So, what is a “Common Read,” anyway?

No Impact Man is UMass Amherst’s third “Common Read,” to be distributed this summer to all 2013-14 new students (both first-year and transfer).  The program started in 2011 when Ron Suskind’s A Hope in the Unseen was selected as a common reading assignment for all incoming freshmen.  Students received a copy of the book during summer New Students Orientation and were asked to read it before returning to campus in the fall.  At New Students Convocation on September 2, 2011, the book’s protagonist, Cedric Jennings, gave the keynote address, and there were discussion sessions later that day, in addition to other programming in the fall.  The 2012 version of the project, using Ernie Cline’s Ready Player One and also featuring an author visit, built on the successes of 2011.

The Common Read at UMass Amherst was started by Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life Jean Kim, in the hopes that a shared reading assignment for all incoming first-year students would not only help prepare them for the vibrant intellectual life of this university but also provide them with a valuable community-building experience and give them a welcome opportunity to reflect, both individually and in groups, on their transition from high school to college.  The idea of a common book at UMass was not new (for years Commonwealth College had an annual “Dean’s Book”), but a shared reading assignment for the entire freshman class – and, by extension, the whole campus – was new.

Of course, many colleges and universities have such programs.  In 2011, new students at Mount Holyoke College read Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.  At Amherst College, incoming freshmen read excerpts from Race and Class Matters at an Elite College by Elizabeth Aries.  At Smith College, it was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  And at Hampshire College, students read Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (new Hampshire freshmen in fall 2012 will read Jeff Sharlet’s Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between).

Summer reading assignments are common at large universities, too.  At the University of Connecticut, new students last year read Half the Sky, the same book read at Mount Holyoke; while at Tufts, new students read Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun.  There are also long-standing summer reading programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (its 2012 book is The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr); Appalachian State University (2012 book: Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter); the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2012 book: Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss); and Washington State University (2012 book: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).  (For recent trends in common reading programs, see this New York Times article; for lists of institutions and books, see data collected by the National Resource Center for the First Year Experience and Barbara Fister at Gustavus Adolphus College.)

The rise of common reading programs on college campuses can be traced to two historical phenomena from the past quarter century: the rise of “mass reading events” in society at large and the emergence of “first year experience” programs on U.S. college campuses.

Book clubs have been around for decades, of course; “mass reading events,” on the other hand, are a more recent phenomenon, the book club expanded to very large groups, often with the help of electronic media, such as television, radio, and the internet.  The most famous mass reading project in history is probably Oprah’s Book Club, a monthly event showcased for several years on the Oprah Winfrey television talk show.  The club’s first selection, in 1996, was The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard; for the next six years, with enormous publicity, significant effects on the publishing industry, and occasional controversy, the club flourished, until dying out around 2002 – though later versions popped up sporadically until the end of Oprah’s show in 2011.  (A good resource on Oprah’s Book Club is Kathleen Rooney’s Reading With Oprah, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2008.)

It may have been the success of Oprah’s club that spawned other mass reading programs in this country, most notably “One City, One Book” projects, in which entire cities are encouraged to read the same text.  The idea is said to have begun with “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book” in 1998, organized by Nancy Pearl of Seattle Public Library’s Washington Center for the Book.  The book chosen was The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks.  The idea spread rapidly, and by the mid-2000s, hundreds of community reading programs were operating around the country.  Perhaps the best known today is “One Book, One Chicago,” which began in 2001 with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (Chicago’s 2012 selection is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak).

In our area, Northampton’s “On the Same Page” project selected Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried in 2011.  The same book was the 2010 selection of “One Book Holyoke.”  The “Pittsfield Reads” program, meanwhile, selected Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in 2011.  And the “South Hadley Reads” selection in 2011 was Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.  Many cities have begun such programs (see the Library of Congress’ list here); it’s been more difficult to keep them going year after year.  The National Endowment for the Arts’ “Big Read” project provides grants to support reading programs in 75 communities nationwide, including Boston (which this year is reading Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies) and Deerfield (which chose Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club ).  There are “One City, One Book” projects outside the United States, too: Dublin’s 2012 book was Dubliners by James Joyce.  For research on “mass reading events,” see Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo’s “Beyond the Book” project.  (In 2012-13, an international Common Read took place, involving Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.)

But when did colleges and universities start asking their students to read the same book, especially first-year students in the summer before they arrive on campus?  For that we need to look at another historical phenomenon: the rise of “First Year Experience” programs in this country.  Orientations and other programming events for freshmen go back centuries; but the current wave of “First Year Experience” programs can be traced to a seminar taught at the University of South Carolina in 1972.  Called “University 101,” it was an effort to improve retention on that campus and to help reconnect disaffected students to their university after the protests of the late 1960s.  The course was a success and widely copied.  In 1982, the director of University 101, John Gardner, held a national meeting in Columbia on “the freshman seminar”; 175 people came.  The next year, the First Annual Conference on the Freshman Year Experience was held; and in 1987, the National Resource Center for the First Year Experience was founded.  Its 2008 conference drew more than 1,600 attendees from around the world.

The movement has been influential: between 1987 and 1995, the proportion of colleges and universities which reported that they were “taking steps to improve the first year” for their students rose from 37 to 82%, and it is thought that the figure is even higher today (click here for more on this history).  First Year Experience programs include University 101-type courses, freshman seminars, residence halls for first-year students only, residential learning communities, undergraduate research programs, enhanced academic advising for freshmen, service learning projects, interdisciplinary and intercultural learning experiences, and extensive new student orientations (like UMass’ own NSO).

