Transcripts For CSPAN2 Discussion On Beach Books 20160424

29yearold, what emerged from his reading of the 2004 Alexander Hamilton is now the hottest ticket on broadway, the hiphop musical hamilton. Broadway play is widely note for many things, including its exact fidelity to the historical facts. So beach books need not be light read, and the right beach book can kick up a lot of sand. As it happens whether the top five most assigned common readings for College Freshman last year was also a book about the obstacles overcome by an immigrant. It is the considerably shorter enriques journey, which offers a harrowing account of a 16yearold honduran boy, a drug user and a thief, who makes his way through mexico and across the texas border at laredo. His book contrasts on several points one is that enriques journey is written at a level appropriate for fifth graders. As gauged by the independent rating system. Well, welcome to the launch of the National Association of scholars new edition of beach booksful its our fifth. This Edition Covers the books assigned by colleges and universities to their incoming freshmen classes in summer of 2014 and 2015. We have a splendid lineup of speakers to break the champagne lot oval the bow of beach books number five. A little later well hear from executive director of the nas, ashley thorne, who first conceived of studying and reading programs as a way to illuminate what colleges really value. She wrote the first four reports, and established the subject as something that book professors and the general public takes seriously. We also will hear from the nas director of communication, david randall. Who wrote this new report. Dr. Randall, whose ph. D from rutgers is in history, joined the National Association of scholars only in october 1st, and his first assignment was to synthesize our massive collection of data on the common readings programs into coherent analysis. He did astonishingly good work in these last few months and well have time later on for questions and conversations, but our keynote speaker is mark bauerline, professor of english at emery university, former director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the arts. Let me say how grateful i am that first thing is hosting the launch of this report. One of the true storm walls in our society again the raging seas sea immediate county tritt that threaten to drown or public culture. The quality books shape the minds of the coming generation as clearly a matterunder general si. The probation officer can explain that much better than i. [applause] thank you for coming here. Its not happy news to speak about Higher Education about their reading choices that are made by the colleges every year, and what im going to do here is just lay out the background about why Colleges Even have these programs at all, and actually to give a little bit of sympathy for the problems that theyre facing when they do assign these books and what they hope these programs, which can run all year long they collect a book, have the incoming students read it, spend a few weeks, organize a program, debate, bring some assignments into the courses that are oriented towards the become they have the author very important to have the author attend and speak. So its a long process. Much as the assignment of books for them all to read. Over the summer. And they wanted to be an extended experience. They want them to spend some time with this book. Why . A lot of other courses to take. Graduated from high school. All summer long, admitted to this institution. Why pile on this extra reading, this extra test. The last thing you want to do is read books over the summer and well see thats one of the issues. So, just briefly, there really are i choose three major problems that schools face today with their incoming students. Actually is not so much the selective institutions but all the others, but actually it affects the selected institutions as well. One is that they read one book, and this is something that doesnt exist otherwise. There is no common reading now either in American Life, in general, or in the schools curriculum. I ask students in a class if i refer to a book, i teach American Literature. Huck finn . Some of them maybe two or three out of the 20 students in the class have read it. Great gatsby. Maybe a couple. The most popular ones the days for High School Reading are oto kill a mockingbird, probably the most popular novel that is chosen in high school, more than have threat but still only 20 of the kid there was a report on this a few years ago. This is a unique actual condition in American Life of for 150 years in the schools and out of the schools, the bible was the book everybody knew. The bible was everywhere. It was in political discourse. It was in School Reading books. The american primmer, lessons around biblical verses. Everyone read the bible or head it read in church, at the dinner table. That was a book that was common could everyone. So i actually have my American Literature students all read portions of genesis and leviticus which is very important at the time of the founding. And the sermon on the mount so when i say to students, president obama in his first nature inaugural used the phrase, time to put away childish things. Does anyone know where that came from . That not the sermon on the mount but five months later. Im getting i dont want to say second corinthian. Public schools grew more secular. We did have really for a few decades there there was a fairly common core curriculum in 11th for 12th grade, sometimes earlier grades, where you did have a set of american works that most students did read. The short stories and the Scarlet Letter letter, walt whitman and emerson, and huck finn, gatsby, hemingway. Fairly solid for the 50s, 60s and 70s and multiculture uranium along and killed that tradition and the promise of mussty culturallism is we would have those works being read but a much richer set as well. More literature by women and minorities. Authors, and this would actually build Greater Knowledge so we would have an africanamerican literary tradition that people would know to go along with other traditions. That isnt what happened. What happened was that instead of having a bigger tradition that everyone would read portions of, it became all over the place. Teachers are largely allowed to select or School Districts select their own works. Common core does not have a required reading list. Theres a recommend reading list and it is largely ignored in the implementation of common core. We dont want to tell people what to read. That sounds like prescriptions and we dont want to get to that because you start excluding things, telling people what to do and its going to be too narrow and so on. So this leaves us with a students who havent read a common book, and the problem is if people they dont have some cultural thing in common, you cant build a culture out of them. The schools in the report talk about community. Well, theyre right to say, one of the ways in which you have a community is people have read the same thing. They have some of the same cultural background. So this is one thing, one problem. The lack of any common reading that the program tries to address. Two, students dont like to read. They dont read very much on their own. Not just they dont have a common reading assignment in school or on their own. We might want to talk about harry potter. Thats the one thing you can mention in class that most of the kid know, but you never know. They may have just seen the movies. Were far beyond the publication in their lives at this point, but they dont read very much on their own. Ill give you some numbers on this. This is from the 2014 American Freshman survey, very large survey