Reading ahead for summer reading

At the beginning of this month, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel was chosen to be the Class of 2019’s Common Experience summer reading book. But for every glowing review of this annual shared experience, there are too many other stories of incompetent FACs, half-hearted discussions and the many students who neglect to read the book altogether. Today, we look at the on-campus events centering on summer reading and how they can be improved.

First, in examining the program’s objectives, we see a shared intellectual experience that provides freshmen a common topic to discuss, more thought-provoking than “Where are you from?” Further, the book choice is meant to prepare students for Duke’s intellectual inquiry through difficult questions that ask how they will engage others in the new social and intellectual crowd of Duke’s student body.

So to these ends we suggest a new summer reading program wherein each class of students at Duke reads a single book every summer and orientation events are expanded beyond FAC circles and the author’s visit. We believe there is potential for the program to facilitate wider interaction between new freshmen and upperclassmen and faculty members, chipping away at some of the intellectual distance between East and West Campus. Thought-provoking reads have multiple layers of meaning and perspectives for interpretation that students and adults at different levels of experience can help unpack. Further, upperclassmen have a much better grasp of how a book choice relates to Duke’s student body, be it through a lens of immigration, sexuality or wealth.

Related to this, the heavily criticized FAC program must be supplemented by activities of a wider scope, at least as far as summer reading goes. The visit of the author is a fantastic event accompanied by orientation week’s FAC chats, but these cannot be the capstone to the reading, passively concluding the book’s journey in an auditorium. Some potential activities aimed at leveraging the book into campus connections are inter-class cocktail parties, faculty debates, a library party or open-air lemonade socials. As an added plus, these events would allow incoming freshmen to meet professors and administrators in the context of academic inquiry, maybe breaking ground for further traditions of academic exchange—picture intellectual tweed jacket wine parties with professors, similar to Monday’s poetry reading.

Finally, touching on the book selection process, although we have seen the unique contributions of recent books, like Let the Great World Spin, that are intellectually accessible but still challenging, the line has to be skirted between being thought-provokingly novel and alienating students. The reading should stress a diversity of narratives without moving completely outside of any student’s reasonable intellectual interest. When we look at the past selection of Eating Animals, we see an overly narrow choice—one that questions one perspective a little too ferociously without allowing for each student to interpret the book according to their intellect and find meaning in their lives to bring to conversations. It would also be worthwhile to consider books—like College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be—which are aimed at letting students pedagogically engage universities and liberal arts educations, topics we should all be invested in and up for discussing.

Duke’s summer reading program has so much potential for its own growth and efficacy as well as for laying the groundwork for other academic traditions. The current one-and-done system has value but also has lots of room for growth, especially in terms of making deeper impressions on students.