Author and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich spoke at Amherst College’s Johnson Chapel on Wednesday, Nov. 7, where she presented first-year students with a question. “Are you going to struggle to get to the top of the heap, or are you going to consider the people crushed at the bottom of it?”

Ehrenreich, author of the recent book Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, delivered the annual Croxton Lecture, an address to the campus’s freshmen. Her lecture, “The College-Educated Elite and the Working Class Majority: Figuring Out Where You Fit In,” dealt with the need to recognize the plight of the uneducated.

“My job today is to put perspective on the college experience,” Ehrenreich said. “Put simply, college is about being inducted into an elite. Only 25 percent of Americans have gone to college.

“College graduates,” she said, “are an elite of wealth. The gap between the incomes of college graduates and non-college graduates is at an all-time high. College graduates make about 70 percent more.

“You know perfectly well,” she continued, “that one of the reasons you’re here is luck. If your parents had put their money into dot-com stocks, or if they didn’t have any money to begin with, or your little brother decided to come down with a disease, you probably wouldn’t be here. So you have to ask yourselves, who are the people who aren’t sitting here right now, but instead are in orientations for places like Wendy’s and Wal-Mart?”

She proposed that the students envision over 1000 empty seats in the Chapel Auditorium, representing the percentage of the population that does not continue their education after high school.

“What kind of people do these seats represent?” she asked. “They’re much more likely to be poor. There’s a big wealth gap in terms of who goes to college. You should also realize that these empty seats are more likely to include people of color than blacks or Latinos.

“As you prepare to become the socioeconomic elite, be sure to think about what will happen to them,” she said. “For the most part, you know what kind of jobs they’re going to get – the kind of jobs you’ve vowed never to do again.”

Ehrenreich explained the several years she spent preparing to write Nickeled and Dimed, in which she tried to support herself with low-income jobs. She worked as a house-cleaner, a waitress, and a Wal-Mart associate, and found that it was nearly impossible to survive on low-wage salaries.

“How did I and my co-workers get by?” she asked. “By facing serious hardships every month – missing meals, not making rent, and forgoing medical care.” She described the agony of physical labor, and the demeaning manner of most of her employers.

“You’re probably thinking, ‘what else is new’?” Ehrenreich said. “Well, here’s what’s new. It’s harder now than it was 20 years ago to get by without a college degree. A lot of blue-collar jobs have disappeared due to industrialization.

“You can find a lot of people within the college-educated elite who say, ‘this is the way things are, because this is what the market dictates,'” Ehrenreich continued. “They’ll say, ‘you wouldn’t want to interfere with the market, would you?’ Two hundred years ago, these people would have talked about God the way they talk about the market today.

“But there are also people,” she added, “who are part of the college-educated elite who fight against this. Nationwide, students are demanding better opportunities for campus workers.” She cited as examples Harvard students who occupied a building to protest the low wages given to many employees.

“My hope,” Ehrenreich conluded, “is that you will gain the skills to change this system. And I’d like you to make that choice for the sake of your own happiness. It’s a lot more fun for everyone when these seats fill up.”

Ehrenreich’s speech received high marks from most of the attendees.

“I was very impressed with her,” said first-year student Isaiah Tanenbaum. “I thought her ideas were firmly grounded. I’m not sure I agreed with everything she said, but I liked where she was coming from.”

Others felt that her description of college campuses as a bastion for the wealthy were off-base.

“I was here on Sept. 11,” said Theodore Hertzberg, an Amherst sophomore, referring to Ehrenreich’s last campus appearance, in which she criticized the Bush administration at a college-wide meeting held in the wake of the attacks. “Considering the nonsense she promulgated on that day, I was not surprised today.”