We would like to compile a list of resources for people who are concerned about issues of class in the academy. Our growing bibliography can be found here. It contains links to online articles that address a wide variety of issues–from surviving on adjunct salaries to empowering working-class students to mentoring new faculty and beyond–as well as a bibliography of books on related topics. Our aim is to provide starting points for conversation. If you have a book or article you would recommend we add to this list, please leave us a comment below. Please include links for online content. A sentence or two explaining why the resource is valuable and/or what it addresses would be very much appreciated.
Here are some more good books, some more recent, some classics, all vitally important, I think:
Stangers in Paradise: Academics from the Worksing Class (Jake Ryan and Charles Sackery)
Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and their Working-Class Parents (Kathleen A Welsch)
Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (bell hooks)
Silences (Tillie Olsen)
Class Matters (Correspondents of the New York Times)
Having thought about these issues for a long time, I would like to add one of my own essays to the list of things to read: Mazurek, Raymond A. “Work and Class in the Box Store University: Autobiographies of Working-Class Academics.” College Literature 36. 4 (Fall 2009): 147-178.
One point I raise which I would like to be considered is that it makes little sense (at least to me) to discuss students and faculty from the working class and there place in the academy without also discussing the intense stratification within the academy in the past forty years. Good tenured line jobs have been replaced by academic McJobs–part time work with very low pay and non tenurable full-time positions. What I have tried to stress, perhaps awkwardly at times, is that there is a new white collar working class (which may not be the best term) of which most young academics in the Humanities are part of.