Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 2

   With only one concept to base my first blog post on, Emile Durkheim’s concept of the division of labor, I paid a visit to the suburban city of Walnut, specifically, Mt. San Antonio College, a Los Angeles county community college nestled on the border of Walnut, West Covina and Pomona. On the macro level, the city of Walnut and its surrounding area appear to be sharply divided by class, with the more affluent living atop a hill that overlooks much of the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. On the micro level, as one of the largest community colleges in the state, Mt. San Antonio College boasts an incredibly diverse and eclectic student body, representing a wide array of social inequalities, ranging from religious and cultural to political and gender differences. However, much like its surroundings, the most striking social inequality that Mt. San Antonio College boasts is class differences in the form of its students’ pre-major program. Like the majority of class differences, the inequalities reflected in Walnut and Mt. San Antonio College stem from the concept of job specialization, or, according to Durkheim, division of labor. Durkheim believed that a job differentiation was functional by nature, believing that it occurs in response to the problems that arise when cities become more materially and morally dense. More importantly to the context of this blog, however, Durkheim believed that when people become so differentiated and specialized that they could no longer be tied together by a common culture, cultural fragmentation and, thus, social difference arises.

While I was able to identify this idea in the city Walnut, as the majority of people who live on the hill are doctors or high-paid executives, it was far easier to spot on a college campus. Possibly because community college students must decide on a major quickly, in order to transfer to a 4-year college, the majority of students were one of 3 pre-majors: business economics, mathematics, and a science based major within the pre-med umbrella. The only commonality between these majors is that they eventually lead to higher paying careers and at least a perceived sense of superiority, a theory that was confirmed when I spoke to the students that were on campus. Furthermore, it was also plain to see that Mt. San Antonio College was allocating a significant amount of their budget toward improving certain departments over others. While this was clearly visible in that the mathematics, science and business economics departments were the only departments that had no classes cut from their curriculum, it was made most evident by the fact that the three departments were housed in the newest and most expensive buildings, while other departments, such as the art history department, conducted their classes from portable classrooms.

It is clear that both Walnut and Mt. San Antonio College epitomize how Durkheim’s concept of division of labor can rapidly transcend its original functionality, instead morphing into a dysfunctional entity characterized by elitism and class inequality. It is these class differences that have emerged from job specification that serve to further classify, define and alienate groups within the Los Angeles Metropolitan area, supporting Robert E Park’s view that the city is made up of little worlds that touch, but never interpenetrate.