?Marin Hummel
Staff Writer

The Humanities Institute at Scripps College in Claremont hosted Walter Benn Michaels, a professor in the department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on Tuesday.

Michaels is an author of several books dealing with inequality, and he speaks about controversial issues.

Michaels’ lecture was titled “Unequal Opportunity: The Flourishing University and the Vanishing Middle Class.”

His lecture focused on the problems in America dealing with universities and colleges and the inequalities in the school systems today.

“We both want not to appreciate our differences but to eliminate it,” Michaels said.

As a society we say that we embrace diversity and want equal opportunities for all races when it comes to higher education.
Universities have shown that they are becoming more diverse.

At the University of La Verne, for example, among undergraduate students enrolled 63 percent of those students are female and 53 percent of students call themselves minority.

Michaels’ main point, in his lecture, though, as great as it is to have such a diverse group of students when it comes to race we are forgetting to be diverse in financial background.

“Do we think that poverty is just as good as wealth?” Michaels said. “We don’t think of people as part poor. People may be mixed race but not part rich or part poor.”

Michaels used the example of the host, Scripps College.

Scripps has 203 women who claim to be part of a minority group.
Out of all of them, the largest group is Asian American and the smallest group consists of poor people.

“I never thought of diversity like this and it makes sense,” said Kristina Miller, a junior communications major. “We do have large groups of people that celebrate being a minority but we don’t think that being poor and going to college is something to celebrate,”

“No poor person goes to college to hold onto their poorness,” Michaels told the audience Tuesday.

The problem today is not racism, it is racism vs. economic inequality. Michaels said. adding that they are two aspects of the same problem, but they are not the same thing.

“Anti-racism is not a solution,” Michaels said.

Michaels used the example of Princeton University, which gives 55 percent of the class of 2010 financial aid, he said.

Princeton has even stopped giving loans and are solely helping their students through grants, Michaels said.

Those figures look good until you look at the breakdown of classes.

Princeton believes that people of the middle class make somewhere between $120,000-$160,000 per year. That is actually a high estimate. So then you realize that Princeton University is giving money to the people who don’t really need it.

“I found this to be a very interesting topic and Michaels had some unique opinions about diversity in the Universities,” said Alex Lester, a senior political science major at ULV, who attended Michaels’ talk.

“I was not surprised by the statistics that he gave about Princeton, but I did find it absurd that they didn’t try to help people with less income attend their university,” Lester said. “It was interesting that in his lecture he took away race from being the topic of diversity and focused on class and financial stability.”

Marin Hummel can be reached at mhummel@ulv.edu.