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In Class, Critics, and Shakespeare, Sharon O’Dair holds the mirror up to the academy, revealing its role in maintaining class privilege in our society. She contends that educational institutions perpetuate elite “bias against the working class and the poor” because such bias is “structurally useful and even necessary in the academy” (3). Reading through Shakespeare’s plays and her own experience as “the daughter of a hard hat” (23), O’Dair shows how liberal goals such as expanding educational opportunity and inclusiveness, limiting the ill effects of capitalism, encouraging political participation, and championing environmental causes contribute to “the reproduction of inequality” in contemporary American society (25).

In the first chapter, “Burn But His Books,” O’Dair discusses The Tempest and the effects of “Intellectual Domination” in late twentieth-century America. The choice Prospero gives Caliban—to change his “brutish” (I.ii.359) ways or suffer hardship—is compared to that offered American working-class students who must either “conform to and preferably to internalize the culture of the (upper) middle class,” or (like Caliban) “actively resist this socialization (or domination) and thus (intentionally) reproduce themselves as uneducated workers” (26). [End Page 207] Next, in “Aping Aristocrats,” O’Dair discusses Timon of Athens and the preservation of elite privilege, showing how the academy’s “actively antimarket values and behaviors” (63) express anxiety about the power of the working-class consumer, whose dollars “give the vulgar a voice” (63). O’Dair distinguishes her position from both cultural materialist and Marxist critics; she contends, status rather than class is what divides us, a perspective she derives from Weberian sociology. The elite’s “demonization of capital” only seems to champion the poor and oppressed, says O’Dair. At bottom, such views reflect “a fear of the people and their voices” (69). In “Fobbing Off Disgrace with a Tale,” O’Dair draws on Coriolanus to argue academia’s avoidance of face-to-face negotiation with its customers, and how that works to retain social and political power.

O’Dair joins the economy-versus-ecology debate in “Shakespeare in the Woods,” looking at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s impact on Ashland, a former lumber industry town. That Festival administrators seem unconcerned by the deleterious effects of Shakespeare’s “living large” (102) in southern Oregon, argues O’Dair, shows the high value of middle-class cultural capital, especially when backed by the heaviest of literary heavyweights, the great Bard. All this would seem an unfair attack on the institution that employs O’Dair, a border-crosser who throughout the book allies herself with both the intellectual establishment and the working class. Indeed, some might see O’Dair as ungrateful—after all, she continues to benefit from the top-notch education she was able through scholarships to obtain. Yet O’Dair’s profit on her schooling seems more than “learning to curse” the (upper) middle class. The analytical abilities and desire for social justice fostered by left-leaning universities have pushed her to reveal class bias ignored by those same liberal intellectuals who champion other disempowered groups.

O’Dair offers a solution to the problem of class bias she sees in the academy: “We need to be far less important to people’s lives than we are” (131). What she seems to mean by this is that it is not enough merely to include more working-class people in our classrooms, especially when we make the price of staying there the loss of their identity. She advocates instead that we eliminate the academy’s gatekeeper power, to make something other than a college degree the ticket to a good life. O’Dair offers no specifics for this dismantling or for its end result. But one can imagine the unsettling prospect of working-class children opting out of college altogether. For some academics, suggests O’Dair, this would be a welcome relief.