At first I was very surprised by the fact that City College was once called the "Harvard of the Poor," but after thinking about it for a while I was not surprised. As I have often heard, the CUNY system is considered one of the best systems in the country. After reading both articles I was amazed at how many radical thinkers there was in the past. It seems that presently noncomforming ideas are horrifying. I was also surprised by the number of publiclly known Intellectuals, and find it very depressing that there are no current day counterpart to these Intellectuals.