Homeless in Academe

Renny Christopher began writing about the hazards of class mobility through education in the essay "A Carpenter's Daughter" in This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class (1995).¹ Now with the publication of her own book, we have the full story of what she's been through and what she's figured out as "a working-class woman in higher education." It makes for powerful reading, packed with insight for those of us who teach working-class students or work on class issues, in any field of study. If, as Janet Galligani Casey argues, "the working-class student's difference, implicitly constituted as lack, is what college is designed to erase," how can she resist that erasure, and what are the costs of that struggle?² And for those who stay and make a career in academe, what are the resources and responsibilities we bring to our teaching and scholarship?

A Carpenter's Daughter is an educational memoir, sharing kinship with Lives on the Boundary (1989) by Mike Rose and Hunger of Memory (1982) by Richard Rodriguez, fellow academics from the working class who have informed Christopher's own self-understanding. Their books—like hers—are narrative, analytical, and polemical by turns, vivid stories of schooling that broaden out into arguments about class, race, and education. Like Rose, having gotten through the gates of the academy, Christopher has stayed in higher education, committed to working out what is possible for the students Rose calls "underprepared" in classrooms that take their histories and their intelligence seriously. Like Rodriguez, whose academic career dead-ended in the dusty archives of the British Museum, Christopher focuses on the pain and losses of what Rodriguez calls the "radical self-reformation" enforced by education. Much as the alienation of the bright working-class student is intensified by Rodriguez's racial status as a Mexican-American scholarship boy, gender plays a similar role in the experience of a bookish and isolated working-class girl from rural Southern California who is now, to her amazement, in a university position of "power and responsibility." A Carpenter's Daughter represents, in one sense, a woman's version of those two men's well-known accounts. And like them, in writing about her "battles in the academic world," Christopher is telling "a story about more than just me." She is writing on behalf of those for whom educational mobility entails a form of homelessness. Her book is, she says, "a critique of the educational system—starting with elementary school—that has made me what I am" (p. xvi).

In school, she was bored by a drill-and-skill curriculum designed to train children of the working class for their future roles. "Earmarked for success" by her teachers, but set apart from peers by this and by her tomboy ways, she was essentially friendless through her school years. She enjoyed working alongside her carpenter father, and was fascinated by space travel—the ambition to reach "escape velocity" and discover what was out there. She escaped as far as Oakland to attend Mills College, "the most beautiful place I had ever seen," but struggled there socially, academically, and financially (p. 41). Her clothes and speech clashed with those of the children of privilege on campus, her high school had not prepared her for the critical thinking and independent work required at a liberal arts college, and there was never enough money. Her college years were punctuated by long periods of dropping out, working low-wage jobs, and then going back to school for the opportunity she'd glimpsed but missed before—to read, think, and write. After an eventual B.A. from Mills and an M.A. from San Jose State, that opportunity seemed to arrive with a teaching fellowship in English at UC-Santa Cruz.

The book's central section, "Fragments from Graduate School," presents Christopher's most focused account of what Richard Wright—another lonely class-traveler she admires—called the "crossed-up feeling" and "psyche pain...