L☀RNA S☁RE

I. A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table

MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.

DAD: O.K.

GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry.

DAD: Me, too. When it was over, I had sex.

UNCLE: I’m having sex right now.

DAD: We all are.

MOM: Let’s talk about which kid I like the best.

DAD: (laughing) You know, but you won’t tell.

MOM: If they ask me again, I might tell.

FRIEND FROM WORK: Hey, guess what! My voice is pretty loud!

DAD: (laughing) There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t.

MOM: I’m angry! I’m angry all of a sudden!

DAD: I’m angry, too! We’re angry at each other!

MOM: Now everything is fine.

DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good.

MOM: There was a big sex.

FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest!

(Everybody laughs.)

MOM: I had a lot of wine, and now I’m crazy!

GRANDFATHER: Hey, do you guys know what God looks like?

ALL: Yes.

GRANDFATHER: Don’t tell the kids.

[Jeff Wall at MOMA]

Walter Benn Michaels, an English professor at the University of Illinois, is also angry, but he has a different view of where the problem begins. He directs his anger not so much at the admissions or development office as at the entire culture of academia, which, in his view, has settled somewhere between insouciance and hypocrisy with regard to the widening class divide. “Poor people,” he writes in The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality,

are an endangered species in elite universities not because the universities put quotas on them…and not even because they can’t afford to go to them (Harvard will lend you or even give you the money you need to go there) but because they can’t get into them.

This is basically true, as Bowen and his colleagues demonstrate. What Michaels adds to the discussion is the idea that many academic liberals have been deceiving themselves about this uncomfortable truth while—unwittingly, perhaps—abetting it.

What he means is that the academic left (which he tartly calls the “supposed left”) expends its energy rallying against such phantom enemies as racism and sexism—erstwhile evils that he believes barely exist today, at least not in the narrow social stratum from which college students come. As a result, “progressive politics” too often “consists of disapproving of bad things that happened a long time ago.” But Michaels does not stop at chiding the “supposed left” for indulging in nostalgia for battles already won. He thinks that by obscuring the real issue —the class divide—that persists behind all the smoke and noise over “diversity,” the academic left has become complicit with the broader political right in rewarding the rich and penalizing the poor.