This week, as 1,300 freshmen started classes at the University of Chicago, they were handed a new book, hot from the printer, about academic honesty.
“Doing Honest Work in College: How to Prepare Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success” by U. of C. political science professor Charles Lipson (208 pages, University of Chicago Press, $13) explains the mundane details of how to write footnotes and cite sources. But, more important, particularly in the Internet era, it also spells out in clear, direct prose what is and isn’t ethical in the world of research papers and midterm exams.
“It’s a how-to book,” says Michael Jones, associate dean of the U. of C. undergraduate college. “This book is going to give everyone a common set of principles.”
Culturally, in modern American society, it’s rare for members of any large group to have much in common. The University of Chicago’s distribution of Lipson’s book, free to each first-year student, is part of a growing trend in which colleges and universities are attempting to counter cultural fragmentation and pass along important values by assigning a book for all freshmen to read.
Depending on the institution and the book, those values may be expressed in an examination of the responsibilities of citizenship or a look at the life of a soldier in wartime. They may raise important questions, such as the implications of genetics research, or explore what’s lost and gained during times of change, such as the transition the freshmen are making from high school.
“Doing Honest Work in College” is unusual inasmuch as it is a book that students will use as a reference work throughout their college careers. More typically, a college or university will assign a book of topical or intellectual interest for first-year students to read during the summer — and discuss together in their initial days on campus.
It’s a first experience, says Matthew S. Santirocco, dean of arts and sciences at New York University, “in living the life of the mind.”
The goal, says Eileen Kolman, dean of first-year studies at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Ind., “is to introduce them to college and the world of ideas and debate.”
In selecting a book, most institutions look for something that is relatively easy to read but also meaty enough to spark interesting discussions. Sometimes, however, those sparks can get out of hand. For two years running, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found itself embroiled in controversy over its summer reading selections.
Its 2002 book, “Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations” by Michael Sells, prompted a lawsuit by some Christian students, contending the university was attempting to indoctrinate freshmen in Islam. A year later, the school’s choice of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich enraged some Republican state legislators, one of whom described the book about the struggles of minimum-wage workers as “intellectual pornography.”
Usually, though, discussions of the selection are much less strident.
For example, freshmen at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., read “Nickel and Dimed” the same summer as those at UNC without so much as a peep out of the legislature.
Community participation
In fact, says Joni Petschauer, director of freshman learning communities, it wasn’t just Appalachian State’s first-year students who were reading and discussing the book but also community residents under a program sponsored by the Watauga County Public Library, as well as students at local high schools and community colleges and members of many book clubs.
“We have a very symbiotic relationship with our area,” she says, noting that university freshmen and county residents have read the same book each summer since 2000.
In addition to small group conversations, usually led by faculty members and administrators, many institutions bring in the author for a lecture and question-and-answer session with students. “We always make sure the author will come to speak to us, or we don’t do the book,” says Adam B. Jaffe, dean of arts and sciences at Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass. Often, the book is worked into the first-year writing or reading classes.
“Nickel and Dimed” is a frequent selection of common-reading programs. Others include “A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League” by Ron Suskind, which tells of an inner-city African-American teen’s experience at the Ivy League’s Brown University, and “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World” by Tracy Kidder, the story of the charismatic Dr. Paul Farmer who has invested his career in working among the poor in Haiti.
The Kidder book “is about a guy who has a passion for what he does and is a little iconoclastic and unorthodox about it,” says Jaffe, whose first-year students at Brandeis read the work this summer. “The main thing is: What does it mean to have an impact in life, to have a career that matters to you personally and/or to the world?”
Over the years, a wide range of books have been used — from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” at New York University to “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” at Wartburg College, an Evangelical Lutheran liberal arts institution in Waverly, Iowa.
The fifth installment of J.K. Rowling’s saga of wizards-in-training was chosen because “it was a fun way of thinking about relevant issues,” says Vicki Edelnant, coordinator of the Wartburg summer reading program. “It deals with themes of adjustment to school. There are some professors they like and some they don’t like. And there are other issues, such as social justice — how the elves are discriminated against.”
Some students and parents, Edelnant says, worried about the religious implications of reading about witchcraft, so that became of a focus of the discussions: How do Lutherans relate to such issues?
This summer, Ohio State University had an interesting wrinkle on the common-book trend.
Rather than assign the same book to all 6,000 first-year students, selections were made for specific colleges — freshmen in the college of arts and sciences read “The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane; those in the colleges of engineering and nursing worked their way through “Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age” by Bill McKibben, an examination of ethical issues around genetics research; and those in the business college were assigned “Inside Arthur Andersen: Shifting Values, Unexpected Consequences,” an examination by a quartet of writers of the ethical and financial collapse of the public accounting giant.
