In the college admissions office of a very highly respected liberal arts college, the admissions officer asks the prospective applicants what they think they might like to study. The first two teenagers say “business,” which is not in the curriculum of this college. Presumably, they and their families want them to get ahead, they see business as the path to success in America, and they assume that attending a highly selective and famous college is a step to business leadership.

Meanwhile, other families in the room also want our kids to get ahead. But we know that there is quite a different pathway that involves intentionally not studying anything as practical and applied as business. If you’re on this path, you know that the right thing to value is a liberal arts education. That will always mark you as someone desirable to employ at businesses and other organizations run by fellow graduates of elite liberal arts colleges.

Paging Dr. Bourdieu, who would explain that a ruling class reproduces itself by defining a certain habitus, or structure of values, that is difficult to acquire and that identifies its bearers as members of the ruling class. The purpose, then, of a highly selective liberal arts college is to transmit the habitus.

That is a hard diagnosis to avoid when sitting in an admissions office. I think there’s a lot of truth to it, although I’d note some complications.

First, there are many paths to wealth, power, and social standing. It’s been said that Washington is full of Harvard grads working for Ohio State grads, and if there’s still truth to that, it’s because America has many centers of power–financial, industrial, military, and political. Bourdieu’s theory may apply more neatly to the France of the grandes écoles than to our stratified–but polycentric–nation.

Second, what you learn from a liberal arts education has incalculable value. It’s not like mastering court etiquette so that you can mingle with aristocrats. You’re learning quantum mechanics, Japanese history, psychometrics–and Bourdieu. These attainments contribute to a good life. They also encourage a range of careers. Many liberal arts graduates just use the habitus to rise in the social hierarchy, but others are inspired to work in kindergarten classrooms, refugee camps, and monasteries. It’s interesting to speculate why the ruling class has chosen rites of passage for its young that are not efficiently designed to produce new rulers. There’s a lot of leakage, as some graduates voluntarily choose not to compete for the top of the social hierarchy.

Third, by rewarding proficiency in the liberal arts, we create incentives to practice these arts at all stages of life. Meritocracy is a highly problematic concept–that is the main theme of this post. But it isn’t an empty idea. Students in a seminar room in a highly selective liberal arts institution really do practice the liberal arts at a remarkably high level. That is not because of their native excellence, but because they–and the adults who care about them–have spent the 18 years before college honing their skills. These kids have worked very hard, and so have their parents and teachers. Many of their peers haven’t made it to the elite colleges because they haven’t performed as well. One outcome is to mark a ruling class by giving them a set of difficult attainments, a habitus. Another outcome is to produce truly excellent scientists, poets, and teachers.

Finally, the people who run these institutions are not intentionally invested in reproducing a ruling class. At least at the level of conscious, deliberate intention, they are motivated by love of the liberal arts and by a sense that the college adds value and provides opportunities for upward mobility. They don’t want to admit and educate only the children of alumni and others like them. They are actually pleased to see students attain the habitus when their parents were far from having it. Diversity, inclusion, equity, and upward mobility are among the highest notional values of these institutions. Such values inspire the educators and administrators and legitimize the whole business. The result is a somewhat diverse actual student body in an institution that still pretty well fulfills the function that Pierre Bourdieu diagnosed.

(Washington, DC) On a week when I got an article rejected almost instantly and then participated in an editorial committee for a different journal that celebrated our rising rejection rate, I just have to plug the Journal of Universal Rejection. Arguably the best journal in the entire universe, it rejects all submissions as not up to snuff.

From the instructions for authors:

The JofUR solicits any and all types of manuscript: poetry, prose, visual art, and research articles. You name it, we take it, and reject it. Your manuscript may be formatted however you wish. Frankly, we don’t care.

After submitting your work, the decision process varies. Often the Editor-in-Chief will reject your work out-of-hand, without even reading it! However, he might read it. Probably he’ll skim. At other times your manuscript may be sent to anonymous referees. Unless they are the Editor-in-Chief’s wife or graduate school buddies, it is unlikely that the referees will even understand what is going on. Rejection will follow as swiftly as a bird dropping from a great height after being struck by a stone. At other times, rejection may languish like your email buried in the Editor-in-Chief’s inbox. But it will come, swift or slow, as surely as death.

The Oberlin College Cultural Appropriation Controversy is almost certainly getting more attention than it deserves because it reinforces critiques of political correctness in higher education. Nevertheless, it provides an interesting case to consider the general questions: What is cultural appropriation, and when is it bad?

Some Oberlin students criticized Oberlin’s dining hall’s bánh mì and General Tso’s chicken as cultural appropriations. These are wonderfully ironic cases. Bánh mì is a French baguette sandwich with ingredients popular in Vietnam. It is a direct result of French colonialism, a perfect example of a creole or hybrid cultural product. Without cultural appropriation, there could be no bánh mì in the first place. General Tso’s chicken has obscure origins but is most widely thought to have been invented in New York City by chefs of Chinese origin.

