In the 28 years since those episodes my status as misfit remains intact. My colleagues talk of going to see films (with subtitles no less!); I go to movies. They try the latest, trendy restaurant; I eat at home. They speak of ski trips in the Rockies or vacations on “the islands,” my trips are to NASCAR tracks to watch cars go fast and turn left. And I would never consider discussing my Glock 17. It is not that I embrace some reverse snobbery that what they do is wrong or what I do is superior.

The first three years went off without a hitch. I had come up from pretty much nothing to having three letters after my name, finishing my Ph.D. at 26. I landed my first, and what would turn out to be my only, job at a religiously-affiliated university in a large Midwestern city. The money was good and my departmental colleagues were exceptional: they were dedicated to teaching; they were accepting and open to all views, from free market to Marxist; and they never put on airs that the professoriate made us somehow better. I immediately felt I belonged in academia and that my low income, blue-collar background was irrelevant, both to them and to me. That changed when my experience expanded from this small group of economists to the academy-at-large. Alas, not everyone was so down to earth.

My first clue that pedigree matters, maybe more so than performance, was when I was tapped as an untenured 30-year-old to be the sole associate dean in a college of thousands of students and over 100 full-time faculty. In those first three years it had become clear that I had a knack for getting things done. With gusto I moved from a small shared office near the basement into my new office in the Dean’s Suite. First task: set up my new, large office. Going through my few academic possessions I came across my college diploma and thought it fine to display on my bookshelf. The Dean walked in, saw it, and asked what it was. I told him, he read it, and asked, “you aren’t going to leave that out, are you?” I was crushed; he was embarrassed by it.

His obvious embarrassment was because the degree of his new Associate Dean (AD) was not from some well-known institute of the highbrow, but from Slippery Rock State College. How was I to know I should hide my background? Where I came from, on the “Nort’ Side” of Pittsburgh, finishing college was quite an accomplishment, let alone a Ph.D. I promptly put the diploma away and never spoke of my undergrad years again.

I went on to have, so I am told, a very successful five-year stint as a paper pusher, earning tenure along the way. That same Dean, about one year into my appointment, told me that in his many years of Deanship at several universities he never had anyone come in and make the job of AD his own the way I had. I’m sure he does not remember the diploma incident and when it came to performance I was not an embarrassment to him or my colleagues. In spite of this, I had a nagging suspicion that I was not a true academic, coming as I did from that school with the funny name. Pedigree is important to the academics who see themselves as the champions of the “little people” — except folks like me.

The gulf between my fellow academics widened about two years into my AD term, but this time the emerging difference was lifestyle (or in today’s parlance, class). I was a guest at dinner in a swank restaurant in the city with the Dean and three or four department chairmen. Conversation turned to what we had done the past summer and I heard tales of Africa and climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, of Japan and kimonos and obis, and traveling through Europe trying the various cuisines and wines. All eyes eventually turned to me. My answer: my family and I went camping alongside the virgin timbers of Pennsylvania as we did every summer. You could have heard a pin drop. Moments later one of the other diners broke the discomfort by continuing his tale of travel, and I was relegated to bystander for the remainder of the evening. No discussions of the challenges of towing a camper up hills, hiking, canoeing or just sitting around the campfire learning from my in-laws the trials of growing up poor in rural Pennsylvania. My administrative colleagues clearly had no interest in things so pedestrian. I realized that night I am more comfortable around plain folk who do things like camp than I am in the company of academics. It seemed I would forever remain the plumber’s son, a white-collar wannabe.

In the 28 years since those episodes my status as misfit remains intact. My colleagues talk of going to see films (with subtitles no less!); I go to movies.

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