The False Image of the Professoriat's Gentility

Fiction, especially that kind of contemporary fiction which reaches the broader public, overwhelmingly deals with those leading lives of relative comfort and privilege--like the more affluent professionals. So it goes with our depiction of college. Yes, we had a sitcom about a community college not so long ago, but now as before the college we are most likely to see pop culture depict is a four year research institution with graduate programs and sports teams and dorms and campus life, staffed by professors living a cloistered but essentially genteel existence.

Of course, it may seem that in spite of that the popular view today is a bit more nuanced. The lot of the adjunct professor of whom American higher education has made ever more, and ever more exploitative, use, has been increasingly discussed, for example. Still, even those who know of such things think it a recent novelty. By contrast, those who read Upton Sinclair's The Goose-Step learn that even if the extreme, semester-to-semester insecurity of the professor is a new and unwelcome change, a poverty that makes even a shabby gentility out of the question has been the lot of a very large part of the American professoriat for a very long time.