This is from the Maps of War site, developed (somewhat mysteriously) by ” a Flash-Designer hobbyist and professional history- buff,” who hopes to help us “place today’s war headlines into a greater historical context.”
Not every map is as elaborate (or successful) as her/his “Imperial History” of the Middle East, but the Maps are a great idea and worth a visit now and again. (It did make me feel dumb, too. Who were the Sassanid or the Seljuk?)
Education, we are told, is about opportunity. It is about young people gaining the skills needed to get ahead in the new post-industrial economy. Whether Republican or Democrat, our political leaders tell us that schools are the way into a brighter future. But what if that future is determined, in fact, by how jobs get constructed and distributed in the new global economy. And if that means that more and more good jobs are fleeing the older industrial countries, then schools in those countries are not about opportunity but instead function as gate-keepers to a shrinking pool of rewards.
from College and social class: the broken promise of America
Cross Currents, Spring, 2006 by John Raines, Charles Brian McAdams
This is from a piece Raines and McAdams wrote last year; it’s a well-researched, passionate plea for change, although in all honesty they seem a little lost about what should be done. I do like their ideas about need-based funding and access, given the ongoing attacks on affirmative action and the apparent failures of ‘percent programs’ to diversify admissions either by class or race. And I certainly agree that we need to learn to ‘see’ class and to teach it in the classroom.
On the other hand, the writers never mention the class hierarchies and privileges built into their own (university) system, including the labor exploitation that underwrites the prominence of research institutions, in everything from low-paid staff to over use of adjuncts to over-paid administrators. Ironically, (tenured) professors themselves are becoming the “gate-keepers to a shrinking pool of [educational] rewards” in their own departments.
Most academics have this ‘outward gaze’ that seems to implicitly accept that what goes on where they work is less noteworthy than what goes on in other workplaces. The result is a focus on teaching about class rather than an attempt to directly challenge the class relationships they encounter and embody. It’s one thing to write papers that document inequity; it’s quite another to organize a card drive to create a faculty union.
I think its time the professors begin to clean up their own houses. In many senses, they are the ones who made the promise so famously broken. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education survey, for example, found that “112 presidents of traditional four-year public and private institutions, and systems, had compensation packages totaling at least $500,000,” an increase “in that level of compensation” of “53 percent.” Amazingly, even as funding for universities is shrinking, compensation for administrators is rising.
I continue to be astonished at the way academics who write about class seem to act or think as if they themselves are not participants in a system (or subsystem) of merit and class privileges that can and should be dismantled. This energy for reform needs to be turned inward, as it were, towards fully democratizing the University itself. Once the professors are organized (hopefully working with university staff and graduate students) then there might be a fighting chance at challenging the larger inequities Raines and McAdams lament.
Social Explorer is a premier U.S. demographics website. Our online tools help you visually analyze and understand the demography of the United States through the use of interactive maps and data reports. Our primary product is a web-based application that creates fast, intuitive, and visually appealing maps and reports. Our software gives anyone with an Internet connection access to census data that was previously the domain of social science experts.
One of my favorite teaching websites is the American Fact Finder, which is the online portal for official U.S. census data. The AFF is an embarrassment of riches, but as such it is also intimidating for some students. I was happy to hear about the Social Explorer, then, which draws on Census data to create a much simpler, easier to navigate set of data.
The freely available information is limited– they sell data to various organizations to make money– but nevertheless extensive. You can zoom in on a map to see the demographic composition of your town or neighborhood. You can contrast 1950 data to 2000, too, and see how radically the population has aged (in 1950, 5-10% were 45-49; in 2000, the lower two thirds of the county included a population that was 25 to 35% aged 45-54). Or, in Coles County, Illinois, where I live, you can see the way the population clusters around two towns, Mattoon and Charleston, surrounded by relatively empty farmland.
Zoom in further and you can see how, according to 2000 census data, the small Black population is concentrated in two pockets: on the west side of the county (around and west of Mattoon: .5 to 5%), and then in Charleston, around Eastern Illinois University (5 to 10%). Interestingly, the small Asian population is concentrated on the east (around the university and east of Charleston: 5 to 10%); and the small Hispanic population (5 to 10%) is equally distributed around the county. The majority white population is somewhat thinner along the corridor that connects Mattoon and Charleston (75 to 90%) than in the surrounding countryside (95 to 100%).
This is a long standing pattern: it’s not until the 1990 census that the minority population registers at all in any significant way. Perhaps not surprisingly, Charleston has the wealthiest neighborhoods, largely clustered around the university ($40 to $45,000) and then farther east ($30 to $35,000). Mattoon has a pocket of relative wealth surrounding the country club ($30 to $35,000). Most of the county, though, particularly to the west, is relatively poor ($20 to $25,000). I imagine that these numbers have risen in the last seven years, although perhaps not as fast for every group.
I was listening to an interview with Michael Yates on the Progressive Magazine pod cast the other day, and he talked about how little most of us know about the ethnic and economic make up of our communities. We just don’t see poverty anymore; the rich are walled off; ethnic groups live in isolated enclaves. The Social Explorer is a great corrective tool.
