Enacting Elitism: Experiencing Race and Class at Haverford College

Since the implementation of the G.I. Bill following World War II, college has been seen as the pathway to a more secure economic future in the United States. Significantly, though, students from wealthier homes attend college at much higher rates than those from low-income homes. The disparity is even more striking at so-called "elite" colleges and universities, which maintain their status through a combination of wealth, power and exclusivity. Despite their selective, monied and often racially charged histories, these colleges imagine and advertise themselves on a basis of diversity. I conducted thirteen interviews and ethnographic observations at Haverford College, a private liberal arts school in the Philadelphia area, in order to examine the effect this imagination had on the students who attend the school. Disproportionately, students who were identified as a racial or economic "other" in some way reported the need to adapt their habitus (the physical embodiment of their cultural disposition) in order to better fit in and succeed at Haverford. Through their stories, I argue that the college ultimately supports a hegemonic system in which elite cultural norms are valued at a higher level than others. By implicitly requiring students from "diverse" backgrounds to change themselves in order to succeed at in elite American culture, Haverford College and its peer institutions are complicit in a process of social reproduction that erases individual difference