How Does “Culture” Become “Capital”? Cultural and Institutional Struggles over “Character and Personality” at Harvard

Abstract

Although the concept of cultural capital has been widely adopted in sociological studies of culture, education, and stratification, few studies have addressed the processes through which specific instantiations of cultural capital become important in particular institutional locations. This article, based on an analysis of primary documents relating to changes in admissions policies at Harvard College between 1945 and 1965, addresses the question of how nonacademic factors came to have such a significant role in undergraduate admissions at elite American universities. It argues that in relatively autonomous fields such as higher education in the mid–twentieth century United States, cultural capital is shaped not only by the relations of cultural qualities and economic classes but also through specific intra- and extra-institutional struggles within the field in question.