Nickel and Dimed: New Students' Convocation Keynote Address
Delivered by Gene Nichol
Dean and Burton Craige Professor of Law
UNC School of Law
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Thank you. Let me add my congratulations and welcome. I'm particularly glad to see you all. I spent so much time last year talking to the parents, senators, congressmen, governors and wealthy friends of the thousands of people who applied and didn't get admitted to Carolina, I'm glad to see that we actually did let somebody in. And not only did you get in, you exercised the profound good judgment of coming to this marvelous place, instead of going to New York or Cambridge or DC, or, God forbid, Durham, Raleigh, Winston-Salem or Charlottesville. I haven't met anyone yet who regretted that choice.
There is excitement in the air. For us as well as you. Crowds have returned to Franklin Street. Bruce Springsteen is on his way to town. Roy Williams is already here [you're the class who brought him with you]. The Carolina summer reading program's on Fox News. A couple hundred folks are looking to run for governor in California. God is in his heaven, and much is right with the world.
There has been a bit of a brouhaha over Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. As a university administrator, I lobbied hard for my own summer reading choice -- Lassie Come Home. I know this year the committee thought it was being cautious. But when I saw they picked a book I'd already read -- twice -- I suspected we were in trouble.
I've been fascinated to follow people's opinions in the papers. Full-page ads about Marxist rants, "intellectual pornography," demeaning propaganda," "literature lite," the "offensive" trash of a "democratic socialist," a one-sided, anti-Christian attack on America, a wedge driven between the university and the people of North Carolina. From what I know of Barbara Ehrenreich, she must be thrilled.
On the other hand, Nickel and Dimed has now been described as "classic immersion journalism," a long needed "bottom up" view of the American economy, a voice for the voiceless, a modern Grapes of Wrath. And, my favorite, a work so controversial that it has accomplished the impossible -- upper classmen read it voluntarily.
Not to be outdone, an array of North Carolina senators demanded the Chancellor provide [quote] "the names and the positions" of the university faculty responsible for selecting the book -- while another legislator demanded to be told the political affiliation of committee members. Reminding us of distant and darker times. Leading me to wonder whether next summer we ought to consider a somewhat shorter assignment -- the Bill of Rights.
I can think of a host of ways we could look at Nickel and Dimed, and the controversy it's generated.
We could see it from our state's perspective. Where 30% of the workforce makes under $8 an hour; where a high percentage of families don't earn enough to readily meet the basic necessities of life; where over a million of us have no health care coverage; and we have one of the largest income gaps in the nation.
Or, even closer to home, we could look through the eyes of our public employees -- here on this campus and around the state. Where over half of North Carolina's state workers are paid under $30,000; almost half can't afford to buy health insurance for their families; and many work two jobs to try to make ends meet.
Or, in our academic programs at Carolina, we could ask, as others have, whether we tilt ideologically to the left -- or, as even I believe -- whether it can sometimes be harder, and take more courage, to stand up and argue for certain conservative philosophical positions than more broadly accepted liberal ones.
I'm not sure of the answers to all these dilemmas. And as I get older, I have less confidence in the labels and categories and ideologies that drive them. But in reviewing Ehrenreich's book, there is at least one matter I am sure of.
I am certain it's tragic, and unacceptable, that the plight of the poorest members of our communities has so clearly receded from our attentions. We're the richest country in human history. Yet almost one in five kids lives in poverty, giving us -- to our humiliation -- one of the highest child poverty rates in the industrial world.
41 million of us have no health care -- though all other major nations assure universal coverage. And though, as Martin Luther King reminded us: "of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman."
We have rich and poor public schools. Not just private schools mind you, but rich and poor public schools. As if any theory of justice or virtue could explain the exclusion of innocent children from the American dream.
In my own arena, we brag of a commitment to equal justice, while a huge percentage are locked out, priced out of the legal system. In much of American life, formal equality is submerged in a torrent of disadvantage.
Yet, decade after decade, in cultural arena after cultural arena, in election after election, these crushing problems are barely discussed. In law, in politics, in philosophy, in the academy, we turn our gaze away from those locked at the bottom. We have come to think that a regime of economic apartheid is both unavoidable and untroubling. In accepting it, we turn our backs on our best selves.
Lincoln thought the central idea of America was that the weak would gradually be made stronger and ultimately all would have an equal chance. But what was central for Lincoln has become alien to us. That's why reading Nickel and Dimed can come as a shock to so many. It is richly ironic that this single book, highlighting the invisible among us, would be assailed as too potent a message, in the face of relentless countervailing signals from every side.
