There are some ways in which class boundaries are blurring.
"People forget that Africa is a place in which class exists," she says.
"The girls themselves were given the option in which class they wanted to travel," he said.
But few observers contest that there are cases in which class actions perform an invaluable role.
It creates, they say, an atmosphere unlike that at any other university, one in which class differences fade away.
And, of course, the way in which class can demand you erase your geographical self, depending on which class you're in.
Trying to justify the current social order, in which class line are increasingly hard and fast and impermeable, you run the risk of moral equivocation.
A believer in the power of progressive politics, he calls for a debate in which class, rather than identity, would be at the fore.
For most people the work is chiefly familiar as transmitted through the Mozart-Da Ponte opera, a sublime social comedy in which class is clearly a crucial factor.
This was made clear by the day's lesson, in which class members took turns talking about what their parents had done for a living.
And Wyoming, in response to a court order striking down its school financing formulas, devised a model school -- one in which class sizes were held down, for example -- for the elementary, middle and high school grades.
