Exemplifying mentorship for working-class first-generation scholars

When I began my graduate program at the University of Maryland, I had no idea that I would experience such high levels of imposter syndrome. I earned high grades as an undergraduate and was competitive enough to receive a fellowship for the PhD program, so I went in feeling prepared for a rigorous academic curriculum. But the workload was heavier than expected, and when I encountered my peers inside and outside the classroom, and observed how my peers interacted with such confidence with some of our discipline's most prestigious faculty, I was intimidated. I began doubting my abilities anew, and started to fear that I was going to get found out, seen to be incompetent, as if somehow they had made a mistake by letting me in.

Among the most prominent faculty members I encountered was Dr George Ritzer. His accomplishments and prestige could have made him the most intimidating of the faculty with whom I got to work. But the exact opposite was true—I found in George one of the most down-to-earth and approachable faculty members, who would go on to take the time to nurture me as a developing scholar. He created an exciting classroom environment that drew in all his students, instilling in us the excitement of learning social theory. I found in George a patient mentor who would provide in-depth feedback and who took my ideas seriously but challenged me to improve. He would serve as an exemplar of public sociology by linking his scholarship to real-world issues that directly impact people's lives (Burawoy, 2005).

In this Festschrift article, I reflect on how George instilled in me, as a working-class first-generation student, a love and mastery of social theory, a foundation in his theoretical contributions that we could further develop in our own work, a passion for and commitment to public sociology, and he modeled the type of academic that I would strive to become. Along the way, I outline how I believe George's own working-class first-generation roots informed his contributions to this style of teaching and mentorship, to nurture and develop students like me that have come from similar roots.

George's pedagogy facilitated an exciting intellectual environment that encouraged rigor and debate, but without the pretentiousness and competition that so often exists in graduate school. It made for the single best classroom experience I had as a student: his Postmodern Social Theory course. As a class, we tackled some of the most difficult readings I have ever encountered from authors like Jean Baudrillard, Frederic Jameson, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, David Harvey, and Zygmunt Bauman. In addition to helping to make such difficult theory accessible, I learned that theory is both pleasurable and a survival skill for interrogating the social world. As noted in other sections in this volume, some of George's most important contributions to sociology are in social theory, and this brilliance was further reflected in the classroom. George's work would also become essential to shaping my own thinking about culture, inequality, globalization, political economy, and theory.

By the time I began taking courses with George, I had already developed intense feelings of imposter syndrome. It drove me to work incredibly hard and to over prepare for class, which unbeknownst to me was a strategy George had also adopted as a graduate student. In a published interview (Dandaneau and Dodsworth, 2006: 89), George reflected that he was “very insecure” taking a sociology graduate course while working on his PhD in Organizational Behavior. (For those who don’t know, George is self-trained in sociology and never completed a degree in the field.) During the course, students were assigned to pick one of three books to read but, he reflected, “I was so insecure that I read them all.” Through that experience, George explained, “what I discovered was that I could operate at their level, in part, because I could outwork them.” George may not have realized that I, too, had such insecurity as a graduate student, but he knew what it was like to have it.

While I was building my own extreme work habits in trying to keep up with the other students, George's classes actually felt different from my other courses. First, his love of theory brought true joy to our graduate seminars. The intellectual pleasure in making sense of and debating a wide range of social theory would come to be one of the elements that most stood out during my sociology PhD experience. Second, George's regular usage of subtle humor, laughter, and a genuine approachability cut through the academic posturing and one-upping that graduate students can sometimes adopt when trying to stand out. His style meant that even an insecure, working-class, first-generation graduate student could share in this love of theory while meaningfully participating in a discussion with a world-renowned theorist. It would also inspire me to pursue a comprehensive exam in theory, widely believed in the department to be the most challenging of the exams. Passing the exam with distinction was the catalyst for overcoming my imposter syndrome, finally feeling like I, too, belonged, that I could operate at their level.

Beyond his teaching excellence in the classroom, George has been recognized for his contributions to teaching across the discipline. For example, his most popular book, McDonaldization (Ritzer, 2020), is now in its 10^th edition (with an 11^th edition forthcoming) and has sold a staggering number of copies for a theoretically oriented book. As a testament to its broad student appeal, the concept inspired readers in a wide range of disciplines, has been excerpted in a range of textbooks, and translated into nearly 20 languages. Students like me have also relied on his wonderfully written comprehensive overviews of social theory, such as Classical Sociological Theory (Ritzer and Stepnisky, 2020) and Modern Sociological Theory (Ritzer and Stepnisky, 2021), to enrich our understanding. It is no surprise that, in 2000, George won the American Sociological Association's (ASA) Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award. As noted by the ASA, “the award recognizes contributions that have made a significant impact on the manner in which sociology is taught at a regional, state, national, or international level” and is typically “given for a series of contributions spanning several years or an entire career.” George's teaching has both engaged insecure, working-class first-generation students like me, and improved student learning across our entire field.