project at ucla. Goes week in mid60s. Here the race for the students who come into college, firstyear students and these are Fouryear College students, not twoyear college or anything. Vocational. These are fouryear baccalaureate institutions. The rate of reading for pleasure, how often in a week do you read for pleasure . How many hours do you log . That was the question. This is the largest cohort in 31 answered, none. Nearly a third of them never read for pleasure. Moreless than one hour, zero minutes to one hour, 24 . One to two hours a week, 22 . Got that. About threequarters of the students reading is a negligeable activity at best. They just dont read many books on their own. At all. Assigning the common reading is youre entering a world in which you have to read books. College is going to ramp up the reading requirement on your own. Youre not going to see a teacher every day who is going to go through a few pages with you at a time. Youll have to be a selfstarter, on your own. If you you drop out the teacher doesnt care. Sometimes dont even know in larger classes theres no babysitting here, no parachute for you. If you just disappear, this is letting you know, you have to accustom yourself to going through a 300 page book, 200 page book, and spending time with it. You have to live with this book over time. Many of those teachers will say its getting harder and harder to assign a book more than 200 pages. Students doesnt go with the rhythms of their life. You cant read a few pains and then do this and then go back. It doesnt work at the college level. So the one book program tries to get them to be more bookish. Thats the intent. Now, some people will say, well, they dont read because they dont have time to read, because they are piling up so many hours of homework. This i problem number three. This where is the American Freshman survey comes in on homework time. This is what students report. Not how many hours of homework they are assigned; how much they actually do. And studying homework hours per week. These are Fouryear College students. Less than two hours a week, 29 . Three to five hours a week, 27 . Six to ten, 21 . Remember, six to ten. Thats not much more than an hour a day. One hour a day, all weekend long. Two hours. Of study time. Now, you get below that, less than an hour a day for nearly 60 of the Fouryear College. Students. So it is not homework that is taking away reading minutes from them. Its not making them less bookish, but weve got to get them there. Colleges are partly graded on retention. Dropouts look very bad for institutions. The obama the accreditation issues can come into play. So theres a lot of pressure to keep students there on the campus. So, let me add one more factor to this. That relates somewhat to the reading factor. You dont read on your own you dont do that much homework. You dont know very much. The Knowledge Level that students come into college with are abysmal. Theyre abysmal. Its not just their reading skills, which are quite low. Last years s. A. T. Reading scores, the lowest in 40 years. Since 1972. A. C. T. , the college readiness, 46 of students taking the a. C. T. The sarge majority of them are going to college only 40 are collegeready. That means they can bet a bminus in a freshman english class. Most of them are going to get c or below. The s. A. T. Writing test, in 2005, last year the lowest scores ever. In fact the scores have gone down every single year except two years when they were flat. So, this is what is happening with the s. A. T. Scores. If you look at the National Assessment of educational progress, this is the nations report card, given to 12th 12th graders by the federal government in content areas in geography, 20 of 12 graders in 2010 were proficient. In u. S. History, only 12 were proficient. In civics, only 24 . So we got very low Knowledge Levels theyre coming in with. So if im not a class and refer to french revolution, if im doing something about thomas jefferson, i have to explain what that is. You cant just assume that the students have historical Civic Knowledge about things. This is another issue that the one book reading can solve. You select a book that has a lot of accompanying knowledge thats going to go into it as well. You select charles dickens, a tale of two cities. Getting something about at the french revolution which will carry over. So you want to select a book that is knowledge rich, going to bring cultural literacy to them that will again fill out that the big gap in their heads. So thats what the onebook program is ideally going to do. Its going to address those. You want to tell us if that happens . Thank you all again for coming out on a night theyre predicting snow, and its also mardi gras. Can you hear me . Okay. Great. And thank you to first things for hosting us. We did get started on this. I wanted to give a little background and david is going to tell about the findings. We got started in 2010 when an nas faculty member told me about a book that his college was assigning as something called common reading, and i didnt know what this was, and wanted to find out if if a lot of other colleges were doing this, and turned out there were 300 colleges and universities around the country that were advertising that they had this one book for college freshmen, and so we put together this list for the first time. Peter and i came up with subject categories to talk about what the books focused on, the themes they focused on, and looked at the trends among what was most popular in the books. We gave our own analysis of what this means for Higher Education more generally, and also started a list of recommended titles that colleges could pick from as better books for next year, and at the time common reading programs were on the rise, and so everyone involved in these kinds of programs was looking for onestop place to go to learn what books were being assigned and what the trends were. So, we unknowingly created something that was very useful for people, and its now become their goto source. Its been cited by the nla and their national conference. Faculty members come to us now and theyre serving on committees for selecting the book. We included every common reading we could find from stanford to owednesdayboro community knowledge, and so because of that, this the only comprehensive list like this. Ive spoken with a lot of the people who coordinate common reading programs and these are faculty members and administrators who genuinely want students to love reading and to talk with one another about the book. Theyre concerned with community. Theres a lack of intellectual community but they get stuck in using templates, patterns that are set up and accepted as the way the programs are run and this is what we should do. They use large committees to select the book by popular vote instead of having a few people who are well read choose good books for all the students. They dont assess whether students have actually read the book. They dont have a test or a grade to hold them accountable, and they always try to bring the author to come to speak on campus, which is fine but it limits them to only choosing contemporary books. And they generally dont think outside the box of what other colleges are doing. One way that nas has been encouraging common reading coordinators to think outside the box is to assign older and classic books. These are the underrepresented items in these lists of what is being assigned, and when i say classics, im thinking of that in a generous way, not just greek and roman classics but the thing that mark was talking about a authors like dickens and twain and worked that have stood the test of time, that are still considered of enduring value and importance. Well, so, coordinators that