruise the internet for solace and distraction, and this is what appeared today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/us/20mobility.html?em&ex=1203656400&en=fd81d8756f45e5a5&ei=5087%0A

I always look for the phrase "first member of her/his family to attend university" in letters of recommendation; those are the students I most want to admit and to fund. It's good to have a little empirical research out there as a reminder of why that matters.

And so anyhow:

Writers of letters of recommendation! Teachers and tutors and librarians and university staff and principals and deans and department chairs and committee members and high school staff and teaching assistants and teachers' aides and Montessori teachers everywhere! Crossing guards and school-bus drivers! Politicians who don't cut school budgets! What you do counts for something! It counts for so much! Thank you so much!

And now I'll get back to reading the files, all right? All right then.

...

Comments

[fabularasa.livejournal.com]

. . . and after a grueling season of it, that kind of makes it worthwhile. Glad it makes a difference to somebody somewhere. Though I don't think I had any "first in family" ones, sadly.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Oh, it does make a difference, it does. The article frames it quite differently, but that's what the stats actually say - college is pretty much the *only* class mobility ladder that works in the US. It doesn't work in every case and it doesn't work very well, but it works. Which we already knew, but it's nice to see some numbers. I would love to see similar figures for Canada. I know that more than a third of the undergrads at my institution are in the first college-attending generation of their families, but Spork U is so very special, you know ...

[fabularasa.livejournal.com]

I do get a taste of some of that, and I know what you mean. My institution has an obscene endowment, the kind many research unis would kill for. And while much of this, obviously, gets plowed into improved marigold beds, a whopping amount goes to funding for financial aid, so that at this very brick-and-white-columns place you see a really high percentage of students who are just. . .not born into that world, let's put it that way. And whose parents have said, ah sure kid, you can go to State U. if you keep your grades up. And then those kids make it here and they get thrown against the wall and told, no, you are going to Princeton, now get to fucking work. And tuck your shirt in, while you're at it.

(Princeton being the southerner's default Ivy of choice, and a particular favorite around here because back in the bad old days of the early 90s it didn't threaten to blacklist us for refusing to hire Jewish faculty, like Harvard and Yale did.)

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Holy COW. THAT recently? JEWISH faculty? Um. Wow.

So, how's the whole faculty diversity thing working out for your institution now?

[fabularasa.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, baby. This place has recovered from some major trauma. It's been a vaguely Christian, inoffensively Presbyterian place since 1878, but in the 1980s the head was of the fiery evangelical sort, as was a small but vocal part of the parent body. So strides that should have been made, weren't. In those days, all faculty hired had to get down on their knees and pray with the head; it was very much a loyalty oath kind of place. Needless to say, Jewish faculty were personae non gratae. So in 1991 Harvard and Yale got together and their deans called up our head and said, hey, ya know that crop of twenty or so kids you send us every year? Yeah, fuhgeddaboutit.

After that, the diversity thing worked out quite well. And that head is long gone, replaced by a gently dotty Episcopal priest. We have Jews (actual Jews!) now, and then of course there's me, more Jewish by the day.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Wow. Or as they say in Mexico City, Guau.

Hey, someone should write a novel about that crazy workplace of yours!