In through the back door
From community college student to tenured professor
Editor’s note: This article is the first in a series about members of the MIT community with working-class backgrounds. Comments, questions, and submissions are welcome at cl@tech.mit.edu.
I remember hearing over the years how people felt once they got tenure. A sigh of relief, a feeling of recognition, the sense they had made it, that they were somehow now okay.
I never felt that.
Those who knew me well would reassure me (so many times over the years) that I’d done it, that I wouldn’t be fired at any moment, that I’d jumped the hoops correctly (many of us know imposter syndrome all too well). But it never “took,” and I never felt what people described.
“In through the back door” is how I’ve always felt about my academic path. Though I’ve been lucky to land on my feet (and I do mean to invoke luck, very explicitly), my life as an academic has always felt, at least psychologically, pretty precarious.
However, the more I work with first-generation college students, the more I want to reassure them that such feelings are normal and that we don’t all come to the university through traditional paths. I increasingly think that making a range of experiences visible is important, and I’m fortunate to not feel as vulnerable as I once did.
I’m from a white working class family. My father graduated high school and was a machinist, then house painter, then janitor/maintenance worker. My mom dropped out of school as a teenager but went back and finished as an adult after many odds-and-ends jobs. Though I was a good (if undirected) student when I was young, when I was 12 and a half my mom died, and life kind of went off the rails.
Junior high and high school mostly became about hanging on just enough. I got funneled into home economics and stenography and working at the campus convenience store. I got sent out to the VA hospital to learn how to file. I never took the SAT.
The early elementary school kernel of being deemed “smart” (mostly because I read books and tested okay) was ultimately quite fragile, lost as a variety of other structural factors came to the foreground. I didn’t know how to think, talk, or ask about my future. I graduated, moved out, and got a job as a graveyard waitress at Denny’s.
It was only after an older woman I respected told me I should try to “do something with my life” that I ended up seeing what my local community college, Chaffey (in Rancho Cucamonga, California), could offer. I figured I could take a class or two during the day while I worked at night.
Community college became one of the most important experiences of my life. Though I kept waitressing full time to make ends meet, that shot at college changed my path.
The community college system in California gave people like me another chance at education. Not only did I receive encouragement and praise for my inquisitive nature, I gained exposure to topics I’d never encountered before (for example, sociology, the field I went on to specialize in). I got health care through the medical office on campus. I got small subsidies to buy my books.
I got the kind of mentorship that happens when you run into a professor in the corridor and the following conversation occurs:
“Are you applying to Cal?”
“Yeah, Cal State Fullerton.”
“No, Cal. UC Berkeley.”
“What is that?”
…and the explanation and advice that follows.
I eventually ended up at UCB thanks to the state system that intentionally creates transfer paths for students like myself and keeps them affordable.
It’s hard to trace your trajectory somewhere. It’s too easy to fall into clichéd meritocratic myths, to forget your privilege. Though I was raised in a working class household, my whiteness was always a non-trivial part of my opportunities.
Remembering all the small pivots, and missed ones, that make up the whole is an impossible task. The truth is much messier, tangled up with chance and effort and privilege and any other number of variables that simply can’t be pulled apart.
CV’s hold stories in truncated, telegraphed form. When I was promoted to full professor last year, it got me thinking about adding my community college experience to my CV. When I told a few of my students about my plan, their cheers of encouragement made me smile, even feel proud, and I was buoyed by their enthusiasm for sharing that part of my trajectory.
In an era where online education is touted, my community college experience remains for me a powerful reminder of how important our everyday face-to-face connections, and the support structures that touch many aspects of our lives, can be (from educational to medical to financial).
In a moment of growing economic disparity, the second chance offered to folks like myself — one that didn’t leave me overly burdened with debt for an undergraduate education — seems even more critical to preserve.
And while a classic liberal education seems under constant threat from the push to instrumentalize learning for narrow job purposes, being exposed to a range of subjects and ways of thinking — many of which I never encountered in high school — was hugely important for my own development. A liberal arts education is something even working class folks deserve.
Though I probably will always feel some sense of having come in through the back door, never totally at ease in the professional world in which I find myself, I want to make visible these diverse paths and cheer on those who take them. I can’t untangle my own path fully, but one thing I can do is put my community college experience on my CV. I’ve left it off for far too long.
T.L. Taylor is a professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department.