An Opportunity to Change the Class System
Ellie Brown, International Liberation Reference
Person for College and University Faculty
College and university faculty are a subset of the middle class. Our job is to “train” middle- and owning-class people and produce ideas and workers that serve the class hierarchy.
We deal with the same issues everyone is facing—classism, racism, sexism, young people’s oppression, environmental degradation, war, genocide. And we are set up to oppress a group that we were once members of—students. To do this we have to become numb to the realities of young people’s oppression and compromise our integrity.
We have often been taught to imitate the thinking of others rather than to think flexibly and for ourselves.
Many colleges and universities have adopted corporate models that exploit faculty labor and train students to be workers but not flexible thinkers. Currently the owning class is attacking empirically based knowledge in order to manipulate the working class (including middle-class workers) into supporting policies that benefit only large corporations.
In spite of the above, our position gives us an opportunity to help change the class system and bring about a just and sustainable society. We can “come home to the working class,” reclaim our role as “people’s intellectuals,” and work for all people. This can include doing the following:
- We can incorporate RC theory and practice into our programs.
- We can challenge the usual ways of defining intelligence and the usual ideas about how people acquire knowledge and which and whose knowledge matters.
- We can introduce RC to activists and other leaders, teach it one-to-one and in classes, and invite campus leaders to take RC classes in our local RC Communities.
- We can remember the value of and actively support working-class people and their work.
I’m excited to be doing this with all of you!
Wilmington, Delaware, USA