As a mentor and academic model, George's passion for and commitment to public sociology (Burawoy, 2005) inspired me from an early point in my graduate career. As the entries throughout this volume demonstrate, George's brilliant work on McDonaldization theory, consumption, and prosumption have deeply impacted critical theory and academic discourse. While he was less of an activist himself, his work continuously engages broad audiences with a “critical imagination.” Much of George's books, articles, and presentations have been especially designed toward helping extend sociology and social theory to non-academic and undergraduate audiences. His work not only enables us to make sense of the world in an intelligible way but it exposes “the gap between what is and what could be … to remind us that the world could be different” (Burawoy, 2005).

In an academic landscape where so many researchers publish scholarship that few people read, George reflected that he wanted to write books “where more people were reading what I was writing” (Dandaneau and Dodsworth, 2006: 91). Given the tremendous reach of his writing, that seems like an understatement. In addition to other scholars, his work on McDonaldization, consumption, and globalization has inspired activists around the world. This is especially the case for those resisting McDonaldization, consumer culture, and corporate-led globalization—helping everyday people to understand how social structures shape their everyday lives and how we can resist them to further human freedom (Smart, 1999). George has also been the keynote speaker at numerous conferences that attract practitioners, including those in business (e.g., hospitality management, tourism), education, and from theological seminaries. He has given various public lectures to general audiences, served as a jurist on panels for general awards (e.g., the Slow Food Award), and written articles or been interviewed for a multitude of newspapers and magazines.

George's mentorship would have both direct and indirect impacts on my work in public sociology. His early feedback on my coursework would train me to be a clear and engaging writer when communicating my ideas. This was deepened when he invited me to co-author our textbooks, Globalization: A Basic Text (Ritzer and Dean, 2021) and Globalization: The Essentials (Ritzer and Dean, 2019). George worked closely with me to help me write captivating hooks, identify content that would be most exciting for students, and use metaphors to effectively communicate complex ideas. Of course, his important theorizing on McDonaldization, the globalization of nothing (Ritzer, 2007), and consumer culture greatly shaped this work as well. A look at George's highly impressive list of publications reveals a long list of former graduate student co-authors whom he has supported as developing scholars, several of whom were also working-class first-generation students. I would draw on and apply the skills I learned from George to subsequent public sociology projects. In 2010, I co-created The Sociological Cinema, a website for using video and popular culture to teach and learn sociology. My recent book, Class Cultures and Social Mobility: The Hidden Strengths of Working-Class First-Generation Graduates (Dean, 2026), further reflects this goal for making academic ideas widely accessible and applicable to one's own life. While the book is published by an academic press, I wrote it to appeal broadly to first-generation students and working professionals alike, to make sense of their upward climb from the working-class into middle-class professional life.

Finally, part of an academic mentor’s role is to model the type of professional we want to become. Despite his global fame and status within the discipline, I have found in George one of the most modest and humble scholars I have ever met. I have been lucky enough to observe George in the classroom, at dinner with publishers, and being flocked by fans asking for pictures at conferences. In all cases, George is very approachable and engaging, generous with his time, and kind in his responses. Steven Dandaneau and Robin Dodsworth (2006: 95) captured it perfectly when, in an interview with George, they reflected “you seem decidedly more comfortable comparing yourself, tongue-in-cheek, to Seinfeld's George Costanza than to a figure like Marx” (but this George is much nicer than the other!). Of course, George's response conveyed his characteristic humility and self-effacing nature, pointing to his own “limitations.”

George's exemplary teaching and mentorship of working-class first-generation graduate students like me, I believe, stems from his own working-class roots and how he has maintained the strengths of a working-class culture. George grew up with a self-described “pretty marginal economic existence” (Dandaneau and Dodsworth, 2006: 85). His father never completed high school and worked as a cab driver while his mother worked as a secretary. He recounted a memory “where we had this piggy-bank that my parents use to dump half dollars in, and things were so bad that my mother had to break open the piggybank in order to live off this money.” George would attend the City College of New York, which in his words, “was seen as a respectable place for relatively impoverished New Yorkers to go. I could live at home and save money.” He has further shared that his education at City College beat any other of his (more prestigious) educational experiences—a testament to the public education system and its potential for uplifting working-class people.

Many of the elements of his teaching and mentoring that impacted me so deeply as a student—which helped me to (mostly) overcome my imposter syndrome and develop into the type of academic that I am today—are rooted in the working-class culture that I believe influenced George. These include his relatability and down-to-earth approach, practicality in wanting his writing to be read and be useful, rather than producing knowledge for knowledge's sake, and his work ethic and humility. All of these are strong elements of working-class culture (Dean, 2026; Lamont, 2000). Like his status as a leading theorist and intellectual within our field, those working-class roots are something to be proud of.

As a working-class first-generation academic, I am grateful to have taken classes and been mentored by George. While I will never attain the type of prestige that George holds in our field, we academics do play an incredibly important role in the lives of our students. I strive to provide this type of exemplary mentoring for my students—especially my working-class first-generation students. Just as George has done for me, I hope that I, too, can instill in my students such a love for and pleasure engaging with social theory, rich theoretical ideas upon which to build, a commitment to public sociology with a critical consciousness, and humility and relatability.