Mandatory Summer Reading (Yawn) · 22 July 2008

By Charlotte Allen – Minding the Campus

It’s July, and there’s one safe bet to be made about the 2.8 million or so new high school graduates who will be entering college as freshmen in just six or seven weeks: Few of them are likely to have even started reading the “one book” that the adminstrators at their chosen college have likely assigned them as summer reading…..As one might suspect on today’s highly politicized campuses, days, the vast majority of freshman summer reading assignments have reflected not so much a commitment to fostering freshmen’s intellectual growth—-via, say, a literary classic or a seminal philosophical treatise such as Plato’s Republic—-as an effort to immerse them in the political cause du jour for liberal academics….most of the books assigned for the classes of 2012 tend to be deadly earnest lucubrations about perceived current social problems that call to mind Sam Goldwyn’s famous quip, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”… The selection criteria typically include lip service to encouraging freshmen to “grow intellectually” (the words are from Cal State Northridge’s website), but they also include such factors as: a not-too-challenging level of readability (today’s high-school graduates have limited literary exposure, which may explain why Persepolis and other graphic novels are popular list choices), the book’s relation to whatever program theme (racial sensitivity, greening the campus, and so forth) the college happens to be promoting for the year…Why don’t colleges show respect for their entering students instead by assigning them genuinely substantial, exciting and timeless books that they are likely to ponder for many years? Well, one university actually does exactly that. It’s Cornell. Over past few years Cornell’s summer reading for freshmen has featured Sophocles’s Antigone (assigned in 2003), Kafka’s The Trial (assigned in 2004), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (assigned in 2005), The Great Gatsby (assigned in 2006), and Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (assigned in 2007). This year’s selection is Lincoln at Gettysburg, historian Garry Wills’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1993 examination of the famous Civil War speech in terms of its roots in Greek rhetoric and the language of the Declaration of Independence. Now, there’s a common reading experience likely to stick with Cornell students for the rest of their lives.