In Defense of the 'Credentialed Class'
In his recent opinion piece, "Guns and Credentials in Twilight," Dr. Preston Jones argued that those with credentials have not only made themselves irrelevant but are the cause of the troubles in the United States today. As a university professor and a member of the so-called credentialed class, I'd like to respond to his piece by talking about my own experience on the path to higher education and what I've learned about the value of universities for improving, not dividing, society.
Dr. Jones assumes in his piece that those who have credentials like his don't get the people who "make the country work." Nothing could be further from the truth. I and many of my colleagues grew up in families that modeled hard work and community engagement through military enlistment, public school teaching, pastoring, small business ownership, and engagement in civic life. From our families we learned about the gift of community and the value of coming together across differences for a common cause. In my own time working labor-intensive jobs I felt the bone-aching nature of physical work and the real need for rest from one's labor. These things are part of who I am and deeply inform the work I do.
Moreover, the work I do in my university classroom is deeply relevant to our time and has had positive results in the many communities in which my students live. I wish Dr. Jones could have sat in on my class about the history of poverty this last semester. In this class, which included black, white, and Latin students from both rural and urban areas, my students came together to talk about the difficult complexities of poverty in the past and present. One week we were reading and discussing J.D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" to understand the deep challenges of white rural intergenerational poverty, and the next week we were reading William Julius Wilson's "More than Just Race" to learn about the ways misconceptions of black men in the inner-city have made it much more difficult for them to move up the socioeconomic ladder. There was a genuine sense of solidarity in this work, even as we disagreed with each other in our discussions.
As part of this class, my students also researched organizations in Northwest Arkansas that are doing the good work of supporting and partnering with vulnerable populations. One thing that stood out to me as my students researched these organizations was how many of their leaders are graduates of my university, some of whom I had in class a few years ago.
So, is the "credentialed class" irrelevant for our time? From my experience, no. We're about the work of educating for social transformation. At my university, we call this educating "Head, Heart, and Hand." And, when done well, the work of the "credentialed class" and the students we teach can play an important role in bringing about the beloved community that we all long for in this moment.
Trisha Posey
Siloam Springs