Backyard Studio: A Review by Britt Novitch

Backyard Studio: On Scholarship - A Review by Britt Novitch

A Review by Britt Novitch

from Pleasant Living Magazine 

"On Scholarship: From an Empty Room at Princeton," by Gerald L. Cooper

       A Review by Britt Novitch

Gerald Cooper's story begins in the small southern town of Lancaster Courthouse, Virginia.  Along the way, his tale weaves around the state of Virginia and to North Carolina, with his career winding and turning much like the hilly back roads found in the South.  His book, On Scholarship:  From an Empty Room at Princeton chronicles his early life, education, and forty-three year career as a teacher and administrator in private schools, two colleges, and other nonprofits.  His story traces the roots of his family, but more, how both those roots and his experiences along the way influenced his own ideas on the importance of education, equality, and tolerance.  In On Scholarship, readers will embark on a journey from a rural southern town to a life-long career based on the belief that education is the gateway to a better life and the ability to provide help to others.  

            A glimpse into Cooper's family history reveals why education is so important to him.   His grandfather sent several of his children to college in the time of economic devastation following the Civil War.  His mother, who was a teacher for thirteen years prior to Gerald's birth, stressed that this was her father’s greatest accomplishment.  She followed in his footsteps, struggling to make ends meet so Gerald could attend the college-preparatory Christchurch School.  Gerald's father and uncle exhausted their savings to attend Virginia Polytechnic Institute.  His uncle married one of the five Stoneham daughters, who all went to college and became public school teachers. Education was a ubiquitous family value.

            Along with the importance of achieving education, Cooper's mother stressed that, “Those who attained higher education had a duty to help others, especially those who lacked finances.”  Upon entering his dorm room at Princeton he realized how being poor set him apart from his peers, as he could not even afford to furnish his room.  He drew from his own struggles and from the teachings of Thomas Jefferson and concluded that status should be based on achievement and not on wealth. It is this insight that is at the heart of Cooper's memoirs, as he applied this belief throughout his career.   

            While venerating the values of history and rural life, Cooper shares the wisdom he has gained by drawing from the past and moving ahead into a better future.  Cooper recalls all of the mentors that enabled him to, “step beyond the shadow of the confederate monument across from [his] home in Lancaster and begin to see life in a new light.” 

            This “new light” included ideas that many of his generation struggled to accept.  Cooper credits his time spent in the Navy for initially motivating him to oppose racial discrimination, which later led him to become an active proponent for racial integration in the schools he served.  During his time at Woodberry Forest School he worked to make the previously aristocratic school more inclusive by setting up an Advisory Council that welcomed non-alumni parents and friends to join, along with the spouses of members.  This led to the first strong representation of females in an official organization at the male-dominated school.  He explains that his biggest areas of concern included extending educational opportunity to all and seeking attention for the underdog, and that helping others learn and grow was the most satisfying goal he achieved.  He wanted to give back the same mentoring he received, and was rewarded by seeing the students he helped give back at different levels. 

            Gerald Cooper's On Scholarship: From an Empty Room at Princeton is especially important to those who wish to create change or wish to gain insight into how change occurs at an institutional level. Cooper dutifully records his personal account while making connections between historical figures and his peers and between the past and the present, to indicate the importance of valuing history to protect the future.

            He demonstrates how he was able to draw from leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to create and form his own vision. On Scholarship is a testament to the many people who inspired and enabled him to foster change in the world around him; reading like a roadmap through the unseen personal history of Virginia's small towns, private schools, and local heroes.  Just as the Founding Fathers provided a written history that could empower and affect those who would follow in their footsteps , Cooper allows the reader to take a look at well-known local landmarks and dig deeper to find the rich backstory that many never would have had the opportunity to explore. 

Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.

SEPTEMBER 18, 2011

Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.

Dear old school friends,

It's hard for me to believe that I have not heard of this book, “Privilege," published Jan. 2011 by Princeton (!) Univ. Press, until now. I'm just one chapter into it, and it has my undivided attention. 

The easy explanation for the current "St. Paul’s phenomenon" is a saying that was popular among boarding schools in the 1960s: "There's St. Paul’s and then there's everyone else." Hasn't SPS always had the largest per-student endowment? ... and cost-per-student?

Our friend, (The Rev.) Courtney Carpenter, Chaplain at Blue Ridge School, had been one of the sizable cadre of chaplains at SPS in the 1960s. He brought a number of SPS practices to the BRS chapel--and to other areas of the school--including a Tuck Shop. In the chapel he also installed the compline, an evening service, and we used a version of the SPS litany of prayers for boys, as I recall. 

