Leon Barber: UNC not always ‘elite’ school

Regarding the Feb. 13 news article “Spellings outlines UNC system vision”: Incoming UNC system President Margaret Spellings said that “educating elites is no longer the only game in town.”

When I went to UNC in the 1960s, I was the son of a working class family. My father was an automobile mechanic with a ninth-grade education, and my mother was a homemaker with a high school diploma.

There I met many working-class students from all over the state, and we worked at Lenoir Hall, the library and other places on campus and worked all summer. I know we never considered ourselves “the elites.”

I don’t recognize the school she described. It was affordable for working-class families then. It should be now, too.

This story was originally published February 16, 2016 at 5:42 PM with the headline "Leon Barber: UNC not always ‘elite’ school."