UNC’s choice of Nickel and Dimed, as Jon Sanders has noted, was abominable. But let’s not forget that Duke also went for agitprop for its young minds, inflicting Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities on its incoming freshmen.
I have just finished reading Sol Stern’s excellent new book Breaking Free, on the disastrous public education system in New York, and he devotes most of a chapter to Kozol’s demented writings. Kozol, reliable socialist he, was invited to Cuba years ago, and obliged by writing a loathesome bit of propaganda entitled Children of the Revolution. His books harp continuously on one theme: that it’s insufficient spending on public schools (due to greedy and racist voters and officials) that keeps the poor miseducated. It’s never because of any failure of the socialist public education system. I recommend Stern’s book highly.
I wonder if any discussion leader at Duke brought up the manifest deficiencies in Kozol’s view. More likely, the “discussions” were purely laudatory.
