I've spent my whole professional career devoted to the study of elite culture. I owe my position and my livelihood to my knowledge of this culture, to my "cultural capital" if you'd like. Yet the official position of "The Profession" is that this cultural capital is something to be ashamed of. It gets you the jobs, the prestige, but an investment in it is supposed to be a bad thing, because it is, by its very nature, "elitist." "The Profession" is deeply ambivalent, then. It depends on a knowledge and a power that it wants to disavow.