Where You’re From

Assignment: David Brooks, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” The Atlantic (December 2024); Lyn Wilkins, “Understanding the Rural Experience,” Student Life (October 6, 2025)

This class considers how place, class, education, and institutional belonging shape the way we—and more specifically, you—see the world. Our readings ask us to consider how elite educational spaces can quietly communicate who counts as sophisticated, ambitious, prepared, or important.

Our focus will not be simply on rural versus urban backgrounds, or elite versus non-elite institutions, but on the deeper question of how our origins shape our instincts in disagreement. Where we are from affects what we trust, what we resent, what we notice, what we defend, and what kinds of condescension or exclusion we recognize most quickly. We will ask how students can become more attentive to the hidden assumptions carried into the classroom: assumptions about intelligence, achievement, class, region, religion, family, ambition, and belonging. The goal is not to reduce anyone to biography, but to see how biography matters—and how learning to disagree requires understanding not only what people think, but where their convictions and vulnerabilities come from.