Richard Rodriguez, Transformed by Education

From a review of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez in the April 7 TLS:

In 1976, as a young academic, Richard Rodriguez received job offers from several prestigious universities in the US, then turned them all down and left academia for good. It was an act of protest. Rodriguez, the child of Mexican immigrant parents, had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the affirmative action policies being adopted by US higher education institutions, which saw him become a "highly rewarded minority student". . . . As a graduate student of Renaissance literature he feels his social position is closer to that of his white classmates than that of "the Mexican American janitors and gardeners working on campus." In his eyes affirmative action is "a parody of social reform" whereby "the least disadvantaged were helped first, advanced because many others of their race were more disadvantaged."

Rodriguez's misgivings about affirmative action arise from his sense that education has transformed him irrevocably, distancing him from his family, his childhood and his Hispanic heritage, and awarding him the privileges of the gringo elite. His memoir, first published in 1982, describes the lonely process of transformation. . .  Rodriguez is unequivocal about the price of such an education for a so-called "minority student" like himself: at every stage the student moves further from the person they used to be, and there can be no going back.

The TLS reviewer wants this to be about race, but it is not; somewhere on this blog I have a similar post about another memoir, that one by a white, working class Englishwoman who felt the same process happening to her. Plus her parents were actively hostile to her educational aspirations, which they felt as a rejection of their whole way of life, which was an issue Rodgriguez did not have.

Taken seriously, education changes you, so if you don't want to be changed, serious higher education is something you must absolutely avoid.