Hal O'Brien

("Privilege" is in scare quotes here because, in my observation, the word isn't used except by people who already have it. Not unlike one who rails against the bourgeoisie is almost always a bourgeois.)

A very odd thing about this, right off the top: "The list is based on an exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University." Um, no, in fact. They're from Indiana State. Here's Mr. Barratt's page on "Social Class on Campus". Here's Barratt's faculty page. Here's Barratt's personal page.

The switch from Indiana to Illinois appears to have occurred very early on in the meme process. If you search by the cited researchers plus "Illinois," you get 819 hits. Do it with "Indiana" (the accurate version), and you get only 9. I suspect this is not unlike the time Mary Schmich's advice to, "Wear sunscreen," got mysteriously attributed to Kurt Vonnegut.

This is the original paper with the exercise, which appears to be meant to be done in a live class, not filled out as a questionnaire. (Note: MS WORD .DOC format, which Barratt seems to prefer throughout his pages.) Questions have been edited out, and a few have been re-worded, on their way to LJ.

In someone else's post of the meme (I won't point to it, since it's Friends Only), I had some more notes:

( To spare you further ramblings of a wordy bastard... )

See generally: Paul Fussell, Class; Lewis Lapham, Money and Class in America; Nelson Aldrich, Old Money.