By Jacob Pactor
Editor of The Bachelor
How do blue-collar high school graduates transition into white-collar college life? How do they not forsake their blue-collar roots once they enter the hallowed arches of higher institutions? After college graduation, how do they combine their blue-collar upbringing with their white-collar education?
Alfred Lubrano, author of “Limb Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams,” will visit Wabash on Thursday, March 25, 2004 with some answers. He will give a public lecture at 11:15 am in the Wabash College Chapel in conjunction with the Sphinx Club’s Chapel Talk Series. At 4:15 pm, he will continue the conversation in Baxter Hall, Room 101. Also a journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Lubrano will visit Professor Jennifer Young’s Rhetoric of the News Media class and eat lunch with current student journalists.
Defining them as ‘Straddlers,’ Lubrano weaves in the challenges and difficulties white-collar educated, but blue-collar background folk have once they leave home. He should know. The first-generation college attendee, Lubrano attend Columbia while his father, a bricklayer, built buildings at Columbia. His story resonates with the stories of so many in the Wabash community.
“If you have any bloodlines at all to the working class, you will recognize– and newly discover–yourself in Alfred Lubrano’s inspired book. It’s the very American, real-as-a-streetfight story of a bricklayer’s son’s own uneasy journey out of Bensonhurst woven movingly with the journeys of a legion of other ‘Straddlers,’” Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Sydney Schanberg said about “Limbo.”
The Bachelor, Student Senate, The Hadley Fund and the Lecture Committee sponsor Lubrano’s visit.
For more information, contact Jacob Pactor at 765-361-6213 or bachelor@wabash.edu. Visit http://bachelor.wabash.edu/bachelor/lubrano.htm for updates.