You will like this, and will think more of me for asking it in the correct POMO jargon: Can your students be INTERPELLATED as upper class? Lower class? Middle class? Or in this land of dreams would they repudiate the very notion of class?

If they do repudiate it, will you impose that conceptual grid by brute force? Will you fit them into it, whether they want it or not — “No, you may not think you are class bound, but you are about as lower middle class as it gets, Buster!”

In other words, what gives you the right to push them into conformity with your theory? Or do college kids today just naturally think of themselves as members of a pseudo-Marxist class society?

I know in sales, life insurance agents would never so self-identify. They would say, “Look, I came up hard and made a success of myself.” To me that means they are low class, to them that they are high class. Who is to say that I should impose my snooty Marxist sociology, or Eastern Seabord snobbery on them? To them I am not high class, but a pointy headed intellectual, a joke. Again, they could well be right.