to ensure that its treasures are secured and shared for many years to come. >> the senate has yet to set a date to vote on the confirmation. >> if we don't have enough people -- [inaudible conversations] >> welcome to the national association scholars new report. i'm the president on the national association of scholars. in 2009, a young man heading for seaside vacation in mexico picked up an unusually heavy book for his beach reading, and 800 page tome on the life of the 18th century immigrant. 50 pages or so into the book the story took possession of the

29-year-old, what emerged from his reading of the 2004 alexander hamilton is now the hottest ticket on broadway, the hip-hop 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 enrique's journey, which offers a harrowing account of a 16-year-old 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 enrique's 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 it's 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 we'll 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 we'll 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 matter-under general si. the probation officer can explain that much better than i. [applause] >> thank you for coming here. it's not happy news to speak about higher education about their reading choices that are made by the colleges every year, and what i'm 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

they're 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 it's 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 we'll see that's 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 doesn't exist otherwise. there is no common reading now either in american life, in general, or in the school's 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 o'"to 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. i'm getting -- i don't 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 african-american

literary tradition that people would know to go along with other traditions. that isn't 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. there's a recommend reading list and it is largely ignored in the implementation of common core. we don't want to tell people what to read. that sounds like prescriptions and we don't want to get to that because you start excluding things, telling people what to do and it's going to be too narrow and so on. so this leaves us with a students who haven't read a common book, and the problem is if people -- they don't have some cultural thing in common,

you can't build a culture out of them. the schools in the report talk about community. well, they're 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 don't like to read. they don't read very much on their own. not just they don't have a common reading assignment in school or on their own. we might want to talk about harry potter. that's 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. we're far beyond the publication in their lives at this point, but they don't read very much on their own. i'll give you some numbers on

this. this is from the 2014 american freshman survey, very large survey project at ucla. goes week in mid-'60s. here the race for the students who come into college, first-year students and these are four-year college students, not two-year college or anything. vocational. these are four-year 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. more-less than one hour, zero minutes to one hour, 24%. one to two hours a week, 22%. got that. about three-quarters of the

students reading is a negligeable activity at best. they just don't read many books on their own. at all. assigning the common reading is -- you're entering a world in which you have to read books. college is going to ramp up the reading requirement on your own. you're not going to see a teacher every day who is going to go through a few pages with you at a time. you'll have to be a self-starter, on your own. if you you drop out the teacher doesn't care. sometimes don't even know in larger classes there's no baby-sitting 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 it's getting harder and harder to assign a book more than 200 pages. students -- doesn't go with the rhythms of their life. you can't read a few pains and then do this and then go back. it doesn't work at the college level. so the one book program tries to get them to be more bookish. that's the intent. now, some people will say, well, they don't read because they don't 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 four-year college students. less than two hours a week, 29%.

three to five hours a week, 27%. six to ten, 21%. remember, six to ten. that's 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 four-year college. students. so it is not homework that is taking away reading minutes from them. it's not making them less bookish, but we've 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 there's 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 don't read on your own you don't do that much homework. you don't know very much. the knowledge level that students come into college with are abysmal. they're abysmal. it's not just their reading skills, which are quite low. last year's 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 college-ready. that means they can bet a b-minus 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 nation's 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 they're coming in with. so if i'm not a class and refer to french revolution, if i'm doing something about thomas jefferson, i have to explain what that is.

you can't 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 that's 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 that's what the one-book program is ideally going to do. it's going to address those. you want to tell us -- if that happens?

>> thank you all again for coming out on a night they're 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 didn't 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 one-stop 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 it's now become their go-to source. it's been cited by the nla and their national conference. faculty members come to us now and they're 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. i've 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. they're -- concerned with community. there's 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 don't assess whether students have actually read the book. they don't 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 don't 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, i'm 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 don't 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 don't like the book, they just won't 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 we'll assign that to them. so, in principle that's a good idea to want to choose books that students will enjoy but in the long run that doesn't 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 i've heard is that the classics are elitist, that they are all privileged. they're 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 re-evaluated. so i'm really grateful to have got ton have these conversations and others through these last few years with this project, and i've now passed the baton to my knowledge, david randall, who has taken it up with great talent and skill and it's been gratifying to see him notice things i hadn't yet noticed, and so i'm going to let him share the findings from this year's edition. [applause] >> thank you, i'd 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 aren't here tonight, but it's a wonderfully, wonderfully better thing what they've done with it. want them to be mentioned. now, i've been talking an awful lot about beach books with everybody over the last few months. it's 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