[Courtney joined Mac Moore and me in setting up "The Smersch," an exercise that took place while the students were away on longer vacations like Christmas. Smersch included such delicacies as champaign and tomato gravy—the latter requiring the participation of Harriet and Prior; Courtney was not yet married in 1965. I fear he is now deceased.]

I hope you'll read "Privilege" and share your thoughts. I regret it's so expensive--$30--and hope you can find a bargain on Amazon or other. Mine was a gift, and I'll lend it locally.

Some of what I encountered at Princeton in 1953, and reported in On Scholarship – From An Empty Room at Princeton,  is very much apparent in “Privilege," and I must add, "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed," as it is here by Shamus Rahman Khan. Perhaps the concern in "church-related" schools is whether or not worldly pretensions get into the "life of the school" and dominate the emphasis. My observation about Blue Ridge and Christchurch—both humble, unpretentious, church-related—is that they imparted a nice amount of spiritual guidance without getting caught up in hierarchical matters that Shamus Khan decries as an abiding weakness in the St. Paul’s experience.

All the best,

Gerry

10.15.10 - WHAT AN AWESOME WAY TO END THE WEEK, PRIVILEGE IS FEATURED IN NY TIMES

by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Economics - Education - Political Science - Privilege - Twitter | 4:37pm EST

Wealth Matters writer Paul Sullivan writes about the first meeting of the Elites Research Network in his column today. Featured in the article are prominent scholars Sudhir Venkatesh, Dorian Warren, Jeffrey Winters, Olivier Godechot, D. Michael Lindsay, Michèle Lamont and Shamus Rahman Khan. Khan is one of the conference organizers and, more importantly for our purposes, author of the forthcoming Princeton University Press title Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.

“It was a serendipitous time for Columbia University to convene the first Elites Research Network conference last week. The conference drew in scholars focused on inequality across academic disciplines, like economics, political science, sociology and history,” writes Sullivan.

“In the academic world, this was remarkable. As several of the scholars acknowledged, there has traditionally been some unease in talking about the elite, let alone researching them.”

Later in the article he writes about Shamus’s experiences with St. Paul’s:

Shamus Rahman Kahn, a conference organizer and assistant professor of sociology at Columbia, seemed to be most at ease with the conflict. The son of a Pakistani father and Irish mother who both emigrated to the United States, he said he came from a wealthy but not elite family. His father, a successful surgeon, paid his son’s way to the St. Paul’s School, a top boarding school.

Yet when Mr. Kahn arrived there in the mid-1990s, he said he lived in the “minority students dorm.” He used that experience and a later teaching stint at St. Paul’s to write a book on the nature of advantage, called “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School,” which will be published by Princeton University Press in January.

“Is it morally responsible for you to get your kids into very expensive schools if it will advantage them?” Mr. Kahn said. “It’s hard not to do it. But by doing it, you’re not explicitly squirting some other kid in the eye with pepper spray. It’s more subtle.”

WEALTH MATTERS

Scrutinizing the Elite, Whether They Like It or Not

By PAUL SULLIVAN

Published: October 15, 2010 NYTimes

THE rich are sitting firmly in the public cross hairs, especially as the economy continues to stumble. Reports that Wall Street bonuses will again be high, and the debate in Congress over tax increases for the wealthy, just add to the outrage.

So it was a serendipitous time for Columbia University to convene the first Elites Research Network conference last week. The conference drew in scholars focused on inequality across academic disciplines, like economics, political science, sociology and history.

***************

Shamus Rahman Khan, a conference organizer and assistant professor of sociology at Columbia, seemed to be most at ease with the conflict. The son of a Pakistani father and Irish mother who both emigrated to the United States, he said he came from a wealthy but not elite family. His father, a successful surgeon, paid his son’s way to the St. Paul’s School, a top boarding school.

Yet when Mr. Khan arrived there in the mid-1990s, he said he lived in the “minority students dorm.” He used that experience and a later teaching stint at St. Paul’s to write a book on the nature of advantage, “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School,” which will be published by Princeton University Press in January.

“Is it morally responsible for you to get your kids into very expensive schools if it will advantage them?” Mr. Khan said. “It’s hard not to do it. But by doing it, you’re not explicitly squirting some other kid in the eye with pepper spray. It’s more subtle.”

His concern is what the concentration of wealth means for American society in the future. He said he wondered whether the post-World War II era in America — as defined by prosperity and rising income levels — was a historical anomaly and was coming to an end.

