One of the trade-offs first gen students make: loss of place

With my maternal grandparents, Effie and Elver Shatwell
at their home in Vendor, Arkansas (1995)

At our first class meeting of the fall semester last week, we discussed this Nov. 2020 episode of The Hidden Brain podcast when Jennifer Morton was Shankar Vedantam's guest.  She's a philosopher, now at the University of Pennsylvania, who has published a book called Moving Up without Losing Your Way (Princeton University Press 2019).  In it, she brings her perspective as a philosopher to think about what I call the class migration phenomenon.  Specifically, Morton talks about the trade-offs students must make when they pursue a course different from that of their families of origin.  Vedantam introduces Morton's work:   

Morton argues there is [a] less obvious ingredient in the story of upward mobility: a willingness to make ethical trade-offs. She doesn't mean lying or cheating, but something subtler and far more consequential.

* * * 

[S]trivers are, as you might expect, ambitious, hard working, smart, but also I think are willing to make trade-offs in the pursuit of those ambitions. Some of those trade-offs in some cases are quite difficult and painful.

My mother at a family cemetery
in Newton County, Arkansas 
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2017

We talked in class about some of the trade-offs--we could even call them sacrifices--that we, as first gen students, have made as we have pursued higher education.  A lot of us spoke about giving up time with family--even the opportunity to get to know family members, such as older relatives, or attend their funerals.  That reminded me of the visit captured in the photo above with my maternal grandparents, a few years before my grandfather died.  I was glad I got to see him the weekend before his death but sad I could not be at his funeral to honor and remember him.  It was just too far to travel from California, mid-semester, the first year I taught at UC Davis.  Unfortunately, for similar reasons, I was also unable to attend the funerals of my other grandparents, as well as that of a great grandmother.  All died while I was living too far away or doing work that made it impractical (sometimes just prohibitively expensive) to go home to their funerals in the small Arkansas community where I grew up and where they all lived.  

We talked in class about how some parents arduously protect the time of their "striver" children, while others are oblivious to the twin demands of higher education and family, expecting the sacrifice of the former in the name of family duty.  My mom was in the former category.  She never put pressure on me to attend a grandparent's funeral because she knew it would distract from my school work or my job--and also that it would be a big financial burden. 

One thing we didn't talk much about in class as part of this discussion is loss of place, though it was implicit in some of our answers, like those referencing family.  What I mean by loss of place is that many people can't or don't remain near their families of origin when they go to college.  This means they experience not only diminished family connections, they also experience diminished connections with the place they grew up, the place they consider home.  

The house where I grew up, a few weeks before my family 
moved in, fall 1964

This can refer to the community, the state or even the house where one grew up.  I recently wrote this about the house where I was raised.  We moved into it when I was three weeks old, and my mother still lives there.  I will always be attached to that house and wish I could see it more often; unfortunately, I've not even set foot in Arkansas during the pandemic, though I'm excited to visit The Natural State next spring, when there will be a reunion/Birthday Party for the 8th Circuit judge for whom I clerked, who has taken senior status but still works in Little Rock. 

Same house where I grew up, after some improvements
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2017

The loss of place may be a particular loss for students who grew up in rural places because those rural areas are associated with attachment to place.  This is because many rural residents live on land passed down from their ancestors, and rural land is more likely than urban land to remain in a family over the course of generations.  

That was the case with me.  I am the fifth generation on both sides of my family to grow up in a rural county in Arkansas.  Both my mother's family and my father's homesteaded the land on which they lived, and I was raised on part of the farm that had been in my father's family since the late 1800s.  There is even a town--really a wide spot in the road that used to have a post office and is now an access point on the Buffalo National River--called Pruitt. 

With my son and my mother
on the Buffalo National River
Pruitt access point 2015

It is a little known fact that many students attend the college nearest their home--if, that is, there is one.  Lack of a nearby college or university is one reason that many rural high school graduates don't continue on to college.  

I was a rural high school graduate who didn't have the opportunity to attend a college within commuting distance from my parents' home (there was a two-year community college 20 miles away), but I was lucky in that the state's flagship land grant university was just 80 miles away.   So, I got a good education, while also being able to maintain many family connections. 

Still, when it came to careers, I was unable to return home to fulfill my professional destiny.  First, I earned an undergraduate degree in journalism, but there was only a weekly newspaper in my hometown, and they didn't have the budget to hire people with journalism degrees.  Indeed, the journalism market in Arkansas is one reason I decided to go ahead and undertake law school, which had long been a dream.  (At the time, journalists in Arkansas earned about $10K/year, which seemed barely enough to service my student loans). 

I had only been in law school a short time when I realized I'd never "go home" to the county where I grew up (Newton) to practice law, simply because there was no market there.  My county of 8000 residents was home to one attorney.  They didn't need another, and there was no one there to mentor me.  Eventually, law school channeled me to the city anyway and to what passes for "big law" in that region.  I had summer associate gigs in Little Rock, Tulsa and Kansas City before deciding to pursue a PhD, which took me to London (because that's where the best scholarship opportunity was).  That led to a decade living and working abroad.  

Then, when I went on the law school teaching market, I'd hoped to be offered a job back in Arkansas, but that didn't happen.  (It is typical for law schools, unless they are T14, not to hire their own graduates, though I note that exceptions get made for men more often than for women). I wound up in California, where I still live and work 23 years later.  I'm very grateful for my career--and the opportunity to raise a Californian--but I still lament that many (though certainly not all) of my Arkansas connections have slipped away. 

With my mother, at the Newton County Museum,
Arkansas
(c) W.R. Pruitt-Herbert 2017 

I moved to California to fulfill what I believe was my professional destiny--becoming a law professor--and one consequence of that was a certain loss of place.