This approach, says Mabel Freeman, the university administrator who oversees first-year programs, made it possible for freshmen within colleges to bond. There were 900 or so freshmen who weren’t in these colleges and could choose any of the three books. But Freeman thinks that number will be even smaller in 2005.
“Next year, I’ll be amazed if the Ag College doesn’t have its own book,” she says.
Such reading programs aren’t limited to undergraduates. Last year, incoming students at Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C., read “The Buffalo Creek Disaster” by Gerald M. Stern, the story of how the survivors of a coal-mining disaster sued their employer and won.
For the past two years, first-year students at the Western New England College School of Law in Springfield, Mass., have read “Damages: One Family’s Legal Struggles in the World of Medicine” by Barry Werth, an exploration of the medical and legal issues around the birth of a severely disabled baby.
Beth D. Cohen, a professor of legal writing and research at Western New England, says, “Because [Werth’s book] was not written for law students, because it was written for a general audience, it really is effective in demonstrating the impact of an injury and litigation on the lives of all the people involved — the family, the lawyers, the doctors, the nurses.”
Raises many issues
Beyond that, she says, “It also raises a lot of professional issues, ethical issues, lawyerly issues. There’s a lot of discussion in the book about truth and the lawyer’s role in relation to truth.”
The school’s experience with the book has been so successful, she says, that it will be assigned to the next two incoming classes. Then, Cohen says, “We’ll have an entire law school that has read this one book.”
That’s also the plan at the University of Chicago, where each new group of freshmen will be given “Doing Honest Work in College.” Eventually, all undergraduates at the university will have and be using the book.
“We wanted to make sure everyone’s on the same page in terms of what we expect,” says Lipson. “My main goal [in writing the book] is not to wag a finger at students, but to remind them of what it means to do honest work and why it’s critical to learning.”
Of course, college and university administrators acknowledge, not every freshman does the assigned reading. After all, unless the book is part of a course curriculum, there’s no grade.
“It’s an honor system,” says Ryan Lombardi, assistant dean of students at Duke University, Durham, N.C. But he believes most Duke freshmen carry out the assignment. “They want to shine in front of their peers,” he says.
At Notre Dame, 18-year-old freshman Milo Dodson from Covina, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb, was discouraged at what seemed to him to be the large number of first-year students who ignored the requirement to read “The Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty” by Thomas E. Patterson.
Dodson found the book “a terrific lead-in to the whole process of voting. It showed us that our vote as 18-year-olds counts just as much as the votes of older people.” And, when he went to the convocation at which Patterson spoke, Dodson got the opportunity to talk with the author and get his autograph.
“To put a face with the words that were in the book — that was kind of cool,” he says.
James Moeser, the chancellor at UNC, says the tempests over the two summer reading books for his school’s freshmen underlined the value of the program.
“Controversy,” he says, “wasn’t our goal. But the fact that [“Approaching the Qur’an” and “Nickel and Dimed”] sparked controversy showed we’d hit a nerve, and we were focusing on issues that matter.”
And he adds proudly, “In the midst of all that, we were able to have a rationale, temperate, dispassionate conversation.”
Any thoughts of dropping the reading program?
“Never,” Moeser says.
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Getting on the same page
Requiring incoming students to read the same book provides colleges and universities with an unparalleled opportunity to pass along values and raise key questions. Here are examples of books assigned for the start of the 2004-05 school year:
SCHOOL: Appalachian State University, Boone, N. C.
BOOK ASSIGNED: A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League by Ron Suskind
REASON: To examine questions of class, poverty and equal access to higher education
SCHOOL: Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.
BOOK ASSIGNED: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder
REASON: To raise questions about what makes a life meaningful
SCHOOL: Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Mich.
BOOK ASSIGNED: Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon (a novel-in-stories about the inner world of a Bosnian immigrant to Chicago)
REASON: To examine questions of cultural displacement and identity
SCHOOL: San Diego State University
BOOK ASSIGNED: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman
REASON: To promote the appreciation of other cultures and traditions
SCHOOL: Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas
BOOK ASSIGNED: The American Dream: Stories from the Heart of Our Nation by Dan Rather
REASON: To encourage students to be civic-minded and pursue their own American dream
SCHOOL: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N. C.
BOOK ASSIGNED: Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point by David Lipsky
REASON: To investigate what it means to be an American and what the obligations of citizens are
SCHOOL: University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Ind.
BOOK ASSIGNED: The Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty by Thomas E. Patterson
REASON: To examine the idea of civic engagement as a well-educated citizen
SCHOOL: Western New England College School of Law, Springfield, Mass.
BOOK ASSIGNED: Damages: One Family’s Legal Struggles in the World of Medicine by Barry Werth
REASON: To show lawyers-to-be the human impact that a court case can have
