Today’s News from the University of Kansas
Headlines
8/31/2020
From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu
Political exploitation of ‘middle class’ examined in new book
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas professor’s latest book, “The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History,” refutes the concept that the United States is a middle-class nation while tracing the history of how the designation became a vote-pandering issue for rival parties. Published by OR Books on Oct. 8, advance copies are currently available.
Distinguished professor wins major national chemistry award
LAWRENCE — Kristin Bowman-James, University of Kansas Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, will be the recipient of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Inorganic Chemistry. This is Bowman-James’ first major national award, and she is only the second woman to receive the award since its inception in 1962.
New Engineering Advisory Board strengthens relationships with alumni
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas School of Engineering has formed a new advisory board of recent graduates to advise the school’s faculty and staff as they prepare students to enter the engineering field. The group, formally known as the Recent Graduate Advisory Board, is composed of about 35 alumni, most of whom have been out of school for 10 years or less.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Political exploitation of ‘middle class’ examined in new book
LAWRENCE — There was a time when politicians didn’t pay much attention to the middle class.
Or at least politicians didn’t claim they did.
“Through the 19th century, almost nobody self-consciously thought about themselves as middle class,” said David Roediger, the Foundation Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. “The mass embrace of the term is kind of a Cold War product. And it didn’t really enter U.S. presidential politics until the 1990s.”
His latest book, “The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History,” refutes the concept that the United States is a middle-class nation while tracing the history of how the designation became a vote-pandering issue for rival parties. Published by OR Books on Oct. 8, advance copies are currently available.
“We’re so used to political campaigns featuring appeals to the middle class — and to hearing most people think of themselves as such — that we don’t imagine these things have a history,” he said.
“But where did this constant bipartisan outcry to save the ‘middle class’ come from? When did it happen? That’s what got me interested in writing the book.”
Roediger deliberately chose the word “sinking” for the title. It was inspired by a passage written by futurist author George Orwell that decreed the middle class should not fear sinking into the working class “where we belong.”
“A lot of the fascination with the middle class is about its falling. It implies a precipitous drop,” Roediger said. “I like Orwell’s word better because it implies a certain gradual grind. Falling is either you’re up on the perch or you’re down. But even when you’re up on the perch, there are all these precarities and fears and miseries.”
Part of the problem with the middle class is actually defining it. It’s one of those words such as “freedom” that means very different things to different people.
“That’s one of the reasons such extravagant claims can be made about it,” he said.
“When I started writing this book in 2012, the presidential race was between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, and they both really went all in on appealing to the middle class. They both said it was anybody making less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. Their experts then said, ‘If you can win that strata, you can win the election.’ Well, of course; that strata includes almost everybody in the country.”
He explains the parties put forth a completely arbitrary figure. The “less than $250,000 a year” only became concrete when relief proposals needed to determine what qualified as a middle-class tax cut.
Yet money isn’t the only factor that establishes a middle-class baseline.
Many social scientists believe the term is wholly dependent on self-identification.
Roediger said, “You might be a Starbucks worker and making $22,000 a year. You might be an executive in a corporation making 30 times that. But as long as you think of yourself as a middle-class person …”
Unlike a Marxist definition — where you’re in a class because you either own things or you’re working for somebody who does — middle class includes all kinds of different relationships with one’s job and geographic proximity. After all, that $250,000 figure means something entirely different to a resident of Brooklyn than it does a resident of Wichita.
“Most people, when asked to self-identify, have in mind their own community,” he said.
Ultimately, what political party is best for the middle class during this election year?
“I don’t think either really has much to offer the middle class, and especially they’ve little to offer people with working-class jobs, incomes and wealth,” Roediger said.
His book devotes several chapters explaining why that’s the case.
“When the Republicans claim to save the middle class, it means tax cuts, which overwhelmingly went to people who if they’re even in the middle class are in the absolute upper reaches of it,” he said. “To the Democrats, saving the middle class has been tied to this one peculiar place in Michigan they obsess over: Macomb County.”
A county that is predominantly white (85% at the last census), Roediger said Democrats have polling data that shows residents of this county are “extraordinarily anti-black, anti-Detroit, anti-welfare, anti-busing, anti all of these ‘liberal’ things.”
“So the function of the middle class for Democratic politicians has been to say we can’t go too far on pro-union or pro-fair trade policies that are meaningful. What we can do is court the middle class by not talking too much about racial justice, for example,” he said.
Raised in Illinois within a family he described as “on this line between what people would call middle class and what I would call working class,” Roediger is now in his seventh year at KU. His areas of research include the histories of the labor movement and slavery.
