UB Author's Latest Work Confronts Class Divide

For the many Americans battling every day just to make a living, societal change won't come until the deeper economic and social issues in our country are better understood - something UB professor Lois Weis has been trying to do for almost 30 years.

Weis, a noted author and longtime professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, will signing her latest book, "Class Reunion: The Remaking of an American White Working Class," at Talking Leaves on Main Street this Thursday at 7 p.m.

"I'm very proud of this book. I feel it's the best thing I've ever written, and it was very complicated to write," Weis said. "Of course, the critical world has to assess it for themselves."

A probing look into the world of working-class society, Weis's latest book is follow-up to her 1990 publication, "Working Class Without Work," in which she offered an introspective look into a working-class high school. Weis profiled the teachers and students in that blue-collar setting to see how members of the working class survive economic obstacles.

"In the 1980s, the working class was disappearing, and many people were sinking into poverty," Weis said. "Men who had in previous generations been working in the steel industry were taking a major salary cut."

"Class Reunion," her latest work, focuses on the same students and teachers 15 years later, now older and with altered perspectives.

But Weis explained that many of the graduates and teachers were not in as dire economic straits as she had expected. The reason, she said, is because both the men and the women in many families worked to make ends meet.

"Most of the students did not end up as impoverished as I had thought they would," Weis said. "Some of the people I caught up with 15 years later were not in poverty because gender roles were realigned. Women who had wanted to go to college since high school were now working as nurses or teachers, or in banks. Men were working as hospital technicians or as janitors."

Weis chooses not to disclose the location of Freeway High School in her book, saying that the unknown location gives the book more of a universal feel.

"The entire global economy is changing as America loses jobs based on outsourcing," Weis said. "Each country is different in the way the issues play. We have a particular history in America that forces the agenda."

Weis has studied the conditions in certain Buffalo schools, although again she would not disclose the names in order to keep a globally pertinent effect.

"I have much more of a national following," said Weis, who has also studied schools in Britain and Canada. "That's where I gained an understanding of these things, in the international landscape."

The professor has unearthed similar truths in other works, including the award-winning "Construction Sites," which Weis said was about "spaces of possibility in otherwise oppressive or negative settings."

Weis also said that her time at UB and her study of schools in a city like Buffalo has greatly shaped her research.

"My being at UB has really shaped who I am as a scholar," she said. "I don't work in a lab, I interact with real people different than those on campus. What's compelling about Buffalo is how real it is. Otherwise I'd be a different researcher."