"Absolutley American: Four Years at West Point"
Carolina's 2004 Summer Reading Book Still Fails to Challenge Minds.
STEVE RUSSELL
Summer 2004
Welcome to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Now, read about West Point.
That is the message UNC is sending with this year’s book selection for the Summer Reading Program. The program, which enters its sixth year in 2004, is “designed to introduce [incoming students] to the intellectual life of Carolina.” For the fifth time in six years, the program has missed the mark.
Many critics of UNC cheered when administrators announced the selection of Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point. Finally, a book that, at the least, has a chance of being objective. In fact, part of the selection committee’s motivation for choosing this book was to silence the national controversy created in the last several years by previous choices.
Let’s review the history of the program that caused such controversy. In 1999, the program began with There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz, the story of two poor youths from Chicago’s west side. A program with a stated goal of improving UNC’s intellectual climate instead only furthered the faculty’s thirst for race-conscious indoctrination.
In 2000, Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War focused, in a negative light, on the South. In 2001, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Fadiman, introduced incoming students to post-Vietnam guilt, the challenges of refugees in America, and the supposedly serious problems of modern medicine. All with, of course, the standard overt criticism of America we expect from the Left.
After the 9-11 attacks, UNC chose Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, by Michael Sells, for the 2002 program. This book, which excerpted and discussed 35 passages from Islam’s holy book, sparked the loudest controversy. Conservative critics were correct that UNC would never choose a book discussing Christianity. Certainly, the selection of this book and the nature of UNC’s defense of it hinted at arrogance.
In actuality, the book looked more at the beauty and poetry of the passages instead of their religious meaning. In other words, this book had academic value. UNC got it right. The backlash from the Right, however, obscured this. For example, Bill O’Reilly compared the program to forcing students to read Mein Kampf at the height of World War II. A poor analogy, but one that unfortunately stuck. Last year, UNC abandoned all pretense of fostering an intellectual climate by choosing Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. The author, who could probably be mistaken for most card-carrying socialists, wrote about her experiences taking various minimum-wage jobs around the country. Conservatives were again outraged at the book’s “social justice” agenda (if you don’t know, “social justice” is what liberals say they want when they want to take your money).
While the Anthropology and Sociology departments surely appreciated most of the Summer Reading Program books, since they set the stage for the routine indoctrination of freshmen-level classes in those departments, the intellectual climate at UNC suffered. This year, incoming students are introduced to the intellectual climate at UNC through a look at the current climate at West Point.
In other words, while Absolutely American looks like an interesting read, it fails to further the goal of improving the intellectual climate. Quite frankly, it is not an intellectual exercise, but rather one designed to spark the same kinds of discussions you hear on talk radio. This is not the level of intellectual discourse that should occupy a university.
The Summer Reading Program ignores the fact that an intellectual exercise should be just that, an intellectual exercise. It should introduce students to the best of knowledge and should challenge those students. A challenge should not require a guilt trip. And it does not require a social science exercise.
Yes, looking at the culture of the American military, and especially at its major intellectual institution, is valuable. Hopefully those who choose to read the book will gain a greater appreciation of, and respect for, our military. But it does not reach into the reader’s soul or truly challenge the reader to think about truth or about beauty.
This does not mean that incoming students should spend their summer with Plato or Aristotle, but it couldn’t hurt. Neither could a few hours with Shakespeare, or numerous other greats from the past. These are the primary sources of our intellectual tradition, not the compiled thoughts of a social scientist with a large grant.
Perhaps the lesson, then, is that reading the sort of pithy drivel that the committee has selected in the past is what students at UNC should get ready for. And if you are not careful, that is indeed the curriculum you will find. But look hard, past the cobwebs of Sexuality Studies, and African-American Studies, and Women’s Studies, and various cultural studies, and Anthropology, and Sociology, and all the other disciplines that promise easy “A”s and little else. Look hard, and UNC’s intellectual climate will reveal itself. That, however, is a story for another day.
In the meantime, enjoy reading and discussing Absolutely American. Do not let discussion group leaders twist the discussion into an attack on America’s foreign policy. Do not let a peer’s assault on President Bush go unanswered. And, most of all, resist the impression that the Summer Reading Program is a shining example of UNC’s intellectual climate.
One more thing. If you ever want your book chosen for UNC's Summer Reading Program, be sure to put a colon in the title. The committee seems to love long titles with colons. It makes everything sound so...intellectual, doesn't it?