we have talked to have given a lot of pushback as to why they say they cannot or dont want to assign older classic books, and so i have collected these objections and answered all of them in the last section of the report, the very last pages. I have 25 so far. Just thought of another couple of them while i was sitting here. My hope is to say, yes, it is possible to choose more difficult, more challenging and better books and still accomplish the things you want to do with these programs, and to make the most of this opportunity. One of the objections that i have heard is that because this is not for a grade, then if students dont like the book, they just wont read it. So the only hope you have of getting students to read it is to pick a book they like. So our job is find out what students want to read and then well assign that to them. So, in principle thats a good idea to want to choose books that students will enjoy but in the long run that doesnt help them because the whole reason that people go to college instead of staying home and reading the books you already know that you like, is to have your mind informed by people who know more than you do. Another pushback ive heard is that the classics are elitist, that they are all privileged. Theyre for the privileged. And to that i say, it is a privilege to get to read these books, and we should give that privilege to as many people as we can. A lot of people especially the ones who are taking the trouble to go to college, we hear talk a lot today about giving more access to Higher Education, and if we really want to give people access to literally opening up their world, if not to something that is truly higher. In this edition we have guest essays by two individuals who agree with nas on these things, but for different reasons, coming from different angles. One is bruce gan, a creator of the create books curriculum that has been used across the country in community colleges. So he has shown that anyone can benefit from and enjoy reading the great books. The other is linda hall, who is a professor of english at skidmore college. She roughers to herself in the essay as a liberal feminist. She sees value in letting books cool for a while and letting them prove themselves over time before suddenly assigning them as common reading. She also thinks that colleges are trying to accomplish too much with just one book and that common reading programs should be reevaluated. So im really grateful to have got ton have these conversations and others through these last few years with this project, and ive now passed the baton to my knowledge, david randall, who has taken it up with great talent and skill and its been gratifying to see him notice things i hadnt yet noticed, and so im going to let him share the findings from this years edition. [applause] thank you, id like to thank very much to first things, to mark, you personally did an awful lot to make this possible. A thank you to everybody else at nas who worked with know make this a much better work. Ashley thorne, peter, rochelle peterson, Glen Ricketts and others who arent here tonight, but its a wonderfully, wonderfully better thing what theyve done with it. Want them to be mentioned. Now, ive been talking an awful lot about beach books with everybody over the last few months. Its been my nonstop topic of conversation. And just today i had a conversation with somebody who had a common reading in 1967 at boston university. He was assigned adventures of ideas in 1933, a history of intellect in mankind intellectual history, combined the effect of that history on mankinds history in general. This was what was considered a reasonable common reading in 1967, and now the decline and fall. Four of the fairly common readings nowdays, garbology, a history of a nonfiction account of the troubles of trash we have. We have too much trash. Make a metaphor about the common reading, which is cruel and i wont. You have march a graphic memoir of john lewis, an admirable man is a comic book written at a fourth grade level. We have enriques journey exmentioned earlier, again, account of an illegal immigrant where this will not it is meant to influence current policy. Indeed a great many of these common readings do. We have ready player one. A very fine novel about video games and how you can face the world if you know enough about 1980 video games. I loved reading it. It was loads of thought. I would not have thought of it at a book for college. And then a book to be afraid of google and invasion of privacy. Theres a worthy message but not really the sort of book you expect for college. So in that decline and fall, we have problems with what you have now for other common reading, and what the report is something about what the common reading programs are. Which id like to sort of emphasize a bit that lead towards some of the problems, the sorts of books they choose, which are very limited and not as good as they could be. All that on route to what we can hope for, and im going to be undiely optimistic here. I think we can hope for something entitier despite what we have been hearing before the all the problems. Think better could be done. You know what a common reading is. Summer reading, everybody reads it. You know its everywhere. 360 colleges a year at least, elite colleges, not elite, public, private, half of the top 100 universities, a lot of colleges. Its meant to build community for a reason, because this is what theyre aiming at its important to talk about what they want to do with this. Community ultimately means i care enough about this book to read it. I care enough about this book to talk about it with my friends. If i do that, the theory goes, i will take my College Education seriously. I will not drop out of college. It is a Student Retention Program fundamentally. It is unfortunate it has to be done at fairly low level. That is what theyre aiming at. So, thats what they want to do. Its worth talking a bit about how they do it because that also gets you to the sort of books they end up on. Its voluntary, overwhelmingly. Even when they say its mandatory, they are sort of expecting they have to have students be willing to do it. They dont really have much in the way of enforcement mechanism. They make them simple, easy reading books because they dont think they can actually get the students volunteer tearily to read them otherwise. So thats number one. Number two, once you decide its voluntary you have to make it so it appeals to as many students as possible, and not unimportant actually that is pedestrianed to as many professors as possible, too because you want the common reading somehow to be incorporated in the classroom was well. That is when you have these huge committees in charge of selecting them. University of cincinnati, four people, 150 books. An enormous investment in time. So cincinnati, 21 people. Many of them 15, 12, very large committees. This is meant partly because the professors are suppose told be able to think what their students will like. You have a chemistry prefer who knows that a chemistry student will like. A Business Administration professor because hell know what the Business Administration student likes, thening lesch professor. Trying to get massive buyin on the parts of the students and the professores. You want the chemistry professor to include the book in the list so you have a book about the love life of marie curie. So buy in by everybody, and buyin is what theyre tasked to do theyre not asked to get a good book. Theyre asked to get one that is broadly appealing. And if being asked as your First Priority get a good book youre not going to get a good one. The institutional structure is that way. So, youre trying to get recent books as well and thats even some of the Mission Statements. They think students will care more if they can actually see the author or somebody or the subject of the book. They want somebody who can come to a lecture in the fall. Therefore theyre always going for a recent book but a you can not get William Shakespeare to come and visit your class no matter how hard you try, and i have. Youre going to get their to people who are recent, people who arent american. There is actually a peculiar youre trying part of the point of going to college is learning about the world. The only people youre learning about it from are those americans who are on the circuit of common reading. Its a very parochial genre was of this. So you get the recent stuff. And its supposed to be appealing, so its all memoir or biography, and the young person memoir, young person biography. 