This book examines how a working-class habitus interacts with the elite culture of academia in higher education. Drawing on extensive qualitative data and informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the author presents new ways of examining impostor syndrome, alienation and microaggressions: all common to the working-class experience of academia. The book demonstrates that the term ‘working-class academic’ is not homogenous, and instead illuminates the entanglements of class and academia. Through an examination of such intersections as ethnicity, gender, dis/ability, and place, the author demonstrates the complexity of class and academia in the UK and asks how we can move forward so working-class academics can support both each other and students from all backgrounds.

This book is a twist on the current discourse around ‘inclusivity’ and ‘widening participation’. Higher education is welcoming students from diverse educational, social, and economic backgrounds, and yet it predominantly employs middle-class academics. Conceptually, there appears, on at least these grounds alone, to be a cultural and class mismatch. This work discusses empirical interviews with tenured academics from a working-class heritage employed in one UK university. Interviewees talk candidly about their childhood backgrounds, their school experiences, and what happened to them after leaving compulsory education. They also reveal their experiences of university, both as students and academics from their early careers to the present day. This book will be of interest to an international audience that includes new and aspiring academics who come from a working-class background themselves. The multifaceted findings will also be relevant to established academics and students of sociology, education studies and social class.

In this second edition, twenty-four college professors, with roots in the working class, discuss the experience of significant upward mobility and the problems of adjustment to life in the academy. This collection of stories provides revelations about the social class system and academic life in the United States.

What are the meanings, experiences, and impact of college for working-class people? The author of this book addresses the two questions, what is college like for working-class students, and what is college for the working class? In The Other Three Percent, the author draws on a wealth of previous research to tell the stories of five very different working-class college students as they apply to, enter, successfully navigate, and complete college. Through these stories readers will learn about the obstacles working-class students face and overcome, the costs and effectiveness of higher education as a mechanism of social mobility, and the problems caused on our college campuses by our reticence to meaningfully confront the class divide. Readers will be invited to compare their own experiences of higher education with those of the students here described, and to evaluate their own institutions’ openness towards working-class students through a series of checklists provided in the book’s conclusion. Allison L. Hurst is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. She is a member of the Association of Working-Class Academics.

Places notions of disability at the center of higher education and argues that inclusiveness allows for a better education for everyone

More students today are financing college through debt, but the burdens of debt are not equally shared. The least privileged students are those most encumbered and the least able to repay. All of this has implications for those who work in academia, especially those who are themselves from less advantaged backgrounds. Warnock argues that it is difficult to reconcile the goals of facilitating upward mobility for students from similar backgrounds while being aware that the goals of many colleges and universities stand in contrast to the recruitment and support of these students. This, combined with the fact that campuses are increasingly reliant on adjunct labor, makes it difficult for the contemporary tenure-track or tenured working-class academic to reconcile his or her position in the academy.

Ideally, universities are centers of learning, in which great researchers dispassionately search for truth, no matter how unpopular those truths must be. The marketplace of ideas assures that truth wins out against bias and prejudice. Yet, many people worry that there's rot in the heart of thehigher education business.In Cracks in the Ivory Tower, libertarian scholars Jason Brennan and Philip Magness reveal the problems are even worse than anyone suspects. Marshalling an array of data, they systematically show how contemporary American universities fall short of these ideals and how bad incentives make faculty,administrators, and students act unethically. While universities may at times excel at identifying and calling out injustice outside their gates, Brennan and Magness contend that individuals are primarily guided by self-interest at every level. They find that the problems are deep and pervasive:most academic marketing and advertising is semi-fraudulent; colleges and individual departments regularly make promises they do not and cannot keep; and most students cheat a little, while many cheat a lot. Trenchant and wide-ranging, they elucidate the many ways in which faculty and students alikehave every incentive to make teaching and learning secondary.In this revealing expose, Brennan and Magness bring to light many of the ethical problems universities, faculties, and students currently face. In turn, they reshape our understanding of how such high-powered institutions run their business.