When you combine the mass reading event in the wider culture with first year experience programs on college campuses, you get “One Campus, One Book” projects like ours.  The projects vary by campus, but their objectives overlap considerably.  The goals of the UMass “Common Read,” for example, are threefold: to introduce incoming students to the intellectual life of this university; to provide a shared experience for students arriving on a campus that can sometimes feel intimidating and fragmented; and to give new freshmen a chance to reflect, both individually and in groups, on the often fraught transition from high school to college, from home to UMass.  Interestingly, Andi Twiton’s study of more than a hundred “common read” programs found two goals predominating: to model intellectual engagement and to build a sense of community, with more than 80% of respondents naming those two goals as key.  But there are other potential effects of these projects.  One of the things I like about Common Read projects is all the secondary readers – beyond the intended audience – they reach.  After all, more than just first-year students read these books; their parents do as well, along with interested faculty and staff, peer counselors and resident advisors, even curious community members.  During the last two years, while talking about the Common Read with groups around campus, I met so many people committed to our students and interested in the Common Read.  All of them had copies of either Ready Player One or A Hope in the Unseen in front of them, many of them heavily marked and dog-eared.

But designing and conducting such a project, on a campus like ours, is tough.  It’s one thing to ask a few hundred new students at a small liberal arts college to read the same book before arriving in the fall.  It’s another thing to do it with nearly 5,000 new freshmen, from wildly diverse backgrounds, coming to such a large university, divided into multiple colleges and professional schools, whose faculty are often motivated more by advanced research than by undergraduate learning.  How do you select such a book?  You need something that will garner wide appeal across campus, a book attractive to both 18 year olds and the many adults around them, a book that will resonate with readers’ hearts and souls but also connect to the intellectual life of a university.  It has to be a book new students will read, without the motivation of a grade, in the summer between high school and college; it should be available in a paperback version, not too long or too short; and it’s nice to have an author who can come visit at the start of the school year to talk with students.  Finally, you’ve got to give the program a high profile, surrounding it with enthusiasm, while not raising unrealistic expectations for what is, after all, a reading assignment for nearly 5,000 young adults!

It’s not surprising, then, that common reading projects have generated controversy.  In 2002, New York City tried to emulate “One City, One Chicago” with its own common read, but the project ended in division and acrimony when organizers couldn’t decide between Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker and James McBride’s The Color of Water.   That same year, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was sued by angry parents when entering freshmen were asked to read Approaching the Qur’an by Michael Sells (the University won the lawsuit, but the experience was searing; see this page, with resources about the controversy from Prof. Carl Ernst of UNC-CH).  More recently, the conservative National Association of Scholars has complained that colleges too often choose books with a liberal bias (for other critiques, see this article from Inside Higher Ed).

So, the projects have potential drawbacks.  It’s probably not helpful, then, to exaggerate their virtues or overstate their effects.  I learned the first year, with A Hope in the Unseen, that nearly everyone on campus had an opinion about the book we chose, many before they’d even read it!  And some people told us flatly, “the students won’t read it.”  On that count, of course, they were wrong.  But I was glad that we were generating cross-campus dialogue, even if some of it was skeptical – connecting people was one of the goals of the project, after all!  Still, it’s probably good to deal with some misconceptions off the bat.  For one thing, the book isn’t meant to make some simple, univocal statement about what “the University” believes or values.  And organizers of the Common Read don’t imagine that every student will read the book the same way and come out with the same lessons.  English professors will be the first to tell you that when you reduce a book to a single, unambiguous message, you reduce both reading and readers in the process.  Similarly, the Common Read isn’t meant to solve, for once and all, some problem on campus, like racism or ethnocentrism.  As Andi Twiton shows in the study cited above, at most schools, common reading programs are meant to do two rather mundane, though important, things: to help build community among the entering class and to model for new students the kinds of intellectual engagement – namely, reading, writing, thinking, and talking about texts – that colleges and universities pride themselves on.  In other words, the Common Read is about the experience, not the message; and it’s about the readers, not the book (although selecting a good book is definitely important!).

Two more things: success doesn’t hinge on 100% participation – though we certainly want every new student to read as much of the book as he or she can.  And the book doesn’t have to be the main focus of campus life for the rest of the year – though it’s important to have programming that not only encourages students to read but gives them a chance afterwards to talk about their reading, ideally in multiple fora.  (See this report from the AACU with ideas on how to improve Common Read projects.)

The UMass Common Read is now three years old and still evolving.  Some things continue from the first year: the book is still distributed during summer New Students Orientation; it is still tied to the keynote address at New Students Convocation; it is still the subject of discussion groups later that day; and it is featured in this blog, which is meant to be a space for students, faculty, and staff to talk about the book.  But changes were made for the second and third years: the selection committee was larger and more diverse, including faculty from nearly every college on campus, along with student readers; the Common Read was tied in its second year to the Deans’ Theme (which was focused in 2012-13 on “social media”); and that year we also initiated an essay contest.

I hope this brief history of mass reading projects on U.S. college campuses, and the Common Read at UMass Amherst in particular, has been helpful.  If you have any comments or questions about this post, please reply below!  It would be great to get a discussion going among campus facilitators of the Common Read.  As summer arrives, the posts will be written more and more with incoming students in mind.  If you have an idea for one of those posts, or would be willing to write one yourself, please let me know.  And feel free throughout the spring and summer to reply to this blog.  (You can learn more about me by clicking on “About this Blog” at the top of the page.)

Happy reading!