Socioeconomic class sometimes feels in the academy like the final frontier. Sure, it has always been a named panel of the triptych meant to hold our attention in the disciplines that pay mind to social power – the other two being race and gender, of course. But class has often been the forgotten middle child in our readings, our research, our discourse.

Several of the contributions to this issue of inquisitive, on the theme of “class,” suggest why this may be. In “Go Dig a Ditch,” Sarah Hartman-Caverly captures how, in many families of the manual labor class – and among academics, too – matriculation has been seen as the first step in the journey out of your family’s class. Class on the low end becomes something to escape, and you can’t fully escape it by continually talking about it. 

Still, class persists as a divider, even if, as Scott Pell suggests in “The Pipeline,” American academics paint a veneer of two-party politics on it all to justify derision and discrimination against those who have less. In an excerpt we bring from his new book, Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, Richard Kahlenberg traces out just how startling class disparities have become in universities, and why it is those in power have had very little interest in addressing them – even when addressing them might improve public perception of higher education. That has partly to do with U.S. News & World Report rankings, which Daniel Diermeier explores for us in "Rank Methods."

As Kahlenberg and others have shown, the myth of pure meritocracy is a tale told by the haves. It provides a handy justification for what Farid Zaid terms “Academia’s Quiet Aristocracy,” that is, the rich who just keep getting richer. In this issue, Zaid marshalls the data to expose the inner workings of the disparity-producing machine, and suggests ways to fix it, while in our Heterodox Life column this quarter, Frances An provides a first-person reflection on what it’s like to be at the poor-get-poorer end of the academic game.

Struggles over class mean battles over power, and so this issue also brings a number of fine essays considering specific struggles for scarce resources and/or self-determination. Brendan Stern recounts the political consciousness-raising of deaf individuals while making the case for a more heterodox Deaf America. Scott Davies examines departmental and disciplinary “micro rituals” and takes special note of how they tend to be flavored quite differently among younger versus older faculty. And Steven Engler explains how he has used the insights of scholars of class to help students understand religious practices.

Finally, for our “Field Guide” series, Deepa Das Acevedo parts the grasses to help us see into the strange (to most of us) discipline of legal anthropology, and, for our “Back in the Day” column, James Simpson considers how literature survives and parses cultural revolutions of the type through which we may now be living.

I have just one favor to ask: Please consider sitting with this issue and reading beyond your usual classes. And please also consider pitching us your ideas for future issues. Our open call is presently on the theme of “limits,” and you can find it at inquisitivemag.org.