mankind's 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 won't. you have march: a graphic memoir of john lewis, an admirable man is a comic book written at a fourth grade level. we have enrique's journey ex-mentioned 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. there's 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 i'd 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 i'm 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 it's everywhere. 360 colleges a year at least, elite colleges, not elite, public, private, half of the top 100 universities, a lot of colleges. it's meant to build community for a reason, because -- this is what they're aiming at -- it's 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 they're aiming at. so, that's what they want to do. it's worth talking a bit about how they do it because that also gets you to the sort of books they end up on. it's voluntary, overwhelmingly. even when they say it's mandatory, they are sort of expecting they have to have students be willing to do it. they don't really have much in

the way of enforcement mechanism. they make them simple, easy reading books because they don't think they can actually get the students volunteer tearily to read them otherwise. so that's number one. number two, once you decide it's 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 he'll know what the business administration student likes, thening lesch professor. trying to get massive buy-in 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 buy-in is what they're tasked to do they're not asked to get a good book. they're asked to get one that is broadly appealing. and if being asked as your first

priority get a good book you're not going to get a good one. the institutional structure is that way. so, you're trying to get recent books as well and that's 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 they're 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. you're going to get their to people who are recent, people who aren't american. there is actually a peculiar -- you're trying -- part of the point of going to college is learning about the world. the only people you're learning about it from are those americans who are on the circuit

of common reading. it's a very parochial genre was of this. so you get the recent stuff. and it's supposed to be appealing, so it's all memoir or biography, and the young person memoir, young person biography. 70% is the popular nonfiction written in extremely direct lack of style. there's no variation in the form. it's all the same sort of thing. and the enrique's 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 it's all the same sort of book.

and one should add to this, they're 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 double-digit selections. when you choose more recent books you choose fewer books. the older the book is the more various it's likely to be. so, when you're 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 left-wing direction, and add to this people who choose the books do tend to be progressive. they don't seem to realize there are books which don't follow the particular political direction. now, because you're 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 isn't going to raise anybody's hackle. to the lowe's common denominator progressivism. and i'm 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 wouldn't be so bad if these were part of the whole but in fact they're 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? there's some decent stuff out there. you have a classic selection at utah valley university, i believe, that is george bernard shaw's 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. it's 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. we'd like to get rid of the extracurricular goals. just make it apodaca goal. don't worry about building community. how do you test if community is being built?

they have a goal which is literally impossible to tell whether they've succeeded at it. confined to academic goals you'll actually be able to tell what you're doing, and if it is working. we'd 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. it's 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 can't 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]

>> i'm told we should be marking time here for about a minute while our technicians mic us for the question session. so, i'm 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 that's 15 or 16 separate colleges. it's -- 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. they're 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 don't know whether this is fate or circumstance or whatever it might be, but there's a lot to think about that the other wes moore had a

lot of bad breaks and isn't 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 it's a book about injustice, but it's 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, that's what happens. that what happens some of the time. there's just mercy about a guy who ends up in jail without having done anything wrong. this poor fellow is living in rural a.m., there's 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, hasn't had a very nice life even after jail. story would be a real page-turner it own right. it's 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 story-telling. it's like the other wes moore, written at best a junior high level. there's a thing called the rating that i referred to before. it's 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, it's not just our opinion. there's pretty hard data that backs that up. so, we are mic'd now and ready to go. so it's time to ask questions. i'm going to start with one to break the ice on this. mark, your comments about these

books suggest that you're pretty unhappy with the choices that your colleagues are making in english departments and elsewhere in the universities. i covey that you're 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 shouldn't trust our judgments about contemporary works. very often we're wrong, and the test of time is a good one you've 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 that's 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 people's lives. this is their only chance to read many of the great works, of civilization. they're not going read them most likely when they're out of college. they're 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 don't 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 can't 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 -- it's 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 i'm shy of retiring. i want to page jane austin's persuasion, a beautiful book, relatively brief book, and a book about second chances, and gosh, that's 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.

