Learning Class Zero

To the Editors:

Siddhartha Mazumdar's editorial, "Working Class Zero" puzzles me. While Mr. Mazumdar seems to draw on his own experience as a dishwasher to portray his fellow worders as rather dehumanized by their work, the overall effect is to mock these people. One has the impression that the author's real concern is not that Cara, Gregory and Jim have boring jobs, but that he should be forced to sully himself with their company. I recall one of my professors at this university who, although known as a great liberal and humanist, once blasted the entire population of South Boston as idiots and cretins because of the way in which they speak. Such "fair-weather liberalism" is not only offensive in its superficiality, but dangerous in its implicit assumption that persons without college educations are inferior and little more than a necessary nuisance to people like Mr. Mazumdar. American liberalism has a strong connection with education and intellectualism, a connection that often breeds a blind arrogance and goes far to defeat its preached tenets. The thoughtless self-indulgence of Mr. Mazumdar's foolish editorial is exactly the sort of thing one hopes not to find in persons as loftily educated as he seems to assume himself to be. "Learning Class Zero?" Paul D. Erickson   GSAS