SNET: I was a teenage communist

Nathan Newman nathan.newman at yale.edu
Fri Mar 10 19:01:50 PST 2000



>On Behalf Of Michael Pugliese


> > Interestingly, the campus itself provided a microcosm that proved
> communism
> > a failure, despite the views of its inhabitants. Most students lived in
> > on-campus houses of five or six students. They shared cooking, cleaning,
> and
> > financial arrangements.
> > I lived with four other people. We agreed to share the cost of
> food and to take turns cooking and cleaning. But each week, the funds came
> up short as one person or another failed to ante up.

As a graduate of Amherst College, the communist school in question, this is the oddest part of the post, since everyone at Amherst eats in the dining hall. It's essentially compulsory with no cooking facilities in almost any of the on-campus housing (again, living on campus is also almost compulsory).

Since a couple of other stories of public life on campus fit stories I've heard from more recent graduates, I'm trying to figure out if the whole thing is a fake compiled from public stories of PC clashes, adding a layer of personal angst to give it bite.

Although there is little question that Amherst has relatively liberal professors and I sympathize with the writers disdain for the particular species of limosine faux revolutionary that occasionally stalked the campus (with the emphasis on faux).

-- Nathan Newman



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