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I have a couple of reflections on teaching at Oxford for a couple of years mid-2000s. Don't want to reduce anyone's biography down to a couple of "key-points", but for what it's worth.. /1 https://twitter.com/trillingual/status/1319626184943112192
On occasion, amongst other things, I taught Marx, Fanon, etc and basically a series of texts that, if they had one thing in common, it was that they focused in various ways on STRUCTURAL inequality/oppression etc. /2
My "traditional" students - upper-middle class, mostly white, often women, usually "home counties" almost all of which had Oxbridge in their family already - they all LOVED those texts. They found them insightful, challenging, thoughtful. /3
That small amount of "non-traditional" students - those who did not come from the Oxbridge families, mainly along class and/or race lines - usually they did NOT like those texts, and viscerally resisted even doing an immanent (internal) critique of their arguments. /4
I realized quickly - maybe I'm wrong - that the "trad" students loved them because they explained their social position to them. These texts made them understand how they were integrated in power. They didn't threaten them AT ALL because they were just, after all, texts /5
And I realized just as quickly that these texts threatened the non-trad students fundamentally. They proposed to these students that their presence in those hallowed elite halls was a fluke, a bit of luck, epiphenomenal, and above all, nothing to do with "meritocracy". /6
On reflection, I feel bad because the only thing that those non-trad students had, to deal with the class/race/region/religion/nationality bubbles in Oxford, was exactly the conceit that it was still a space of "meritocracy". I'd given them texts that stripped that conceit away/7
All of this makes me understand, a little more (although it's not THE explanation) about the phenomenon of "non-trad" individuals in "trad" elite spaces being more existentially against the structural arguments than the "trad" individuals occupying "trad" spaces are. /FIN
do note the possibility of ecological fallacy: maybe this was my experience amongst a particular cohort in time and space, as well as the way they dealt with me - a "non-trad" tutor. see alternatively: https://twitter.com/j0s3fk/status/1319713227513671683?s=20
Too many replies to keep linking to now. Do read them all. Shows how multifaceted this issue is and how "non-trad" students diversely deal with it. I was only ever a "non trad" junior research fellow there. (Which =another story lools)
