A few years ago, we had a representative from ''Teach America'' visit our campus. Teach America tries to recruit this nation's most talented college graduates to go into some of the nation's worst public schools. This is Teach America's means of transforming our schools into something better.

This woman stood up in front of a large group of Duke students, a larger group than I would suppose would come out to this sort of thing, and said to them, ''I can tell by looking at you that I have probably come to the wrong place. Somebody told me this was a BMW campus and I can believe it looking at you. Just looking at you, I can tell that all of you are a success. Why would you all be on this campus if you were not successful, if you were not going on to successful careers on Madison Avenue or W…