70 is the popular nonfiction written in extremely direct lack of style. Theres no variation in the form. Its all the same sort of thing. And the enriques journey, somebody who just gone off to fawns Nonprofit Organization somewhere, somebody who overcome adversity to be able to get to college. There are different scenarios but its all the same sort of book. And one should add to this, theyre less varied the more recent they are. Not just the same book but the most popular books are most recent books. 2012, just mercy, published last year. These are the ones that have doubledigit selections. When you choose more recent books you choose fewer books. The older the book is the more various its likely to be. So, when youre talking about intellectual diversity, there really is a really narrowing by focusing on the present. Add to all this, there are some political skews. It is all skewed in the direction of progressive books, and partly this is in the Mission Statements themselves. There are Mission Statements which say we want to talk about diversity. We want to talk about timeliness. We want to talk about civic engagement. Many word which are not objectionable in and of themselves but part of an archipelago of jargon which is going to skew you to a leftwing direction, and add to this people who choose the books do tend to be progressive. They dont seem to realize there are books which dont follow the particular political direction. Now, because youre trying to get consensus, it tendses to be you do an awful lot of books on the environment precisely because the talking about the environment isnt going to raise anybodys hackle. To the lowes common denominator progressivism. And im saying this not nor political point as such. The point is it restricts the universe of possible books that much more. In addition to all the other limitations you have, you can only get books which fit these various progressive limitations. It means that you have a very, very narrow range, and it wouldnt be so bad if these were part of the whole but in fact theyre the entirety of what is being read, 50 colleges each year, it is a problem. Okay. I want to go from that. What can we hoch for what can be done better . Theres some decent stuff out there. You have a classic selection at utah valley university, i believe, that is George Bernard shaws book. You have the college of concordia having an interesting book about modern china. You have a classic work by frederick douglass. You have Johnson Edwards editing of the dire of david brinyard. You have good book that are honorable mentions. Its not impossible to choose them, and they are working right now for alas far too few of the colleges, but the point is that they do exist and they do seem to be working. Therefore, we do have a bunch of recommendations for what can be done better. Wed like to get rid of the extracurricular goals. Just make it apodaca goal. Dont worry about building community. How do you test if community is being built . They have a goal which is literally impossible to tell whether theyve succeeded at it. Confined to academic goals youll actually be able to tell what youre doing, and if it is working. Wed like them to have smaller committees, composed entirely of people who love books and have a great experience of it. We would like them to integrate readings into the classes and have them be testable. You can test for swimming knowledge. You can do that. You can test for whether you have read a book over the summer. Its not impossible to do. We do even have a recommendation that perhaps it might be better to make the College Admissions process a bit more selective. You really cant get your current student body to be able to be willing to read, able to read, one challenging book in their entire four years, maybe you should make your admissions standards a little tighter. But aside from that, we do actually have some confidence in students and some confidence in the colleges. We do actually think that simply going to the best existing standards practice of the common reading programs will be a marvelous improvement. It is working for the colleges that can do it. It can work for the other colleges. We could even go above that to have a focus on the classics, broadly defined and that would be even more marvelous and wonderful but the best existing practices can make a real and practical improvement in students, in Higher Education, and i guess i do want to leave you with that. There is hope for the future. There is hope based upon what already exists. Thank you. [applause] im told we should be marking time here for about a minute while our technicians mic us for the question session. So, im going to be making nonsense noises for a minute. So please look interested. I thought maybe i could fill the time by saying a word about the two top books this year. Books chosen by the largest number of colleges. One is the other west moore. Two years running the most popular book in common reading programs in the country. I think thats 15 or 16 separate colleges. Its the other west moore is about the other wes moore. About the other wes moore. Wes moore, who wrote the book, is a rhodes scholar, a man who is a white house fellow, an illustrious career help read about someone with his name who grow up in the same city, baltimore, but who was convicted of murder and serving a long term in prison. The other wes moore was a drug dealer, crack dealer, had a hard life. The coincidence here is pretty much the entire story, one of them goes on to lead a good life, the other one goes on to lead a terrible life. Theyre both black men growing up in the same city. Why did it happen that way . Why did one go down the road from bun direction and one the opposite direction . A lot of chin pulling here, where we dont know whether this is fate or circumstance or whatever it might be, but theres a lot to think about that the other wes moore had a lot of bad breaks and isnt that a shame. Think the reason this gets assigned as much as it does is that it allows the white students to feel not entirely guilty about this. They should have empathy for the other wes moore but they should realize the other wes moore made some bad choices, too. So, it stands in the middle of or black lives matter moment where we can think deep thoughts about injustice in American Life and its a book about injustice, but its not entirely about injustice because the other wes moore is a really bad dude. He is a crack dealer who participated in a gang murder and went to jail. Well, thats what happens. That what happens some of the time. Theres just mercy about a guy who ends up in jail without having done anything wrong. This poor fellow is living in rural a. M. , theres a murder committed 11 miles away the two killers, who are also black, cook up a story to make this guy the fall guy that is not very energetic police in the alabama town, buy the story, convict him, send him to jail, he is