In my ongoing quest to find discourse about class and classism on campus, I just came across Stanford's statement on classism that includes discussion of both interpersonal interactions and public policy. It's an unusually comprehensive statement that appears to have been written during the pandemic (and perhaps during the period of justice work following George Floyd's murder) and has not been updated since (some of the many links are broken). Yet it's a rare example of a campus including this much detail about social class inequalities within broader diversity and inclusion work.
The page includes pedagogical resources, such as these classroom activities from the APA and exercises on identifying one's own class privilege. Data on the socio-economic diversity of the Stanford student body is reported. There are multiple links to historical, economic, and political sites for those curious to learn more.
The site does link to Stanford's First Generation/Low Income student pages, but I'm not seeing any link from those FLI resources back to these contexts of class and classism as part of the experience of FLI students.
A website is a step toward advocacy but is not, of course, a commitment to ongoing advocacy. The site is addressed to individuals who want to learn more. There's nothing here about what the campus is doing, nothing about where students might organize with others for change. But it's a first step that many more campuses can be taking.
It would be great if this work could be a course project or the work of a student group.