I start with the assumption that there is no such thing as cultural purity. We are all creoles, all the way down. We have been in contact with each other all along, naturally and inevitably borrowing, sharing, and stealing. Even supposedly “uncontacted” peoples deep in the rain forest have actually been in close contact with others for thousands of years. Claims of cultural purity and authenticity are almost always problematic, morally as well as factually.

And yet the critical students at Oberlin were making some valid points. To borrow a cultural product is to enter a relationship with someone else. That can be done respectfully and gratefully or rudely and exploitatively. In other words, it involves ethics. Also, it can be done skillfully–so as to produce an excellent product (possibly one never seen before)–or else poorly. In other words, it involves aesthetics. The Oberlin students are saying that their college dining hall’s Asian food has been borrowed disrespectfully and also poorly.

Those can be fair points, but we don’t often conduct such conversations well—for two large and important reasons. Because of positivism, we are not good at talking about ethics. And because we accept deep social inequality, we tend to overlook the material conditions of fine culture.

To the first point: We live at a time when science has enormous prestige, and science cannot address value judgments except to recognize that human beings form them for various reasons. Science suggests that there are two buckets: facts and evidence go in one; values, emotions, preferences and tastes, and personal identities go in the other. To say that Oberlin’s bánh mì are bad is not a factual claim, so it must involve emotion, preferences, and identities. That means that we cannot reason deliberatively with people who might hold different views of Oberlin’s bánh mì or of culture more generally. We can only express opinions that have strong emotional charges and that are linked to our identities. So to take a position on either side is to harm emotionally people who have different identities.

I would not dismiss the significance of emotion or identity. We must be sensitive of both. But we can also deliberate about relatively subtle, charged, and complex questions like food and culture. More than one perspective is valid, and each position can be supported with arguments and reasons. Opinions can change; the group can learn. Expressing a view is not necessarily a threat to other people; it can be an opportunity to reason.

In a positivist and relativist culture, scholars in the humanities and cultural disciplines are basically taught to suppress value judgments–yet certain strong values break through that screen because they are irrepressible and because political movements stand behind them. So even though value judgments are deemed to be culturally relative, it is wrong to be sexist, racist, or colonialist. I agree that those attitudes are wrong, but I see them as just the tip of a submarine mountain of ethical issues, all complex and all deserving of analysis.

When I was writing my book about Dante, I first encountered the view held by certain scholars that cultural appropriation is intrinsically bad. For instance, it was intrinsically problematic that Byron appropriated Dante’s medieval Italian culture for liberal nationalism. My response was: let’s think about when and why various forms of cultural borrowing are good or bad for various people. That is to reason about ethics, which is countercultural for many scholars. (Aaron R. Hanlon has a good response to the Oberlin controversy, calling for a distinction between “appropriation,” which should be value-neutral, and “expropriation,” which is bad and requires a critical argument.)

The second issue is inequality and the material conditions of successful borrowing. The dining hall staff of Oberlin College may not have been given the support they would need to do a good job providing Asian food–or original, “fusion” food. That would take experience, support, and time. Absent those supports, it’s possible that they should stick to what they know best (which will not be culturally pure or authentic, but simply a list of recipes of miscellaneous origin that are familiar to them). Or it’s possible that someone should help them try new things. But it definitely takes resources to engage well with any unfamiliar culture.

In many a Yuppie household (such as mine), people frequently dine in fine restaurants that serve foods from around the world, occasionally travel to distant lands, attempt to learn other languages, and have rows of cookbooks from many cuisines that they use to cook their own food. For instance, we were able to spend the winter break in Guadeloupe, and last night I cooked Chicken Colombo, which is a Guadelopean fusion dish strongly influenced by South Asian indentured workers. Meanwhile, in many families, the adults cook what they learned from their own parents. I remember chatting with a bunch of working-class immigrant high school students from Hyattsville, MD who were amused (more than offended) that Yuppies cook food other than “their own.”

The differences between these two kinds of households may depend in part on personal tastes and proclivities and on local cultural norms. For instance, Mexican/Asian fusion cuisines are famously widespread in San Bernardino County, California. But there is also certainly a socioeconomic aspect of this difference. I cooked Chicken Colombo last night because we could afford to visit Guadeloupe. One reason we visited that island is that we have had opportunities to learn French. And we were comfortable eating food unfamiliar to us because our neighborhoods have long been full of diverse restaurants. These are forms of material support.

