6-17-2022 4:34am

REQUIRED FRESHMEN READING

Summer Reading Starts Now

Racial inequity is one of the most common themes in the books that first-year students are required (or recommended) to read before they show up on campus.

By Maria Carrasco, insidehighered.com

Some of the books first-year students are assigned to read include “The Nickel Boys,” “Just Mercy” and “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”

While incoming first-year college students enjoy the summer break, many will also be cracking open books that their institutions have asked them to read before classes start. The summer reading assignments, known as common books, differ at each institution but are all meant to stimulate discussion about current events when students arrive on campus.

This year, as in the past few years, many institutions are choosing books that touch on issues of social justice—particularly racial inequities. At Siena College in New York, first-year students are required to read Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, a novel based on the true story of abuse at the Dozier School for Boys in Jim Crow–era Florida.

Michelle Liptak, a first-year-seminar professor at Siena, said the faculty committee chose the book back in 2020 for the 2021–22 and 2022–23 academic years.

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“We’re very committed to picking a text that deals with current issues,” Liptak said. “And so given what was going on, especially in regard to the Black Lives Matter movement, we wanted to pick a book that dealt with injustice and race. We narrowed it down to five titles, and The Nickel Boys was one of them.”

The 925 members of the incoming freshman class will discuss the book in their first-year seminars and—depending on the professor—either write an essay or take a quiz on the text.

The college also plans to bring in Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist at the University of South Florida, to discuss her work examining the unidentified bodies of the boys who attended the Dozier School and went missing, said Britt Haas, another professor who leads a first-year seminar. Faculty members who teach the book all try to make it relevant to the world today, she said, though they approach it in different ways.

“The common thing is that it’s the basis for discussion,” Haas said. “It varies very widely, not only the assignment, but even the conversations that we’re having in class. They are all certainly about racial justice issues—how far we’ve come and how far we have to go in terms of striking the balance of racial justice. But all the professors do different things with the book.”

At Goucher College in Maryland FINISH READING HERE