In this article, the author reflects on his feelings as a working-class transplant into academic culture and the middle class. He draws on his feelings of alienation from the people who surround him and his observations of the cultural subordination necessary to succeed in the middle class world to explain his desire to do more to help other first-generation college students. [Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.]