A hidebound reading list for freshmen: colleges promote a predictable ideology.

Minneapolis Star Tribune ^ | 10/3/10 | Katherine Kersten

[rhema]

Last month, you dropped your college freshman daughter off at school. Chances are, as you toted boxes up the dorm stairs, you noticed bulletin boards "celebrating" diversity and a poster announcing a big diversity bash during "Welcome Week."

Diversity -- of skin color, sexual orientation, etc. -- is all the buzz on American campuses today. But intellectual diversity, the kind that really matters? That's a different story.

Take the "common text" your daughter was assigned to read over the summer. The purpose of this shared reading -- a tradition for freshmen on many campuses -- is to encourage intellectual reflection and to start a campuswide dialogue, say college administrators. This academic year, 93 percent of the top 100 colleges ranked by U.S. News and World Report assigned a common reading, according to the National Association of Scholars (NAS) in Princeton, N.J.

In June, NAS released a study of 290 American colleges with such programs. This fall, the study was updated to include all 314 campuses with common readings -- 184 books in all. The conclusion? Far from being diverse in theme and perspective, these books tend toward lockstep conformity.

You won't see "Moby Dick" or "Hamlet" on the list, or even "The Great Gatsby" -- books that have stood the test of time, and that call students to think seriously about humanity's greatest challenges. Instead, most "common texts" seem intended to advance an ideological agenda -- to nudge young people into viewing the world through a very particular prism.

This fall, for example, many freshmen are arriving at college with "No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet" tucked under their arm. Others are being instructed on the evils of capitalism -- the economic system that built our nation's world-class campuses --

[Antoninus]

The Great Gatsby is not a great book. It drives me crazy when conservatives cite it as such.

[Antoninus]

Those Jesuits certainly know how to run a school.

I hate to say it, but sending your daughter to a Jesuit school is a terrible mistake and a waste of money. Unless she's unusually strong, you may lose her--and you'll be paying them tens of thousands of dollars to brainwash her.

And I say this as the product of 8 years of Jesuit re-education.

[WorkingClassFilth]

Exactly. I intend for the offspring to develop talents, interests and practical skills in a wide range of areas. Part of our homeschooling aims at unlocking the nature of the child and directing them in their path toward independence and self-reliance. The ultimate practical goal is to unleash young people that get what they need from the system to achieve THEIR goals - not to be processed for a slot in state economy. Business training along with their strong suits may be better in the long run than any kind of B.A. or the usual collegiate BS.