His 1991 book, “The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class,” is considered one of the foundational works in whiteness studies.
At first, he didn’t consider “The Sinking Middle Class” to be a companion piece to that opus.
“As I look at it now, a lot of the content actually does end up talking about how middle class really means the white middle class in the United States,” he said. “When politicians use the term, we’re meant to understand they’re talking about the kinds of folks who live in Macomb County. So this book ends up being more about race and class than I thought it was going to be.”
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Contact: Heather Anderson, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, 785-864-3667, [email protected], @KUCollege
Distinguished professor wins major national chemistry award
LAWRENCE — Kristin Bowman-James, University of Kansas Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, will be the recipient of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Inorganic Chemistry. This is Bowman-James’ first major national award, and she is only the second woman to receive the award since its inception in 1962.
The award is for Bowman-James’ work in expanding the structural concepts of transition metal coordination chemistry to the coordination of negatively charged ions, known as anions. She has succeeded in providing insight to anion coordination from a transition metal coordination perspective, possibly leading to a better understanding of the chemistry of anion interactions with surrounding environments.
While anion chemistry is not necessarily considered mainstream inorganic chemistry, Bowman-James found so many similarities between anion and transition metal coordination that “it just seemed so logical,” she said.
“It is truly exciting that my inorganic chemistry colleagues considered my research worthy of the ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry,” Bowman-James said. “This acknowledgment of my research is validation of my ideas and research findings.”
Bowman-James received both her undergraduate and doctoral degrees in chemistry from Temple University, spending the last two years working on her graduate degree at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in Haifa. In 1975 she became assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at KU, eventually becoming the first woman to chair the department. Later Bowman-James was appointed statewide project director of what is now the Kansas NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) in 2005 and became a University Distinguished Professor in 2007.
Bowman-James’ research targets the fundamental structural interactions and chemistry of negatively charged ions (known as anions) for environmental and biological applications such as sensing, separations and catalysis. She is most recognized for applying the structural concepts of transition metal binding, first proposed in the early 1900s by Nobel Laureate Alfred Werner, to anion host-guest chemistry. She is a co-editor of the first book devoted exclusively to anion chemistry, “Supramolecular Chemistry of Anions,” 1997, as well as a 2012 sequel, “Anion Coordination Chemistry,” both published by Wiley-VCH. Learn more about her research here.
The ACS National Awards Program is designed to encourage the advancement of chemistry in all its branches, to support research in chemical science and industry, and to promote the careers of chemists.
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Contact: Cody Howard, School of Engineering, 785-864-2936, [email protected], @kuengineering
New Engineering Advisory Board strengthens relationships with alumni
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas School of Engineering has formed a new advisory board of recent graduates to advise the school’s faculty and staff as they prepare students to enter the engineering field. The group, formally known as the Recent Graduate Advisory Board, is composed of about 35 alumni, most of whom have been out of school for 10 years or less.
“KU Engineering has an amazing network of distinguished alumni. Strengthening connections with our more recent graduates by establishing this board will benefit our current students and broader alumni network,” said Arvin Agah, dean of KU Engineering. “I look forward to working with our recent graduate advisory board to elevate the stature of KU Engineering on the national level.”
The new board, which consists of alumni representing all engineering departments, as well as several industries and government, should help the engineering school keep current with the latest developments in engineering.
“I love to stay connected with the university and school, as well as my department. The professors there really crafted the mindset for me of what it is to be a professional aerospace engineer,” said Katie Constant-Coup, an engineer for the Federal Aviation Administration who chairs the new board. “I see this as a way to give back to a school that gave me a fantastic career path.”
Constant-Coup, an Overland Park resident, received her bachelor’s degree from KU in 2014 and her master’s degree in 2016. She served as the president of KU’s chapter of Sigma Gamma Tau honor society during the 2015-16 school year and sees her new role as a way of continuing her efforts to build diversity and include more women in the engineering field.
“What our board members really bring is that perspective of being new in their career. Maybe they’ve done one or two career moves since they graduated, but they have a fresher take on what the career field is looking for,” she said. The board will “see what new avenues we can investigate for students as technology and the field evolve over the years.”
That advice should help faculty give their students an edge, “so that students really stand out when they graduate,” Constant-Coup said.
In addition to advising the school on the current state of the engineering profession, members of the board will also help recruit students and track their progress toward a degree, maintaining contact throughout their academic careers and beyond.
“We’re very excited to set up this committee,” Constant-Coup said. KU “is the home away from home, as a lot of our members call it, so we want to give back as much as we can.”
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