I didn’t really have an idea about Gaudino. I had no idea it was controversial with the faculty. It just seemed like, “Oh, here is this program and we’re going to apply some of the knowledge from the classroom outside the campus. What a great idea.” So I applied. I do then recall when we […]

There’s nobody in the world who could have gotten me to read Hannah Arendt. It’s still probably the most dense material I have ever read, On Revolution. He assigned us all those books to read the summer before, “Small Town in Candor?” something like that. [Small Town in Mass Society.] Books on education. Robert Coles. […]

I remember my father being concerned with my safety saying, “You’re going to Appalachia as a white, upper-middleclass kid and you’re going to live in their house?” So he was concerned I was going to get ripped off. Or, yeah, “You’re going to live in inner-city Detroit?” or “Are you going to live down in […]

My parents, there were some questions like sort of “Why?” And the interesting thing was that Gaudino made a real effort to include the parents, to educate them a little bit. We had a couple of sessions where parents were invited on campus, to his house and he really wooed the parents and was writing […]

I think in part he figured: OK, Deep South is going to be different for most of these students, the black-white racial issues; Kentucky, Appalachia, the poverty, the rural; the Iowa farm I think was just agriculture and I think the theory was small farmer, even then, contrasting it with maybe bigger business; and then […]