on death row until the author of the book takes up the case, and after years of effort, exonerates him and shames the prosecutor, the police. This is written some 20 years after the guy is sprung from jail. He has died of dementia, hasnt had a very nice life even after jail. Story would be a real pageturner it own right. Its a story well worth telling about how inyateses can happen in our society, but stevenson is not going to leave it there. He takes the story as emblematic of the entire nature of the american Justice System the grinds down the poor minorities and provides no real justice except for the occasional savior who the book is partly memoir, partly storytelling. Its like the other wes moore, written at best a junior high level. Theres a thing called the rating that i referred to before. Its an independent body that examines large chunks of test and assigns a grade reading level to it. The other wes moore and just mercy come in about eighth grade level. So, when we say that the books chosen for common reading or easy books, its not just our opinion. Theres pretty hard data that backs that up. So, we are micd now and ready to go. So its time to ask questions. Im going to start with one to break the ice on this. Mark, your comments about these books suggest that youre pretty unhappy with the choices that your colleagues are making in English Departments and elsewhere in the universities. I covey that youre in fav of a kind of censorship. What about that . Well, we need a core curriculum. We need a common body of works that arch that everyone read. This brings coherence to a culture and also allows us to let things work themselves out over time, and we shouldnt trust our judgments about contemporary works. Very often were wrong, and the test of time is a good one youve raid something you thought was fantastic. 20 years later it looks awfully dated and just in that short period of time. You talk about censor cycle thats a limit amount of time in a school day on any syllabus. You have to make choices. Make good choices or bad choices . And the cost is very high. College is a very short period in young peoples lives. This is their only chance to read many of the great works, of civilization. Theyre not going read them most likely when theyre out of college. Theyre having they have a professor there who will guide them through. They have other students who are reading the same thing. This is an extraordinary opportunity, and when you ask students when they ask people ten years after college, what you regret most about college, they dont say i wish i went to more parties. What they say is i wish i took more courses in art history. I were i took a little more shakespeare. Realize now college was a unique intellectual growth time, and if the faculty cant provide the resources to make that happen, then we need to get other faculty. David, i want to ask you a question. [applause] on you had some carefully worded criticism at a bunch of these books. I wonder, if you had to choose the one common reading that is going to apply to maybe a whole college, maybe a whole bunch of colleges, what would your pick be and why . My pick will be its only going to be for the college where i am on the committee because i do not want item pose myself on anybody else because im shy of retiring. I want to page jane austins persuasion, a beautiful book, relatively brief book, and a book about Second Chances, and gosh, thats a lesson we all need. As a College Student i would have loved to have thought about the fact that we do have Second Chances in life. Thats the one. Okay. Ashley, i want to ask you a question. Books can be about thing that are near at hand or far away how do you come out on the near versus far spectrum for beach books . Thats a very abstract question. Well, the thing that comes to mind is that colleges use the word relevance. That we need books that are close to what Students Experience today. They need a book by an author that is of their same race or near to them in age, the same background sociologically. That might have merit but its also good to get us out of the things that we already know, to help us know things outside of us, and the getting outside of our current era biases is a valuable thing there like you said, mark, there are thing that we think are the right way for all time but are really limited to our current age. So a point of relevance there are things that are ancient thatimportant in young peoples need. Anyone knows a better book about peer pressure that the study of what happens in the pear orchard that night. I dont know what it is. Or i mentioned this earlier when we were talking. In the illad, theres that section where hector has won some victories, and he gets a little full of himself and he brings his arm you outside the walls of troy, and theyre doing good but then things start to turn, and hector realize i made a mistake. They run bag can inside the walls be held feels respond, and doesnt want to show any cowardice. So he is standing outside the walls. His mother and father are on the ramrod saying, get inside, and the walls are impenetrable, and he is sitting there and theyre standing back and he sees this point of light coming toward him. Its achilles coming. The great warrior. And at that moment hectors courage he wilts and loses his will, and i would say i said to peter earlier when this came up, you take 100,000 teenaged boys in america today, and you tell me if you find ten of them who dont know that experience, that guy is coming to get me, through high school, through this, this is middle school, the neighborhoods they live in or on the football field. The basketball court. That kind of experience is, i would say, all together relevant to the 19yearold kid coming into college. Far can be near. Im going repeat your questions for the sake of cspan so ill take yours first. I just wanted to echo what mark said and challenge the idea of far and near, i think far is near. Probably [inaudible] thats what we do in english questions and should do for a all students. Okay. The far is near. If we look at it correctly. Im not sure what the question is there. Thats a comment. Isnt the beach books problem a phenomenon of the larger core curriculum problem . If you have faculty that have their intellectual responsibility they cant even decide upon more substantive classic works for College Reading it would seem unusual they would throw aside all of their usual objections to white centric, old white male culture, for their one book for summer reading. So, i cant see how we solve this problem without solving the even more egregious problem of the lack of intellectual courage saying to kids you shall read these books to start your college years. Im not sure i can repeat that. Is note beach book phenomenal represents the an abdication of intellectual authority of the teaches and we cant solve this problem without addressing that bigger problem. Weve lost the core curriculum so we no longer have anything that we can rely on as students all having read in common. But here we have this one look, this one opportunity. I feel like this is a possibility to bring that back, and thats what were trying to do. Its not a core curriculum. Its far from it. And it is representative of the larger loss, but with just this one book, i think it is possible, and its our task to show colleges why theres a need for these kinds of books and why theyre important. I have a question about what you think ideal makeup of a committee is. Im not sure its english faculty because colleges its [inaudible] i wonder if it could be Something Like a faculty who reports spending time reading. So, whats the ideal makeup of a committee that selects books . Probably not in the English Department or members thereof