{"id":97318,"date":"2022-10-29T13:05:29","date_gmt":"2022-10-29T19:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=97318"},"modified":"2022-10-29T13:06:01","modified_gmt":"2022-10-29T19:06:01","slug":"escaping-the-temptation-to-academic-snobbery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2022\/10\/escaping-the-temptation-to-academic-snobbery.html","title":{"rendered":"Eluding the Temptation to Academic Snobbery"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

R. Senzi, \"The School of Athens\"<\/a>
Raphael\u2019s \u201cSchool of Athens\u201d (located in the papal apartments at the Vatican) features Plato, Aristotle, and a few others.\u00a0 It was modeled on neither my boyhood nor my family.\u00a0 (Wikimedia Commoms<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Particularly in my early graduate school days, there were times when I thought that my having come from a completely non-academic family had worked against me.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have friends and long-time colleagues, themselves with strong Ph.D.s from prestigious schools, who have fathers and grandfathers and multiple siblings with professional and academic doctorates \u2014 in at least a couple of cases, with more than one<\/em> doctorate \u2014 and for them, I discovered, going into a doctoral program was just something you did. \u00a0No big deal. \u00a0Practically everybody in their families had a Ph.D., an M.D., a D.D.S., a J.D., a D.Phil, an Sc.D, or, at least, a master\u2019s degree.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

My family wasn\u2019t even remotely like that. \u00a0My mother graduated from high school, but never attended college.\u00a0 After leaving his family farm in rural North Dakota, my father was caught up in the Great Depression and worked construction in southern California.\u00a0 Then he served in Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s Civilian Conservation Corps, followed by the pre-war Army, and thereafter, for the duration of the Second World War, he lived and worked on various military bases pending deployment to England and, after having been assigned to General Patton\u2019s Third Army, as a non-commissioned officer in France, Belgium, Germany, and Austria. \u00a0He had managed a couple of years of part-time study at a forestry school in North Dakota and at Pierce College<\/a>, in Los Angeles. \u00a0When he was demobilized, he came back out to California and eventually started a construction business of his own.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

My parents weren\u2019t unintelligent, by any means. \u00a0Quite the contrary, in \u00a0fact. \u00a0(A sign of this is that the Army sent my father to the University of Chicago to study German, as well as to Maryland\u2019s famous Camp Ritchie<\/a>.) \u00a0But my mother came from a small town in Utah and my father grew up on a farm located quite a distance outside an even smaller town in the Upper Midwest, and they hadn\u2019t had the time or the leisure to obtain the kind of education that I was ultimately able to get,\u00a0 They certainly couldn\u2019t be described as \u201cintellectuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Given that background, going for a doctorate was uncharted territory for me. \u00a0Nobody that I knew very well, certainly no one to whom I was related, had ever done such a thing. \u00a0(My brother and I were about the only people that I knew of in the family up through our generation who eventually earned bachelor\u2019s degrees.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve come more and more to appreciate a powerful benefit that my background conferred upon me: \u00a0I worked construction myself just about every summer when I was in the United States, from high school through graduate school. \u00a0(That was one of the reasons I chose to attend UCLA for my doctorate: \u00a0It had, and has, a superb program in Near Eastern studies, but I could also work summers at the family business \u2014 of which, by then, my brother had assumed control.) \u00a0I can\u2019t say that I always enjoyed the work, but I really liked the men with whom I worked and whom I had known since I was a small boy \u2014 men like Tino Beltran<\/a>\u00a0and his brother Frank,<\/a>\u00a0and Joe Esparza,<\/a> and our company mechanic,\u00a0Red Faler<\/a>\u00a0(about whom I\u2019ve written here on this blog).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the men who sometimes worked for our company was actually a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a>. \u00a0(I won\u2019t name him because I don\u2019t want to risk embarrassing his family, whom I knew.) \u00a0He wasn\u2019t a well-educated man. \u00a0His grammar was poor, and I\u2019ve sometimes joked, in recalling him to my wife and kids, that he had no idea at all where to locate 2 Nephi in the Old Testament. \u00a0But even as a rather young boy, I noticed that he was the first to arrive at service projects and the last to leave, and that he was Involved in every single one in which I ever participated. \u00a0If there was a widow\u2019s house to be fixed, he was there. \u00a0Sometimes I was, too, but I had little to offer. \u00a0I realized then that, while he was far from sophisticated or urbane, and while I aspired in those days to be at least somewhat more sophisticated and urbane than I was, he was worth at least two of me. \u00a0I was convinced then, and I\u2019m convinced now, that he will occupy a wonderful place in the celestial kingdom. \u00a0Me, though? \u00a0Well, I can hope.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have many faults, but there\u2019s one that I\u2019m very grateful to have avoided: the arrogant elitism that sometimes afflicts academics. \u00a0 I just don\u2019t feel it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I can readily imagine that things might have been different for me. \u00a0I have enormous respect for academia and my feelings for great colleges and universities border on religious awe. \u00a0When I\u2019m at Oxford or Cambridge or Caltech or Harvard, I feel almost as if I\u2019m on holy ground. \u00a0(\u201cBehold,\u201d said a friend and colleague as we stood one day by the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Square, \u201cthe omphalos tes ges<\/em><\/a> [the navel of the earth]!\u201d \u00a0And \u2014 may I be forgiven for it! \u2014 I actually felt that way, just a bit.) \u00a0Wherever I travel, if there\u2019s a good school nearby I always try to visit it. \u00a0I might very, very easily have become an academic snob.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, having spent many of my formative years around manual laborers whom I considered friends and almost family \u2014 it took me a long time, as a child, to realize that my Uncle Warren at the construction company wasn\u2019t even really a relative at all \u2014 and belonging to an extended family replete with farmers and truck drivers, construction workers and welders, I have never been even remotely tempted to regard academics as a superior breed. \u00a0Being a professor is an honorable trade, of course, but no more so than being a cement finisher or a dry land wheat farmer.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is on my mind because of some of the complacently elitist comments that I\u2019ve sometimes observed from certain former Latter-day Saint academics who, I\u2019m guessing, were not as lucky in this respect as I have been. \u00a0They\u2019re disdainful of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of course, and regularly sneer at its claims and its doctrine. \u00a0But what has really appalled me, I confess, is the sheer contempt that I\u2019ve seen in them for ordinary members of the Church, whom they dismiss as rubes, fools, primitive bigots, uneducated and unreflective lowbrows, and, as one of them recently described Latter-day Saint temple-goers, as \u201cphilistines.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not that I have anything against any particular member of the faculty at Harvard but, on balance, I\u2019ve always resonated with this 1963 statement from the Ivy-educated patrician William F. Buckley Jr.: \u00a0\u201cI should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I simply can\u2019t abide smug assumptions of class superiority. \u00a0Much as I admire academic achievement and deep culture, I cannot see that such things make those who possess them better people or more valuable souls, let alone more pleasant to be around.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Posted from Tiberias, Israel<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 Particularly in my early graduate school days, there were times when I thought that my having come from a completely non-academic family had worked against me. \u00a0 I have friends and long-time colleagues, themselves with strong Ph.D.s from prestigious schools, who have fathers and grandfathers and multiple siblings with professional and academic doctorates […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEluding the Temptation to Academic Snobbery<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    Particularly in my early graduate school days, there were times when I thought that my having come from a completely non-academic family had\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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