Expanding Economic Democracy in American Higher Education: A two‐step approach to hiring more teachers from poverty‐ and working‐class backgrounds

Abstract

American universities are seeking to increase ‘academic staff diversity’ by hiring more females, racial/ethnic minorities, military veterans, and persons with disabilities. Various researchers have presented evidence showing that people of poverty and working‐class origins are significantly underrepresented within the US academic staff. Nevertheless, no college or university includes social class background considerations among its diversity criteria. The first part of this study recommends informal procedures currently employed teachers can use to expand economic democracy in higher education by hiring more academics of humble origins. The second part shows how the consequences of these unofficial efforts can be directed toward making social class background a formal part of every American university's academic staff hiring standards. The discussion also lists anticipated criticisms of this proposal and appropriate responses for each complaint. [P]reserving the status quo without tackling the accumulated disadvantages that children carry with them throughout their lives would ultimately erode a half century of progress in enhancing the capacity of our colleges and universities to serve the country's core values. In our view, the nation can ill afford to pay such a price. (Bowen et al., p. 243) In this paper, working‐class academics includes teachers whose parents or guardians never attended college and who held jobs commonly associated with blue‐collar, pink‐collar, or poverty‐class occupations, such as short‐order cooks, domestics, labourers, waiters, waitresses and other vocations usually not requiring at least an associate or undergraduate degree for entry. To avoid monotonous repetitions, the terms ‘college’ and ‘university’ are used interchangeably, as are ‘social class background’, ‘social class origins’, ‘socioeconomic background’ and ‘socioeconomic origins’. While the title of this article includes ‘hiring’, the discussion also offers comments about recruiting and retaining working‐class academics.