by Mary Turck
My philosopher daughter gave me a book written by a colleague: Jennifer Morton’s Moving Up Without Losing Your Way (University of Princeton Press, 2019). I found it both challenging (it is philosophy) and resonant with my own long-ago experience as a first-generation college student. Like me, Morton grew up somewhere between working class and middle class. Now she is a philosophy professor. Morton identifies us and students like us as “strivers,” among the tiny minority who move upward across class lines. Her book considers the ethical challenges posed by this upward mobility mediated by college education.
Going to college, upward mobility in general, removes strivers from “the relationships, concerns, and viewpoints with which one grew up.”
Using many stories drawn from her teaching experience, Morton describes the unavoidable tension between focusing on one’s own studies and achievement and responding to family needs for financial and emotional support. This distance has ethical costs, but those costs are not only individual responsibilities. Strivers should see their struggles in the larger ethical context of unjust social, economic, and political structures.
“As higher education increasingly focuses on teaching students what they need to know in order to perform a job in the world as they will find it, that vocational focus leaves little time to ask a central question: How should the world be? Engaging in this kind of reflection is not an indulgence, but a necessity. It is especially essential for those who are negatively impacted by the social structures that exist in the world we inhabit—the same people, sadly, who are the least likely to have access to the resources required for this kind of reflection.”
Morton, herself an immigrant, says that, while strivers from different backgrounds have different stories and experiences, the immigrant narrative offers insights for all strivers. Her analysis is echoed in Soraya Membreno’s story of her graduation, told in a completely different kind of book: A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty writers on immigration, family, and the meaning of home. (Edited by Nicole Chung and Mensa Demary. Catapult, 2020.)
Mary Turck
Find Your Book!
Need to get your hands on a good book while doing your work to shelter in place? The library is closed in a response of solidarity amid the COVID-19 crisis, but here are some places where you can get your hands on all the great titles. Shop independent bookstores!
SubText Books: https://subtextbooks.com/books
Moon Palace Books: https://www.moonpalacebooks.com/
The Red Balloon Bookshop: https://www.redballoonbookshop.com/
Birchbark Books: https://birchbarkbooks.com
Magers & Quinn: https://www.magersandquinn.com/
Next Chapter Booksellers: https://www.nextchapterbooksellers.com/
Irreverent Bookworm: https://irrevbooks.com/
Or you could even consider the amazing Powell’s in Portland: https://www.powells.com/; Book Shop, https://bookshop.org/; AbeBooks https://www.abebooks.com/; or Indie Bound, https://www.indiebound.org/