Gabriel Rosenberg

Don't believe the hype

The August 21 story in the Duke Chronicle entitled “Freshmen skipping ‘Fun Home’ for moral reasons” begins by stating that “several” incoming Freshmen have chosen to forgo the recommended common reading for the incoming class of 2019 because they objected to the “pornographic” nature of Alison Bechdel’s award winning memoir Fun Home. The Duke Chronicle article has by now circulated well beyond the Duke community, and responses range from people outraged that students would reject a book without reading it first to people lamenting the loss of traditional conservative values at Duke. With around seventeen hundred students in the incoming class, there were bound to be some people who reacted as these abstainers did.