Will Bunch: After the Ivory Tower Falls

Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI Radio in New York

From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Will Bunch, the epic untold story of college—the great political and cultural fault line of American life According Will Bunch today there are two Americas, separate and unequal, one educated and one not. The strongest determinant of whether a voter was likely to support Donald Trump in 2016 was whether or not they attended college, and the degree of loathing they reported feeling toward the so-called “knowledge economy of clustered, educated elites. Somewhere in the winding last half-century of the United States, the quest for a college diploma devolved from being proof of America’s commitment to learning, science, and social mobility into a kind of Hunger Games contest to the death. That quest has infuriated both the millions who got shut out and millions who got into deep debt to stay afloat. Join us for an examination of After the Ivory Tower Falls, when award-winning journalist Will Bunch embarks on a deeply reported journey to the heart of the American Dream, on this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large.