He cited data showing that the United States now had the second-lowest level of intergenerational income mobility in the world, after England.

“If we lose this truly American thing — that you can become anything if you just work at it — then you’re really going to lose what makes America America,” he said. “It already appears that it will take a tremendous amount of time for people to bring their families out of poverty and for the wealthy to fall from the advantages they have.”

WEALTH MATTERS; Scrutinizing the Elite, Whether They Like It or Not

...used that experience and a later teaching stint at St. Paul's to write a book on the nature of advantage, ''Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School,'' which will be published by Princeton University Press...

October 16, 2010 - By PAUL SULLIVAN - Education - 1217 words

NEWS AND IDEAS FOR THE COLUMBIA COMMUNITY -THE RECORD - vol. 36, no. 09 - March 21, 2011

Sociologist Examines A New American Elite

Year Khan spent teaching at St. Paul’s provided the impetus for his new book.

By Roger Fortuna

http://news.columbia.edu/files_columbianews/imce_shared/vol3609.pdf

[Text below has become somewhat misplaced by cut-paste from pdf; see original for clarity.]

Shamus Rahman Khan, an assistant sociology professor [at Columbia], is interested in elites. As a graduate of St. Paul’s School, one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the nation, he thought that by going back there for a year to teach, he would have the perfect subject for his research on what it means to be elite in 21st-century America.

What he found surprised him and is the subject of Khan’s new book, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.

“The school was much more racially diverse, but even though it was more democratic, it was unequal in a new way,” he says. “The kids were richer than ever before, and that class difference is the big, new barrier to access at the top. Racial and ethnic diversity doesn’t equate to mobility and equality.”

ther was a successful surgeon and his mother a nurse—Khan grew up in a wealthy suburb of Boston, where his upwardly striving parents made sure he had private music lessons, trips to Europe and other cultural enrichment. When he enrolled in St. Paul’s in fall 1993, he found himself assigned to the mi- nority student dorm, surrounded mostly by black and Latino boys from poor, inner-city neighborhoods.

He notes that his Pakistani heritage “hardly afforded one oppressed minority status,” yet he was still astonished by what he saw on the campus outside Concord, N.H., which has been attended by generations of America’s wealthiest and best con- nected families, from Vanderbilts to Rockefellers.

“Children with multiple homes who chartered planes for weekend international trips, came from family dynasties, and inherited unimaginable advantages met me on the school’s brick paths,” he writes. “My parents’ newfound wealth was miniscule compared to many at the school.”

The context for his research is the growing income disparity in the United States between the very richest Ameri- cans and the average earner. Over the past 40 years, even as great gains in racial and gender equality have been made, the incomes for the richest 10 percent of Americans have grown nearly 100 percent. Meantime, the rest of American earners have seen only a 3 percent increase over that period, according to the Economic Policy In- stitute at the University of California, Berkeley.

He expected to find the same patterns when he went back, the old- fashioned ideas of entitlement based on family dynasties, connections and cultural refinement. Instead, he dis- covered a “new elite” at his alma mat- er, one that includes more women and minorities and is distinguished by a sense of privilege rather than entitlement. He decided to study how this sense of privilege is conveyed to students and came up with three key lessons.

the year

reinforce their position, because they don’t have the knowledge they need to move up the class ladder, no matter how talented they are.”

Khan, however, doesn’t buy the narrative that the new elite has ascended to the top rung of American society, which we think of as a meritocracy, on the basis of in- nate intelligence and drive. He ascribes it to “differences in opportunity,” such as better schools, academic coaching, after-school enrichment programs and a supportive home environment. He also notes that such advantages are increasingly out of reach for everyone but the very wealthy. At some point, he wonders, “Do we have a moral responsibility to address this inequality?”

He believes the answer is yes. “I am among those who believe that too much inequality is both immoral and inef- ficient.”

Kids at St. Paul’s and other elite institutions learn that social hierarchies still exist, but they can be treated like ladders, not ceil- ings. They learn that experiences matter. And they learn how to feel comfortable in just about any social situation, as is required in an integrated and open society that values hip-hop and opera, Beowulf and Jaws. “The irony is that it’s not the elites that are now culturally exclusive,” Khan says. “The disadvantaged in society are the ones who are more culturally limited. That seems to

Khan calls this “democratic inequality,” and it is at the heart of a resurgent field in social science research that he is leading with fellow Columbia sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh and Dorian Warren, a political science professor at the University. These scholars contend that even though America has become a more open society, class still plays a major role.

