Excellent article in the New Yorker, by UT professor Minkah Makalani
It begins —
When I was growing up, in Kansas City, Missouri, I didn’t know anyone who had gone to college. No one in my family had ever gone; almost everyone found work in the city’s ever-growing service sector, learned a trade, or joined the military. College seemed like a good idea, though I knew as much about how to get there as I did how to pilot a space shuttle. What little I knew about college life I gleaned from the TV series “A Different World.” From the exploits of the math whiz Dwayne Wayne and the Southern belle Whitley Gilbert at Hillman College I understood that, whatever it got right or wrong, college offered two things: a place where you could debate ideas, and a place where there were no guns.