that's 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? >> that's 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 it's 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 that-important in young people's need. anyone knows a better book about peer pressure that the study of what happens in the pear orchard that night. i don't know what it is. or -- i mentioned this earlier when we were talking. in the illad, there's 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 they're 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 doesn't 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 they're standing back and he sees this point of light coming toward him. it's achilles coming. the great warrior. and at that moment hector's 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 don't 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 19-year-old kid coming into college. >> far can be near. i'm going repeat your questions for the sake of c-span so i'll 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] -- that's what we do in english questions and should do for a all students. >> okay. the far is near. if we look at it correctly. i'm not sure what the question is there. that's a comment. >> isn't the beach books problem a phenomenon of the larger core curriculum problem? if you have faculty that have --

their intellectual responsibility they can't 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 can't 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. >> i'm not sure i can repeat that. is note beach book phenomenal -- represents the an abdication of

intellectual authority of the teaches and we can't solve this problem without addressing that bigger problem. >> we've 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 that's what we're trying to do. it's not a core curriculum. it's far from it. and it is representative of the larger loss, but with just this one book, i think it is possible, and it's our task to show colleges why there's a need for these kinds of books and why they're important.

>> i have a question about what you think -- ideal makeup of a committee is. i'm not sure it's english faculty because colleges -- it's -- [inaudible] -- i wonder if it could be something like a faculty who reports spending time reading. >> so, what's 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. that's a joke. interesting. i think -- i don't 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. >> i'd 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 you're 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 isn't as appealing and accessible as the -- [inaudible] ...

>> you can know where the students are, how fast they're reading. you can also know if they're trying to game the season by clicking through because they can't possibly be reading that fast. and you can know what days of the week they're 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 it's up to the colleges to aspire to that and not be content with formulas and, like you said, processed, pre-processed materials. ready-made answers. and it's something that faculty can do. that's what their job is. and it's 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 mark's, especially mark's statistics and from what david suggested, the problem is that we're not doing the job of lower education that we need to. the colleges, it's almost a futile endeavor. >> too late. >> to try to catch up -- [inaudible] >> is in any merit to the idea that the problem is a k-12 problem and that students, by the time they read college, are a kind of lost cause if they've 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, it's 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 youth-oriented

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 don't care, they don't -- they're 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, you've got to do this. if you want to become a, an

informed citizen and a discerning consumer with good taste, you've got to do these things. you've got to absorb these things. that argument doesn't go very far. >> i'd 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 doesn't mean that it can solve nothing, and it doesn't mean that changes in what colleges do won't help. you know, a nontrivial number of people where that means, what, thousands of people, maybe millions over the course of years, and it's not all the immediate. i'm going to give you my happy-dramatic anecdote. one of the first classes i ever taught i had an older student. what's 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 hadn't 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 there's 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, don't 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 who's 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 don't know if -- there you go. my filmology not up-to-date. 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. we've had art competitions, open mic nights, military demonstrations, science experiments. there's 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 it's a dead author, you can always get an impersonator of. [laughter] >> i've got to be the down note on this one. if movie exists, they'll watch the movie and won't read the book as often as not. >> well, you know what happened in seinfeld when -- [inaudible]

"breakfast at tiffany's, which, of course, changes the whole course, plot of the book. >> i don't think i can repeat that -- [laughter] yes. >> a three-part question. has any thought been given to why there's 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 aren't coming from high school where they, where the curriculum -- whether the curriculum is good or not where they're used to accountability. >> okay. so the three-part 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. i'll 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 it's not very common, but it does happen. and, yes, some colleges do test, and it seems to work well, and it's a question of why more don't do it. the third, rotation by discipline, i've not heard of. ashley? >> i have not, but i think it's 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 it's 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 that's not racist, that's not the western canon, that's 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 question's related to my near versus far question earlier.

