Berkeley, they are still smart and hard-working, although I have yet to see any evidence that this quality is acquired at Berkeley.

Chico State in contrast has smaller classes, few inexperienced graduate student teachers, and hires faculty because they want to teach undergraduates for their career. Big name or not, undergraduates routinely interact with experienced faculty hired for demonstrated teaching skills. It is true that Berkeley educates the very best high school students. But Chico State takes California’s second best students, and makes them into really talented people. One day, I would like to see Chico challenge Berkeley on “value-added” in terms of student learning. I am confident that Chico grads would best Berkeley grads in terms of how much they learned from their classes between the day the walked in the door and the day they graduated. After all, it does not take much to take the straight A student from high school, and then turn them into a college graduate like Berkeley does. Chico takes the B student, and turns them into a college graduate. And we do it for less tax money than the overpaid professors (and underpaid teaching assistants) at UC Berkeley. Chico State’s true honor is hidden, and US News and World Report gets it wrong when they published college rankings and informed us that again, UC Berkeley is the number one national public university while Chico State didn’t even make the list.

A Little Sociology: The Relationship between Status and Achievement
But this paper is not only a rant about Chico and Berkeley. Rather it is about the nature of status and how alongside market forces, status distinctions shape what colleges do. I think Chico would best Berkeley in a fair comparison of undergraduate quality of education, but then I teach at Chico, and naturally take some pride in what we do. And so more than self-righteous navel gazing, this paper is also an exploration of status systems work to allocate unequally both prestige, and access to opportunity outside the blind mechanisms of the labor market. As such, this paper draws on social psychologist Max Weber’s description of status inequality in occupational caste relations, which is what the status system US News measures is really about.

So first a little sociology. High status means that one group (in this case Berkeley people) monopolize goods or opportunities through the maintenance of social distance from lower status people like me at Chico State. They do this through their power to award status markers when assigning prestigious goods. Thus, despite the fact Berkeleyites and Chicoites look alike, take the same classes, and learn the same things about sociology, Berkeleyites are routinely paid more, more likely to sit at the head of a table, be elected to honor societies, divide up federal grants, and award academic status. More to the point, US News asks administrators working at places like Berkeley in determining their rankings of everyone else. And not surprisingly they tautologically conclude that since they are paid more, they must do a better job at teaching, and therefore deserve another raise because their ranking in US News is so high. Note that this has nothing to do with an objective measure of “quality” in undergraduate programs. Indeed, as I said before if this were the case, I think Chico would beat Berkeley hands down in US News rankings. But in fact the ranking has little to do with the anonymous mechanisms of equally anonymous labor markets, which Weber writes, such status systems in fact abhor.

Weber writes that the inequality between groups like Berkeley and Chico are maintained through rituals which ensure that we will coexist in a system of mutual repulsion and disdain. My rant about Berkeley’s underserved status is typical of how a subordinated group emphasizes its own honor by disdainfully pointing out the pretensions of the dominant. But the dominant group has its own ways of justifying its status is deserved, typically by emphasizing the acclaim it received in the past. The result is a rhetorical dance engaged in by both parties. Both universities believe that there is something unique about their own institution, and each believes its own honor is the highest one, a fiction which is cultivated in avoidance strategies which mean among other things that Chico’s students chances of getting into graduate school at UC Berkeley are virtually non-existent.

But at Chico we too protect our honor from the pretensions of Berkelyites. At Chico we routinely explain how our secret honor is hidden from the rest of the world, including US News, and particularly in the context of the stigmatizing rank Playboy once gave as the number one party school in the nation. Still Berkeley too has an image problem. They need to explain why their honor is deserved, and the pretensions of people like me are the result of envy and jealousy. In short there need to be rituals and stories to explain caste dominance (Berkeley), and caste subordination.

According to Weber, because Berkeley is on top of an established pecking order, Berkeley’s story is about a glorious past demonstrating why logically Berkeley is the highest ranked public university in the United States. The past leaders and Nobel prize winners who made the glory of Berkeley possible are heroes. There are regular remembrances of these heroes on special days, in the names of buildings, scholarships, and other tokens acknowledging their role in creating the deserved glories of the present. The message is clear to Berkeley grads: they are special and deservr their exalted place. And by implication the rest of us are losers.
At Chico, the stories and rituals are of course different. They are not about a glorious past (we don’t have a plausible one), but about why our clandestine honor is routinely hidden and ignored. What is more, buried in the story we tell about ourselves will be an assertion that one day we will overcome the odds, and our secret glory will be revealed.

Chico’s Hidden Honor
At Chico State, I routinely explain our position in higher education’s hierarchy to prospective students and new faculty. I describe the easy access to faculty, the smaller classes, and point out that UC Berkeley has none of these. Because I am an alumnus of the University of California, Davis, I typically tell visitors that I learned to teach undergraduates at the UC, but I became good at it only at Chico. The ideology I describe is one that explains away Chico’s stigma as a second rate public university in a manner which highlights our special, albeit unnoticed skills. Our mythology about our hidden honor goes something like this. If you would look closely at Chico State student, you will find that they work better in the “real” world. Chico students also write better because real professors (not graduate students) grade their papers. And because all the hyper-competitive self-absorbed nerds from high school went to Berkeley, our students develop collaborative relationships in classes. This means that Chico State students are better prepared to be part of the teamwork found in the modern workforce. Chico’s applied hands-on approach encourages students to be involved in businesses, schools, and government as “real people” not theoretical drones. Our students will never labor with a calculator and computer for fifty years as will a Berkeley student.