Chapter 4: From the Council House to the Ivory Tower: Brilliance, Bullying, Passing, and the Failure of Academia for Working-Class Academics

This chapter aims to help working-class students and academics to feel less alone and for those with more socio-economic privilege to consider their biases. It begins by outlining the author’s childhood in poverty and her pathway to and through university, including experiences of having to repeatedly excel academically in order to access only some of the opportunities which socio-economically privileged people can take for granted, before discussing experiences as a working-class scholar in an ‘elite’ institution. The work takes an intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) approach to consider the ways in which not only working-class people but also other minoritised and oppressed identities can be exploited in terms of how they keep an institution running (as an academic: teaching, research funding, publications, ‘impact’, reputation. As a student: fees), while simultaneously being mistreated. Voice is a red thread throughout, including a consideration of being silenced, whether by oneself in order to try to pass as middle class, or by others, including when attempting to speak up about wrongdoing to improve organisational culture.

The chapter employs work by working-class sociologists, both to support the argument and because they have helped the author to relocate her own voice after mistreatment in the academy. Alongside Bourdieu’s theorising of capital (1979, 1984, 1987) is Skeggs’ research about working-class women (1997, 2005) and work by and about working-class academics (Binns, 2019; Crew, 2020; Warnock, 2016). In addition, this chapter draws on work by Sarah Ahmed, who has been vocal about the secrecy and inadequacies around handling complaint in the academy (2017, 2021).