Abstract

The author explores his vexation with David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” in terms of its assumptions about class. He suggests that it both negates his own experience as a member of the working class and of the pedagogy he employs as a teacher of writing with middle-class students, given its insistence on mimicry of a dominant discourse that involves a betrayal of self for both working-class and middle-class learners of academic discourse.