but the faculty on campus who read the most. Mark . I think the students should select their own books. Thats a joke. Interesting. I think i dont know. Depends on what you want the book to do. It is to [inaudible] i think the right answer is probably whatever members of the National Association of scholars on that. Id like to say a one word in defense of english faculty. I have had some interesting conversations with friends who are in various humanities disciplines on the left, and a number of them report that there is some more interest in the cannon on the part of the english faculty than there is on western civilization. There is some sense if youre going become an english professor, you there is a not trivial sense, a sense of literary quality and a nontariffan sense that john dunn is pretty good. Obviously there are people in the english discipline, fair number who are pretty good, any selection criterion is not going to be perfect, but have something way or two the English Department would the french department, the italian department, would not be bad. I have one more shoutout. One person be a classicist. [inaudible question] an interesting analogy in my life is the critique of a process, and i think [inaudible] technology has made it easy have to Data Information without deliberation and thinking. So the question is, how do you essentially get organic intellect. A process, wholefood type intellect which isnt as appealing and accessible as the [inaudible]. You can know where the students are, how fast theyre reading. You can also know if theyre trying to game the season by clicking through because they cant possibly be reading that fast. And you can know what days of the week theyre reading and whether they actually finished the book as they said they did. So data mining is getting worse, not better. [laughter] is there an answer to how, what do we do to create that that richer, more complete mind that would be ideal . I think it is up to the faculty to model this for students, and its up to the colleges to aspire to that and not be content with formulas and, like you said, processed, preprocessed materials. Readymade answers. And its something that faculty can do. Thats what their job is. And its our job to encourage them to do that. I preface my question with a point of information [inaudible] was a graduate of Hunter College high school, one of the premier Public Schools in the country. So was david. [laughter] it seems to me that marks, especially marks statistics and from what david suggested, the problem is that were not doing the job of lower education that we need to. The colleges, its almost a futile endeavor. Too late. To try to catch up [inaudible] is in any merit to the idea that the problem is a k12 problem and that students, by the time they read college, are a kind of lost cause if theyve not had a good foundation. Mark . Certainly. You know, of course. And we include the home, the home life in that, are they growing up in homes with books, parents read to them . We know that for many of these kids those first three or four years of reading with parents is often socioeconomic fate. Kindergarten, its already too late for a lot of the kids who are 2 or 3,000 words of vocabulary behind the other kids. And the gap only widens as schooling goes on. Also i would add that Youth Culture has never pressed down on adolescents like it does now mostly because of all the media and all the digital devices now. Young people consume, absorb, are flooded with youthoriented media and entertainment and web sites and communications all the time now. And it just buries them in their leisure lives. And this is an acculture ration for them acculturation for them. And this is already fully in place by the time they enter college. And so colleges are looking at a student who so many things in their lives have just scripted them and geared them against not just they dont care, they dont theyre actually, you know, resistant to a lot of the intellectual demands that go into college life. They can get over them with the career and money side. If you want, if you want to be, you know, an engineer, if you want to go into audiology, youve got to do this. If you want to become a, an informed citizen and a discerning consumer with good taste, youve got to do these things. Youve got to absorb these things. That argument doesnt go very far. Id like to say one more thing on the side of hope, if i may. Somebody has to do it. [laughter] let us assume that college cannot solve every problem that has accumulated until then. Okay. That doesnt mean that it can solve nothing, and it doesnt mean that changes in what colleges do wont help. You know, a nontrivial number of people where that means, what, thousands of people, maybe millions over the course of years, and its not all the immediate. Im going to give you my happydramatic anecdote. One of the first classes i ever taught i had an older student. Whats his story . Well, i was a cop, and i got shot in the chest. And as i was recovering in the hospital, i thought i wanted to do Something Else with my life. And so he wanted to come back to college and be a high school teacher, and he was really paying attention. But his first go round in college had planted some of the seeds, even he hadnt been the perfect College Student by a long shot the first time around. But there was the send time round, and something the second time round, and something the first time around made him want to come back. So theres no need to be a pollyanna, i guess, but neither should we think the changes we can make will have no effect whatsoever, at some point wonderfully in the future. You really take jane austen seriously, dont you . [laughter] carol. Yes. Two short questions. Do you think Something Like [inaudible] has been made into a film might work and then have an actress or director come to the campus . And do you see hope in the fact that none of the books seem to involve zombies or vampires . [laughter] there is they do. World war z was assigned. [laughter] let me make a comment of my own and then turn to ashley on this whos loaded for bear on, i think, this question. There are many, many books on our list that have been made into movies, so many that early on we got to the list, created a whole column on checkoff column, is there a movie, is there a movie. A great number of the books already have movies, others have movies in the works. So movie making is part of the whole apparatus well, i meant classics though. Well, persuasioninging many i dont know if there you go. My filmology not uptodate. The issue is can we improve the marketing of classic books via other media, and is that a good idea. Yeah. The thought is that only if the author comes to speak will we have Something Interesting an event for students. But colleges have gotten really creative. Weve had art competitions, open mic nights, military demonstrations, science experiments. Theres one college that has a Shakespeare Festival every year and a different book by shakespeare. And so, yeah, movie night is a good idea. There was one university of wisconsin parkside assigned Edgar Allen Poe and had a poe impersonator come to campus. [laughter] so if its a dead author, you can always get an impersonator of. [laughter] ive got to be the down note on this one. If movie exists, theyll watch the movie and wont read the book as often as not. Well, you know what happened in seinfeld when [inaudible] breakfast at tiffanys, which, of course, changes the whole course, plot of the book. I dont think i can repeat that [laughter] yes. A threepart question. Has any thought been given to why theres only one common book assigned . Why not two . And why not a rotation where one year you have something from the Science Department