This brings up another story of when I returned to college in my forties after being away from academia for over twenty years. The University of California at Santa Cruz had a reputation as the official college where 'Trustafarians', the offspring of the wealthy from Southern California, would go to play hippie radical for a couple of years before settling down to become fulltime capitalists. The closest they got to being a 'Working Class Hero' was listening to a John Lennon song. The majority had very little life experience down in the trenches. Their class prejudice was always simmering just beneath the surface no matter how egalitarian their rap was.

I had one discussion group with a useless TA and a handful of students as part of a political philosophy course. I could never understand half the stuff being discussed in this group. I figured either I was pretty dumb or there was a lot of empty rhetoric being tossed around. I was doing well in the class as far as written work, so I was betting it was the latter. I was not a big talker in that group, but one day I did speak up about something we were discussing. This one kid in class was kind of a pain in the ass and shut me down with a "that statement is parochial and simplistic." He was constantly doing this with other students too. I just laughed it off and told him I thought it sounded pretty good.

I had my quarterly meeting with the professor and brought up I was having a hard time even understanding what was being discussed in the group and told him the story of the kid's attack on me. The professor was my age and assured me that the majority of these kids were just 'talking to hear their head rattle.' He encouraged me to challenge him next time with his blessing.

Sure enough, at the next discussion group, the kid tore into me again. This time he added a personal attack in the form of, "What are you doing here anyway? You must be my dad's age and he is a doctor. What happened, didn't you make it through the first time?" I then returned him to the topic and systematically filleted him like a fish using good old Socratic Method and forcing him to clearly define the terms he was using. He folded like a cheap lawn chair. 20 years of street education fell on his head hard. The rest of the students actually laughed and applauded. This kid had lost any potential fans a long time ago and I played to the audience. I actually felt bad after I did that. It was like beating a retarded puppy with a shovel. But this kid did ask one very important question of me "What are you doing here anyway?" He was right. I certainly wasn't learning anything, and a political science degree at 43 was about as useless as it gets. I dropped out of school a few weeks shy of a degree and never looked back.