We recently received an email announcing a Jan. 30 workshop at our alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about “class awareness.” This is not about remembering when you were supposed to be in organic chemistry lab; it is concerned with acquiring skills to “raise awareness, shift cultural beliefs about social class, build cross-class solidarity,” and so on.

We are baffled. It has been decades since we walked what was called the “infinite corridor” in M.I.T.’s main building, whose facade had chiseled into to it the names of science’s pantheon: Aristotle, Pasteur, Faraday, Kepler, Lavoisier, Darwin, and so on. But the only class system at the “‘tute” that we recall was the division between hyper-nerds and everyone else.