that they suggest and history, another year something from art and mathematics, literature, that way . And third is why not, indeed, have some sort of testing or assignment that [inaudible] these kids arent coming from high school where they, where the curriculum whether the curriculum is good or not where theyre used to accountability. Okay. So the threepart questions are why not more than one book, why not rotation among the disciplines yes. And the third one was [inaudible] some specific assignments. On some specific assignments. Ill dispose of two of those pretty quickly. Some colleges do assign more than one book. Of course, the question of whether they will actually read it magnifies, the more reading is done. So its not very common, but it does happen. And, yes, some colleges do test, and it seems to work well, and its a question of why more dont do it. The third, rotation by discipline, ive not heard of. Ashley . I have not, but i think its a great idea. Yeah, ditto. Recommendations next year. I have a question. Whether this has ever been used as a rationale for choosing literature, c. S. Lewis, the literary scholar, said the reason to read was to inhabit other worlds, to expand your mind, to step out of your time and your culture and your age and your race and your gender and to imagine what life is like in some other era, some other culture. And he revolved the whole theory of [inaudible] around that. And its kind of harry potter or fantasy literature or tolkien does at its best. A cultural resonance, it seems to me. Has that kind of rationale ever been used to select literature . Because thats not racist, thats not the western canon, thats just sort of an active imagination. Has that argument ever been used to select9 literature, and if not, why not . Has the argument ever been put forward to select books based on the imaginative distance from the here and now . Thinking of fantasy literature as maybe the biggest embodiment of that. I think that questions related to my near versus far question earlier. Yeah. But i think im going to turn to david on that first because he is a much stronger fan of the fantastic, and im much more rooted in the realism. I guess you would say, in effect, i think thats what they think theyre doing now. There are two troubles. One is their sense of what is different is based upon very narrow categories of modern multiculturalism which, in effect, means somebody in effect, somebody from somewhere else in the year 2010 is presumed to be remarkably different from us, and theres no sense of how greatly much more different people were 500 years ago from wherever. So its a very narrow sort of diversity that is being chosen for. And the other thing for Science Fiction is that, actually, one of the most common fiction things done but thats not because, its no longer because it is new and different, its because thats now the default genre fiction that people read. The default movies that they see. I love Science Fiction and fantasy, but when its chosen, its usually because it stretches the students less, not because it stretches them more. And fiction is very rare. Its nonfiction is more than 70 of the books chosen. And of those nonfiction, most are memoirs. So its very much a lot of the subtitles are my journey, my struggle, my year in blank. So its very mefocused rather than theres dangers in this, too, in that a fair amount of these things get exposed after a year or two as fraud. Three cups of tea turned out to be a work of fiction masquerading as a memoir. So weve spoken a lot about human engagement, this problem of human engagement. My question always is what is how do we [inaudible] i think really the root of whats at issue is how many times have we heard the phrase publish or perish . Our faculty at large universities who are forced to seek out, you know, areas of research where none have gone before who are really actually kind of driving, trying to find something new and different. And i would argue that, actually, the scholarship that youre being encouraged to pursue in modern academia is a trend very similar in many ways to the themes that are found in these books in the certain sense that [inaudible] sec tar university trying to be different, engaged with particular themes in society is resulting in scholarship that, you know, then you find professors who are not engaged in their students education [inaudible] so how would you respond to that . How much of a factor is the straining after originality by faculty members who, in their efforts to avoid the perishing part of publishing, of course, per rich, have perish, have delegated the reading of material to totems of the university and have allowed these themes of race, class, gender, gender preference to become pretty much the all and all of beach books . Well, i can speak for the humanities and the softer areas of the campus. Weve got a bargain in place between faculty and students. The bargain is on the faculty side im going to show up to class and give you a syllabus, im going to give you a decent lecture, presentation, and then im going to go away. Youre going to do what youre supposed to do on the syllabus, and youll submit those materials and take those tests, and youll get a decent grade. Lets not spend too much time talking in my office. Lets not do too much extracurricular contact. I dont want to sit around and talk with you for 45 minutes about why shes getting up in the middle of the night and washing her hands, you know, walking the halls. Lets not get into that. [laughter] youve got the syllabus, youve got the assignments, you know what to do, ill see you later at the exam. Thats the bargain. I wont bother you too much, you dont bother me too much, and the system will continue going. I think that if students learn no other [inaudible] before they get to college, they at least believe in the virtue of efficiency. Is it simply that reading books is just too slow for students . Is reading books just too slow for students and thats why colleges have dumbed down their reading lists thus far . Opinions . Sometimes one gets the sense that they havent even tried to know. So its just not their priority. I mean, its not that difficult to read if you put, if you spend some time on it. I dont think the slowness of it is the problem, its just the sheer lack of interest. But i can see how in much of the high achiever world spending, you know, all summer long to read all the novels of henry james, that doesnt sound very productive. Right . That doesnt, that doesnt go along with building a resume. It doesnt go along with, you know, doing, you know, internships or i mean, i can see how what youre saying does sound inefficient in terms of the high achiever focus on so much of their lives if their high achievement isnt directly oriented around books. I mean, you know, 200 years ago it would be expected of leaders in civilized nations to have all done their reading in. These are lessons in readership, good lessons and badless lessons bad lessons. When George Washington stages addisons play about cato because he thinks this is an important thing, this is what people should know. Those things dont seem to go with success so much in the contemporary world than other activities of, you know, building up your social media time or networking in certain ways or getting, doing those things that can go on a resume. So it seems we need to change what we value as a society. Well be able to take two more questions. Sir, well just tell me if im being too cynical. Come back to this larger question, shes gone now. If the faculty is, if the tone on campus is to resist this common [inaudible] and try to create a community by assigning a book, is it an attempt to create a community of people who resist community . [laughter] paradoxical question here. [laughter] tell me im too cynical. Are beach books programs an attempt to create a community by resisting larger principles of community . Well, you wouldnt choose the classics if youre trying to create a community of people [inaudible] so this is a reference to the anticulture on campus. Its oppositional character thats dislike, perhaps dislike is too soft a word for the inheritance of western civilization, rejection of all that in favor of whats new and break on our shores as the sea of the new culture cometh. I want to add one more goodwill thought, im sorry. [laughter] the people who serve on these committees are the ones who didnt run screaming from serving on a selection committee. Theyre the ones who are dedicated to the college. They may not have made choices i like, but they put in the time. And, yeah, theyve got more of a sense of community than the ones who slacked off doing any Community Service at all. I dont mean slackers i mean, among the professors, among the faculty. So the people so youve got at least some bias among the people who are selecting the book for people who actually care about their college and their students. I would ask the question are they on that committee . They volunteers for it because volunteered for it because they want to control what every student has to read, and they dont want the i dontg book in peoples hands. [inaudible] [laughter] ashley . I was just going to say, you bring up a good point that contemporary books that are no longer popular in a few years limit your community to just those readers at that time. And if you do read a classic, it connects you to the whole, the generations who have gone before and who are go after you that you can those generations [inaudible] and the future generations. Im just suggesting the faculty itself is contradicting itself. Uhhuh. Last question, sir. Im wondering [inaudible] in terms of institutional [inaudible] politics seems to be an addon. Suppose its the ore way around the other way aroundsome the university has redefined itself as a political force, and i think these programs are invented to [inaudible] i mean, when they talk about community, perhaps theyre talking about political community. Now, if thats so, then [inaudible] really isnt part of that. Theres no messaging for that. Put this into a question . Well, im just saying what would happen if [inaudible] so theres the possibility that were being too gentle about all this, that its not mere accident that there is a political subtext to these books, that its the political agenda that is driving the selection of books. The National Association of scholars is friendly to that point of view. In fact, we [laughter] led with it in our previous years of presentation on this and in some of the opeds weve been writing about it. Ive tried to rein it in a little bit in that theres clearly some element of goodwill in the selection of these books. Its not just all about politics. They could do a lot worse. It is not an agenda, reading noam chomsky 24 hours a day. Something else is going on. One of the popular books this year that i didnt previously mention is outcast united. Its another, basically, Childrens Book about a multicultural soccer team in south carolina, a dogooder volunteers to organize a bunch of immigrant kids from all over the world whose prospects are bleak, and suddenly their lives are transformed because they can all play soccer together. Peter, adapted for young people by warren st. John. Warren st. John [laughter] its been written down. When he adapted it for young people, he took a hundred pages out of it. So this is the shorter version suitable for College Students. [laughter] but the title rather nicely captures the spirit of this whole enterprise. The outcast united, students are taught to think of themselves as outcasts. Theyre united in coming together in this oppositional enterprise in which their going to generate a new, more wholesome culture. And thats one main reason why books, not just classics in the classical sense, but books written before they were born are so few. 91 of the books assigned in common reading programs around the country this year were written after these children were born. 93 . 91 . So its as though the written word hardly existed before their did. There are a few sort of hints that there might have been something written down in english earlier, but you have to go to some pretty faraway colleges in southern utah and places like that. I would say there is a major exception right here in new york city. Columbia university assigned the iliad as common reading this year. This is not a story of uniform disgrace everywhere. Its a story in which the, what are we up to, 350 colleges this year assigned this . The great majority of them have taken the easy path into a world in which the books they assign are unchallenging, the content of them so accelerately political overtly political. There is a quality of intellectual squalor that has overtaken this enterprise. As an organization, the National Association of scholars and i think first things as well kind of duty to be optimistic, to try to find something in this that can redeem this enterprise. If colleges are not going to go back and recreate some kind of core curriculum, a common reading may be only a bandaid, but at least its a bandaid. And, therefore, let us go out and find the best bandaids we can. Certainly, enriques journey or just mercy dont make the cut. We need something a little bit better than that. And some suasion on the part of those who do like to read can go a long way. I imagine every Single Person in this room is here because books have changed your life. Manager that you read at some point something that you read at some point that turned on your life and made you somebody who wanted to read for the rest of your life. And you care about that. We want you to take that caring into this public discussion. Its great to publish a 200page report about this and hang our expheadz say what a sad situation heads and say what a sad situation it is. But all of you have friends and influence and family members who care about these things too. So we urge you to go out and talk about this. Lets get a conversation started in this country about better books for the beach and maybe beyond the beach. Not just sand castles, were looking for something more substantial than that. So i thank you for coming. I thank first things for having us. [applause] the oklahoma land rush, i hope im giving away copies of two of my books while they last. Mark has put some of his books up here. I dont know if hes giving them away or selling them. He can make a choice. [laughter] theyre half price, actually. [laughter] [inaudible conversations] thanks again for coming. I hope well see you at future events. [applause] [inaudible conversations] we want to hear from you. Post your feedback to our facebook wall. Facebook. Com booktv. Heres a look at some books that are being published this week. [inaudible conversations][i thank you all for coming. Nice crowd. First of all, i have to deal with the title of this panel which really threw me. History laws of nature, laws of man. The title is a little difficult for me as a political reporter. I write about the laws of man, and i never think about the laws of nature unless im covering a Natural Disaster like our 1994 earthquake. Our panelists have two tasks. T most important for them is to talk about their books in such a compelling manner [laughter] that youll all rush out afterwards to buy copies and have the authors sign them. The book signing is in signing area number one. This is area as noted on the festival map in the center of the Event Program or one of the volunteers in the room will help direct