Flipped on the telly, and who should be on but Gillian and David! Unfortunately, they were just wrapping up opening for Joan Baez, who proceeded to be a major disappointment. Have I ever heard a worse version of Caleb Meyer? No, not really.

James Murphy, another of the new cool people this year, has a girlfriend who reminds me a million times of Char. The three of us went to the Workers Rights Clinic. I hadn't been there for a while, but they'd never been there before so they shadowed me. They'll do a great job there, the both of them.

But ultimately, the highlight of the day was in Feminist Legal Theory where I finally lost my cool. The presentation was on Colombian women by two class members who are Colombian. The conversation moved to questions about gender roles more generally, which is fine because those questions really underlie a lot of other topics. But when one of the two women presenting suggested that GW students are in the "top ten percent" of the nation and that this is the reason for our more progressive views on gender roles, I lost my cool. In retrospect perhaps I misunderstood and she wasn't equating the class privilege of GW students with enlightened views, but that's what I heard. I went off for a few minutes on how education makes people stupid and that working class people actually have a much better understanding as a whole of our society and the functioning of its institutions than PhDs do. Rita laughed at some of the funny parts of my raving. I was too infuriated to get a good gander at other students' reactions.

When I finally decrescendoed, sweet Sylvia came in to back me up. She finished quickly, and the woman whose comment had set me off responded not to me but to Sylvia, and in that pathetic, petty way that overeducated people do.
posted by weiss @ 8:47 PM