As Ehrenreich puts it: "the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric, it's intellectual endeavors, from its daily entertainment." My friend Bill Friday would turn it over and respond: " a million North Carolinians living in poverty are paying taxes to subsidize your education. I want to know what you're going to do to pay it back."
But we're not here tonight just to talk about a book. We also celebrate your induction into a community, a highly remarkable one, the University of North Carolina. A great public university. The first public university. And you start tonight at a time in our history when the future of public higher education is contested. Many of the best publics are now taking decided steps toward privatization. Michigan, Virginia, perhaps Berkeley and Texas. The University of Virginia law school became private this year. I spoke in Virginia a couple of weeks ago and indicated this was yet one more piece of evidence that if Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he'd be a Tar Heel. It wasn't well received.
But given these challenges, and given the lessons of Nickel and Dimed, we might remind ourselves tonight that this institution was created BECAUSE opportunity is not equally distributed in our state, or in our nation. We exist, as Frank Graham taught, 'to savor and preserve for even the poorest youth the intellectual and spiritual resources of mankind."
Like me, many of you are the first in your family to go to college. We can feel deep resonance with a speech given two decades ago by British labor leader Neil Kinnock:
"Why am [I] the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to go to university? Was it because all my predecessors were 'thick'? Did they lack the talent -- those people who could sing and play, who could dream dreams, see visions? Were [they] not university material?
"Was it because they were weak? Those people who could stand with their legs straight and face the people who had control over their lives, and tell them, 'No, I won't take your orders.' Were they weak?"
"Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we have because they didn't have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand."
Carolina exists to "secure a platform upon which to stand" -- whether one is born high or low, black or white, rich or poor, rural or urban. Whether you're from the manicured suburbs of Myers Park or the bleaker streets of Grifton. If we lose our grip on that -- the mandate of affordable, accessible, extraordinary education -- the University of North Carolina will no longer truly exist. We would abandon a mission as clear as it is sacred. Virginia, Texas, Michigan may go another way. Not North Carolina.
And, finally, this lovely, heartening controversy over Nickel and Dimed points to another core component of our mission. If, as I believe, vibrant democracies cannot exist without strong public universities; vibrant public universities cannot exist without an equal commitment to the values and processes of democratic liberty.
Public universities are meant to be especial laboratories for the understanding and critique of our social order. Democratic governance demands the piercing eye of a questioning populace. And an empowered and participatory citizenry begins with the independent explorations of engaged students.
Our public universities, then, must be more open, more rigorous, more skeptical, more challenging, less ideological, less doctrinaire, and less subject to orthodoxy than the broader societies they serve. So to those who would protest, and challenge the received wisdom, and form committees to push your visions of a better Carolina, you stand with a long, cherished line of dissenters in Chapel Hill. As the marvelous Bill Aycock put it, "Carolina has come far, short on cash, but long on freedom."
I close with familiar sentiments -- at least to Tar Heels. Sentiments that bring together both why we are here and what we have read. Charles Kuralt's now famous University Day Address delivered a decade ago:
"What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well or the bell or the stonewalls, or the crisp October nights, or the memory of dogwoods blooming. No, our love for this place is based on the fact that it is, as it was meant to be, the university of the people."
"We found here something in the air. A kind of generosity, a certain tolerance, a disposition toward freedom of action and inquiry that has made of Chapel Hill for thousands of us a moral center of the universe."
"After 200 years, we can read again the words on the University's seal -- 'Light' and 'Liberty.' We can say that the University of North Carolina has lived by those two short noble words. And that in all the American story, there is no place quite like this."
Now, in truth, I don't think we've lived every moment of our history by those words, "light" and "liberty." Too much blood and too many tears prove otherwise. But given our history, and given our aspirations, I do believe that we have a better chance of living out that creed, that literally uplifting public mission, than any other place on earth.
And unless we are to abandon the charge of democracy, and assume, like much of the rest of the academy, that real opportunity lies only for the already blessed, then the need for great public universities is stronger today than at any moment in our history.
Dr. Graham believed we can build "an intellectual and spiritual center for the world" here, while remaining true to our "foundational commitments to democracy and equality." If we do, Charles Kuralt will be right that "there is no place quite like this."
For more information about the Carolina Summer Reading Program, send email to read@unc.edu.
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Last revised: September 4, 2003.