>> yeah. >> but i think i'm going to turn to david on that first because he is a much stronger fan of the fantastic, and i'm much more rooted in the realism. >> i guess you would say, in effect, i think that's what they think they're 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 there's no sense of how greatly much more different people were 500 years ago from wherever. so it's 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 that's not because, it's no longer because it is new and different, it's because that's now the default genre fiction that people read. the default movies that they see. i love science fiction and fantasy, but when it's chosen, it's usually because it stretches the students less, not because it stretches them more. >> and fiction is very rare. it's -- nonfiction is more than 70% of the books chosen. and of those nonfiction, most are memoirs. so it's very much a lot of the subtitles are my journey, my struggle, my year in blank. so it's very me-focused rather than -- >> there's 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 we've 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 what's 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 you're 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. we've got a bargain in place between faculty and students. the bargain is on the faculty side i'm going to show up to class and give you a syllabus, i'm going to give you a decent lecture, presentation, and then

i'm going to go away. you're going to do what you're supposed to do on the syllabus, and you'll submit those materials and take those tests, and you'll get a decent grade. let's not spend too much time talking in my office. let's not do too much extracurricular contact. i don't want to sit around and talk with you for 45 minutes about why she's getting up in the middle of the night and washing her hands, you know, walking the halls. let's not get into that. [laughter] you've got the syllabus, you've got the assignments, you know what to do, i'll see you later at the exam. that's the bargain. i won't bother you too much, you don't 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 that's why colleges have dumbed down their reading lists thus far? opinions? >> sometimes one gets the sense that they haven't even tried to know. so it's just not their priority. i mean, it's not that difficult to read if you put, if you spend some time on it. i don't think the slowness of it is the problem, it's 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 doesn't sound very productive. right?

that doesn't, that doesn't go along with building a resumé. it doesn't go along with, you know, doing, you know, internships or -- i mean, i can see how what you're saying does sound inefficient in terms of the high achiever focus on so much of their lives if their high achievement isn't 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 addison's play about cato

because he thinks this is an important thing, this is what people should know. those things don't 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 resumé. >> so it seems we need to change what we value as a society. >> we'll be able to take two more questions. sir, we'll just -- >> tell me if i'm being too cynical. come back to this larger question, she's 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 i'm too cynical. >> are beach books programs an attempt to create a community by resisting larger principles of community? >> well, you wouldn't choose the classics if you're trying to create a community of people -- [inaudible] >> so this is a reference to the anti-culture on campus. it's oppositional character that's dislike, perhaps dislike is too soft a word for the inheritance of western civilization, rejection of all that in favor of what's new and break on our shores as the sea of the new culture cometh. >> i want to add one more goodwill thought, i'm sorry. [laughter] the people who serve on these committees are the ones who didn't run screaming from serving on a selection committee. they're the ones who are dedicated to the college. they may not have made choices i like, but they put in the time. and, yeah, they've got more of a

sense of community than the ones who slacked off doing any community service at all. >> i don't mean slackers -- >> i mean, among the professors, among the faculty. so the people -- so you've 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 don't want the i don'tg book in people's 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. >> i'm just suggesting the faculty itself is contradicting itself. >> uh-huh. >> last question, sir. >> i'm wondering -- [inaudible] in terms of institutional -- [inaudible] politics seems to be an add-on. suppose it's 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 they're talking about political community. now, if that's so, then -- [inaudible] really isn't part of that. there's no messaging for that. >> put this into a question?

>> well, i'm just saying what would happen if -- [inaudible] >> so there's the possibility that we're being too gentle about all this, that it's not mere accident that there is a political subtext to these books, that it's 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 op-eds we've been writing about it. i've tried to rein it in a little bit in that there's clearly some element of goodwill in the selection of these books. it's 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 didn't previously mention is "outcast united."

it's another, basically, children's book about a multicultural soccer team in south carolina, a do-gooder 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] >> it's 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. they're united in coming together in this oppositional enterprise in which their going to generate a new, more wholesome culture. and that's 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 it's 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. it's 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 band-aid, but at least it's a band-aid. and, therefore, let us go out and find the best band-aids we can. certainly, enrique's journey or just mercy don't 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. it's great to publish a 200-page 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. let's get a conversation started in this country about better books for the beach and maybe beyond the beach. not just sand castles, we're 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 -- i'm giving away copies

of two of my books while they last. mark has put some of his books up here. i don't know if he's giving them away or selling them. he can make a choice. [laughter] >> they're half price, actually. [laughter] [inaudible conversations] >> thanks again for coming. i hope we'll see you at future events. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> we want to hear from you. post your feedback to our facebook wall. facebook.com/booktv.

>> here's 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 i'm 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 you'll 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