book spotlight: privilege by shamus khan
Brayden is correct. Shamus’ book is good. And I can’t wait to see what Brayden, and other orgheads, have to say about it. If you haven’t been following the story, Shamus Khan is a sociologist at Columbia, a sociology blogger, and has written a book on St. Paul’s School, an elite boarding school. Shamus is a graduate of St. Paul’s and later came back to do research on it through ethnographic methods. He became a teacher and resident at the school for a year. Privilege is his analysis of what exactly happens at these elite boarding schools.
The book is an examination of how elites are made and how they relate to the rest of the world. Shamus’ argument is pretty simple. Elites used to be about entitlement. Things were handed to you. Now, elites are about being “at ease” in the world. Elites have to still put in the work and effort, but they see the world as something to exploited and leveraged, rather than a constraint. Modern elites are capable of straddling different social arenas with ease and cross boundaries. A simple but very profound point.
What does this have to do with a prep school? Schools like St. Paul’s, through rituals and interaction, instill this sense of ease among its students. It’s not merely about displaying status. Of course, there’s a lot of that. It’s also about learning how say what people want to hear, to be able to hang out with many kinds of people (not just rich people), and learn that what will fly in a given situation. It’s about learning that life is not a constraint, but a game to be learned. The joy of reading Privilige is seeing the nuances and contradictions of that ethos in vivid detail.
Let me conclude by situating this book within the sociology of education. Shamus isn’t quite right in stating that we don’t know much about elites. It’s more accurate to say that stratification researchers don’t have good ethnographic evidence on the socialization and habitus of elites. However, there is a lot of good recent stuff on the educational institutions of elites. I’d start with Duffy and Goldberg’s Crafting a Class, which discusses how elite liberal arts colleges admit students. Then I’d go with The Chosen, Karabel’s epic analysis of HYP admissions. I’d also add in Mitchell Steven’s ethnography of liberal arts admissions, Creating a Class. These books are all about how “the system” sees their relationship with the elites.
Shamus’ book fills in the crucial missing piece. It’s a well grounded description of the people who are the ”input” into the elite higher education system. It’s a view of elite life from the ”training camp,” right before they are unleashed into American society. Highly recommended to anyone interested in stratification and education.
Every time I see that cover, I want someone to come by and push him off the shelf.
Kieran
January 26, 2011 at 6:41 pm
Kieran: That says a lot about you. Me? I think happy thoughts when I see that cover (fields, flowers and stuff). Positive psych is rubbing off on me — serenity now!
teppo
January 26, 2011 at 7:13 pm
“Um… don’t bother getting up… your on top of.. yes, if you can roll over a bit, just a little, I can grab that… copy of Contexts… thanks.”
fabiorojas
January 26, 2011 at 8:52 pm
Possible thought bubbles:
“I think I’m going to be sick…Fabio told me I couldn’t work with him if I came to IU because I consider myself a postmodern sociologist.”
“Mystery meat… I didn’t even know they had that here!”
“Should I go with STATA, R, or SAS for my senior paper?”
Hillbilly
January 26, 2011 at 10:02 pm
Shamus makes an excellent choice in opening Chapter 1 by describing Chase Abbott. A St. Paul’s legacy (many times over), Abbott enters St. Paul’s secure in his place in the world, and his place at the school. But he is soon rejected by the majority of his classmates. He doesn’t “belong” because of his legacy status: he is seen as an artifact of the “old elite,” where being a legacy was enough to achieve popularity and success. The Chase Abbotts live sequestered in a dorm and in a closed social group, just like the minority students at St. Pauls a generation earlier.
Abbott’s social exclusion highlights one of the book’s themes: the new elite are “cultural egalitarians” who believe they are successful because they work hard(er). (And so Chase Abbott cannot find his place among them.) This belief persists despite the fact that they do very little work, and much of it is focused on acquiring fluency with a set of important ideas, rather than knowing “things” (154).
Thus, the new elite see social (and economic) difference as a function of individual action, not social structure, and this perception becomes the primary justification they use for their advantage (including, importantly, access to Ivy League college educations). It elides the possibility of structural or social causes for hierarchies. Without cause to critique social hierarchy, the new elite are content to sit at its top and believe themselves to be egalitarian.
Since my next project focuses on the “omnivorous” and “multicultural” disposition/consumption of elites, I found Shamus’s text extremely useful, and a pleasure to read.
Jenn Lena
January 26, 2011 at 10:27 pm
@Jenn: Great points. It’s an illusion/construction of self instilled by ritual. By creating tension over inevitable advancement, you truly believe that you had no help. And if you believe it, so will a lot of other people.
Reminds me of the Facebook film. Yes, MZ was a brilliant programmer. But once you read the wiki, you see how all the privilege came into play help convert MZ’s raw talent into a real career: dad paid a computer guru to tutor MZ in junior high school; he went to Phillips Andover and roomed with another brilliant programmer, where they had the time and resources to hone their skills; mom and dad provided loans when Facebook ran out of money; he was not expelled for hacking the Harvard computer system; at Harvard, he had access to other wealthy friends who could easily drop $18,000 so he could buy extra servers. Facebook itself was initially built on exploiting exclusivity (you could sign up if you were at a chosen school). But yet, a lot of people see the success of Facebook in purely individual and not structural terms.
fabiorojas
January 26, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Kieran: That says a lot about you.
I have a lot of latent class antagonism.
Kieran
January 27, 2011 at 1:06 am
There’s a lot of studies, including ethnographic ones, about elites in French sociology (some kind of Bourdieu’s heritage). Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot for example. Lot to learn about rituals, socializations, etc.
(please, forgive my english : I’m French)
Une heure de peine
January 27, 2011 at 7:23 am
Kieran: I’m not sure it’s so latent. (FWIW, I also want to shove him).
Dying to read this book. You Americans get your deliveries so fast!
tina
January 27, 2011 at 2:49 pm
To add to Fabio’s list, I would add Robert Granfield’s book, Making Elite Lawyers. Although focused on legal education, it certainly fits in with the genre.
Steve Boutcher
January 27, 2011 at 7:14 pm
Very happy that you enjoyed the book! You are certainly correct about the scholarship on elites in education, and I would add the work of Bowen and Bok to the list. There’s also a great review by Andy Delbanco in the NY Review of Books, called “Scandals of Higher Education.”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/mar/29/scandals-of-higher-education/
But I would emphasize that within stratification research, we have a lot of work on poverty and disadvantage, and comparatively little on wealth and advantage. And as increases in inequality over the last 40 years have largely been driven by the income/wealth seizure of the rich, we need to know more about such this group.
Shamus Khan
January 27, 2011 at 10:10 pm
I’m with Kieran, though my class antagonism isn’t latent.
The reason I’m very glad for this book is that your entire list of other resources are about the practices of colleges and universities. Very little has been written about prep schools.
I’m just a lay person, and not an academic, but when I saw the description of this book, the summaries, and the blog pieces, I was like, “Duh.” I’ve been writing about some Quaker schools for a while and can’t seen to get them to see what I can see, that prep schools, even those with “good” intentions, only reinforce the social order.
I look forward to reading this book.
Jeanne
January 28, 2011 at 8:25 pm
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