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Thursday, July 27, 2006
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Of Course UD Thinks it's Ridiculous... ...for students to refuse to read something their university has asked them to read. The group of freshmen at Clemson who, offended by the sexual content of Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, by Ann Patchett, are refusing to read the book (the all-freshmen reading selection for this fall) are being silly. And they've forced upon the university a silly solution, which is to insist that all students take part in the discussion of the text and submit assignments based on it... but, er, not read it if they don't want to. UD finds the selection itself, and the justification for it, however, almost as silly. In choosing a way up-to-the-minute pathography of the booze-, heroin-, and sex-addicted writer Lucy Grealy (she died of an overdose), the university ignores centuries of better, more reflective, books that touch on its subjects. Worse, in choosing the book because, as the head of the selection committee comments, "It's a book about a friendship between two young women that are just a few years older than the college students themselves....It causes (students) to think about issues that they are likely to be confronted with in the near future, and it offers the opportunity for some serious intellectual discussion," the university makes the mistake of pandering to the identities of students. The professor simply assumes it's commendable on the committee's part that it found a book that features people students will find similar to themselves. Though, if you think about it, this impulse is itself misconceived in the context of the book. Truth and Beauty features the pumped up arena of hyperextremist personalities, gruesome psychoses, and intimate psychic violence that we've come to expect from pathographies. At most one or two unfortunates among the Clemson freshman class will confront such a horror. |