A collaborative work of faculty and upperclassmen, the program that year included small group discussions led by students of three books we of the entering class had been instructed to read over the preceding summer.
The books were The Wretched of the Earth, Poverty in America, and The Plague.
That was not a reading list chosen by the Vatican or the American Legion.
Who did choose it?
I never knew.
All three were hits with the left of the period, though not entirely with the same factions of the left, and not for the same reasons.
I did not know it at the time, but both Camus and Harrington were anti-communists and Camus could never bring himself to betray his countrymen, the pieds-noirs.
However guilty his liberal conscience, he could never have brought himself, as Sartre did, to endorse Fanon's bloodcurdling project of global race hate.
All the same, remarkable testimony to the power of the left at that time at that school, I think.
Although with great effort I was able to later, that summer I couldn't finish Fanon.
The hate was too much for me.
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