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Reyes Coll-Tellechea Translated by Mark Zola 4 Language and Cultural Capital Reflections of a “Junior” Professor Here in the United States we have perhaps the most brutal form of social discrimination: some, as a matter of course, are awarded the full enjoyment of life; many are not. —John K. Galbraith, The Good Society Middle class societies will remain highly inegalitarian in certain respects, but the sources of inequality will increasingly be attributable to the natural inequality of talents, the economically necessary division of labor, and to culture. —Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man What Is Education For? These are the days of a global economy, neoconservatism, global warming , neoliberalism, feminism, anti-immigration laws, genocidal wars, affirmative action protests, identity politics, gay rights, the welfare crisis , AIDS, famine, and so on. A horrible century has just ended. We all hope the new one will ease human suffering. Politicians speak of education as the means for a better future; at the same time, there is a public clamor about the crisis in education. It hits close to home. I am a foreign-born professor, working at a public university in the United States of America. I believe that producing and distributing knowledge are at the core of intellectual labor and that intellectuals have the social responsibility to explore the world, analyze its complexities, evaluate possible solutions to real problems, and communicate all of that to their communities. I also believe that powerful social forces prevent the production and distribution of knowledge to whole sectors of the population. As public education is transformed to meet the goals of new, private interest groups and economic elites, it stands to reason that intellectuals 77 who work in the field of public education—or public transmission of knowledge—have to speak up. This essay is the story of how I arrived at these convictions and how, in turn, these convictions gave me the strength to work—against the odds—alongside my students and colleagues. Born, raised, and educated outside of the United States, I arrived in this country in 1988. I entered graduate school at a public institution and received a Ph.D. five years later. That is to say, I spent a number of years accumulating knowledge and learning how to produce it. I then accepted a job offer in Boston and entered academia. As I went from being a student to being a professor in a matter of months, I was confused about every aspect of my new career: teaching, research, service. I know now that this happens to most “junior” faculty who re-enter the university right after they finish graduate school. But in those days, I was frustrated and lost. From my mentors I had learnt that distributing and producing knowledge1 were not only my goals as a teacher and a scholar but also my responsibility and obligation. I was to teach, produce scholarly articles and books, develop new courses, attend professional conferences, serve on university committees, and contribute to the well-being of the community at large. By accepting the UMass/Boston job offer, I was agreeing to do it all to the best of my abilities. But how in the world was I to perform so many tasks at once? Did other junior faculty manage to do them better? Perhaps I was not “that good” after all. At times, I must confess, I felt like a fraud. I found it hard to “descend” to the undergraduate level and even harder to “rise” to the level of the scholarly world. Was scholarship more important than teaching, or vice versa? Since the teaching and the scholarly worlds seemed so far apart, I felt that I had to adjust my priorities in order to survive in my brand new, tenure-track job. Trying to get closer to the real level of my students, I abandoned my “ideal syllabi” and increased my efforts to develop a sophisticated theoretical framework for my research. At this point, I caught myself thinking that perhaps the production and distribution of knowledge were indeed separate activities that were impossible to reconcile. It seemed to me that my students would not understand or benefit from my research and vice versa. I went through phases where I saw myself as a good teacher and frustrated scholar, then as a good scholar and frustrated teacher. I produced new knowledge in the form of articles and 78 Reyes Coll-Tellechea [3.141.200.180] Project...

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