I don’t know anyone at Oberlin, but I can imagine two kinds of hypothetical characters: a Yuppie student who despises the college’s bánh mì because she grew up with better ones, and a working-class immigrant student who is offended that the college serves “someone else’s” cuisine because she hasn’t had an opportunity–yet–to sample and cook foods from around the world. Material inequality is relevant to both perspectives. Without sufficient resources, it is simply harder to make something ethical and creative out of a cultural interaction.

The expectation is widespread that colleges should provide pathways to prosperity and success for individuals–and also make the distribution of wealth and power in the whole society more fair and equitable. Higher education seems to have that potential because it does promote upward mobility for individuals. Even if you are born in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, if you attain a college degree, your chances of staying in the bottom fifth are only 1 in 10.

But the results at the national scale are disappointing. Only a few (14.5%) of children born in the bottom quintile complete a four-year degree. The pressure for higher education to promote economic mobility better comes from various quarters–conservative governors angry that college degrees aren’t aligned with employers’ needs, technocratic liberals in the Obama administration trying to push down college costs, and campus activists demanding that student populations be representative of the national population in terms of race and social class.

The pressure is understandable, and much of it is valid, but we must squarely face the reasons that higher education does not promote mobility if we want to improve results.

College graduates represent the upper strata of society. About 40% of US adults hold college degrees, and they increasingly fill the top 40% of the slots in the whole socioeconomic hierarchy. That is why it is good advice to an individual student to complete college. Four-year colleges intentionally prepare their students to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, business leaders, and teachers, not bus drivers, receptionists, or construction workers. That’s what they offer; that is what they’re for. It means that the alumni body, almost by definition, will not represent the socioeconomic profile of the country.

The alumni could, however, represent the racial and gender diversity of the country if race and class were decoupled. And the alumni could come from economically representative backgrounds. Half of college students could be raised in homes below the median income, even though, as alumni, they would occupy the top 40% of the socioeconomic scale. That would imply a great deal of upward mobility, and it’s one criterion of justice (justice as an equal chance to succeed).

The barriers, however, are serious. One obstacle is that we don’t have an expanding middle class. Adjusted for inflation, the median US family earned $54,000 in 2014, about $4,000 less than in 1999. If families in the middle are becoming worse off, then upward mobility for some implies downward mobility for others.

That zero-sum model is an oversimplification, but there really are only so many jobs for lawyers, doctors, engineers, and corporate executives. Families who already stand in the top 40% will fight tooth and nail to keep their own kids in that tier instead of trading their spot with someone from further down the hierarchy. They will spend whatever they must on housing, k-12 education, and extracurriculars; apply whatever pressure they need on their alma maters; and take full advantage of their social networks to keep their kids ahead of the median. They may value both racial and socieconomic diversity as educational assets, but not to the extent that they are willing to give up a spot at a top college to someone else’s kid. And it is highly implausible that raising their consciousness about injustice will change their behavior. I can think of no comparable outcome in human history. People at the bottom of hierarchies do achieve change by obtaining power, but not by making the people at the top feel bad.

We might think that by investing in human capital, we could expand the middle class and make space for more people above a real income of $54,000. To some extent, that is both possible and important. But my sense is that left-of-center economists are now criticizing the human capital thesis. Yes, individuals who have more valuable skills, more elite social networks, and more cultural capital will beat out the competition for desirable jobs, which is why a college degree predicts high earnings. But raising the proportion of people with college degrees–as we have done–does not make the society more equitable, because other factors are increasing inequality. Prime suspects are deregulation, capital mobility, and monopoly power.

Finally, at the individual level, a person must move a long way from the levels of financial, human, social, and cultural capital available at the bottom of the economic hierarchy to reach the levels that are expected for candidates for great jobs. It is implausible that you can move nearly far enough during four years that start at age 18. To the extent that higher education is a path to upward economic mobility, it is near the last mile of that path. Colleges and universities compete for applicants from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds who have already received unusual support from families, community groups, and k12 schools. Colleges can play a useful role by a) being aggressive about finding these applicants, the ones who are ready to move the last mile, and by b) serving such students well. But they are not going to get disadvantaged kids 80% of the way. They offer too little, too late.

These are reasons that higher education is unlikely to make more than a modest dent in the inequality problem. To address that problem in a serious way, we need different economic policies. In a different political-economic climate, colleges and universities could do their jobs (educating students and producing knowledge) with less injustice. Given the reality, I believe our top priority is to understand the inequality problem better and to make the knowledge that we produce more politically significant. I don’t mean only economic research and policy advocacy but also normative inquiry, cultural critique, social experimentation, public dialogue, and a range of other research-related activities. Meanwhile, we must deal with an unjust context as ethically as we can, which means handling matters like admissions, hiring, and retention thoughtfully  while also acknowledging the inadequacy of these responses to the underlying problem.

[PS: I read later today that “colleges themselves are responsible for about 5 percent of the variation in students’ earnings later in life,” which reinforces my argument here.]