The son of Pakistani and Irish immigrants—Khan’s father was a successful surgeon and his mother a nurse—Khan grew up in a wealthy suburb of Boston, where his upwardly striving parents made sure he had private music lessons, trips to Europe and other cultural enrichment. When he enrolled in St. Paul’s in fall 1993, he found himself assigned to the mi- nority student dorm, surrounded mostly by black and Latino boys from poor, inner-city neighborhoods.

He notes that his Pakistani heritage “hardly afforded one oppressed minority status,” yet he was still astonished by what he saw on the campus outside Concord, N.H., which has been attended by generations of America’s wealthiest and best con- nected families, from Vanderbilts to Rockefellers.

“Children with multiple homes who chartered planes for weekend international trips, came from family dynasties, and inherited unimaginable advantages met me on the school’s brick paths,” he writes. “My parents’ newfound wealth was miniscule compared to many at the school.”

He expected to find the same patterns when he went back, the old- fashioned ideas of entitlement based on family dynasties, connections and cultural refinement. Instead, he dis- covered a “new elite” at his alma mat- er, one that includes more women and minorities and is distinguished by a sense of privilege rather than entitlement. He decided to study how this sense of privilege is conveyed to students and came up with three key lessons.

Kids at St. Paul’s and other elite institutions learn that social hierarchies still exist, but they can be treated like ladders, not ceil- ings. They learn that experiences matter. And they learn how to feel comfortable in just about any social situation, as is re- quired in an integrated and open society that values hip-hop and opera, Beowulf and Jaws. “The irony is that it’s not the elites that are now culturally exclusive,” Khan says. “The disadvantaged in society are the ones who are more culturally limited. That seems to reinforce their position, because they don’t have the knowl- edge they need to move up the class ladder, no matter how talented they are.”

Khan, however, doesn’t buy the narrative that the new elite has ascended to the top rung of American society, which we think of as a meritocracy, on the basis of innate intelligence and drive. He ascribes it to “differences in opportunity,” such as better schools, academic coaching, after-school enrichment programs and a supportive home environment. He also notes that such advantages are increasingly out of reach for everyone but the very wealthy. At some point, he wonders, “Do we have a moral responsibility to address this inequality?”

He believes the answer is yes. “I am among those who believe that too much inequality is both immoral and inefficient.”

AUTHOR SHAMUS KHAN’S TAKE ON “PRIVILEGE” PRAISED IN SAINT PAUL’S ALUMNI MAGAZINE

by Courtney Shaw | Filed in: Books - Princeton University Press - Privilege - Publishing | 11:17am EST

Shamus Khan’s Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School was recently reviewed in the school’s alumi magazine. In the book he provides an inside look at the Concord, New Hampshire institution that has been the private realm of the elite for the past 150 years. One might expect that the alumni, as members of said elite, would not take kindly to his critical analysis of their alma mater.

However it seems the opposite has been the case. It has certainly won the acclaim of Nelson Aldrich–Saint Paul’s alumnus, scion of the Rockefeller family, former editor of the Paris Review and Harpers, and author of Old Money. (He is also the author of the 1979 essay “Preppies: The Last Upper Class?,” which predates the famous “The Official Preppy Handbook.” The essay has been described as “a seminal work of exposition on the manners and mores of the WASP establishment.”) His review begins:

“It has been said that it’s better to have a writer in the family than an assassin, but not much better. Shamus Khan, the author of this brilliant book, is a twice-anointed member of the SPS family… and some among his many relatives — after reading his book (or about it) — are surely calling him an assassin. This will not affect the value of his book at all.”

Aldrich’s glowing review continues on to highlight the thesis of Khan’s work: that the meaning of “privileged” has changed from simply indicating an “elite” background to some different quality dependent on personal achievement and accountability, and that the school is working to teach this trait to new generations of students. He concludes his review with a suggestion that St. Paul’s begin teaching this book to its students in lecture.

In 1979 Aldrich expressed the difficulty of determining “what ideals, if any, are inculcated at prep schools. Among the students, there is a certain reaction against the relentless competitiveness of Preppie life, in the name of cooperation. And out of this reaction, some prep schools have tried to create an odd set of ideals compounded of Christian, Maoist and Rogerian elements that many of the students seem to find affecting, if not yet soothing.” Khan’s study of the St. Paul’s School examines the development of the change Aldrich identified years ago. Read Aldrich’s essay here, then pick up a copy of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School for yourself!