In 1996, I accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Southampton College of Long Island University. It is a private school, and being such, I had uncomfortable visions of teaching wealthy students with whom I would have nothing in common. I had felt the discomfort of not fitting in with middle- and upper-class students even as an undergraduate. I come from the poverty class. I, like many students from my background, was the first in my family to attend college. Just reaching the point of enrolling was a major step outside of my comfort zone. From the moment I arrived on campus, I knew I was in a foreign land. It took me nine years to finally obtain my BA. On my graduation day, I was a single mother, and with my degree in hand, I was looking forward to finally getting out of poverty. Raising one's income, however, does not erase the cultural history of coming from a poverty-class or working-class background. This became clear as I later pursued more advanced degrees.

And now I was at a college where I feared I would once again feel out of place, even among the students. I knew that, even if this were the case, I would still make class issues an important part of my teaching, as I had elsewhere. But, to my delight, LIU-Southampton caters to a substantial number of working-class, inner-city, poverty-class first generation students. Whereas before I had few opportunities to serve as a mentor to students who shared my background, I now had many.

Perspective

Within the scholastic "academy" exists many "matrices of domination."1 One encounters them when going through initiation into the academy. The academy's business is to reproduce itself, by producing new academics, accumulating and validating knowledge, and disseminating that knowledge by means which support the academy's self-reproduction. If one's knowledge is other than what the academy produces and validates, the knowledge stands a good chance of becoming subjugated, dismissed as irrelevant, or just plain ignored.

Scholars, publishers, and other experts represent specific interests and credentialing processes, and their knowledge claims must satisfy the political and epistemological criteria of the contexts in which they reside.2