Common reading: good idea, needs improvement
Very few new students showed up to the common reading lectures this week, which does not bode well for next week’s speakers. Despite this undeniably shaky beginning, we think the program has potential to positively influence campus life inside and outside the classroom in future years.
We do not want to see the common reading program die, but it must change if next year’s matriculants can be expected to participate. First, the readings should be mailed with Orientation Week packets instead of merely posted on the O-Week Web site, which is not even directly linked to Rice’s homepage. The additional publicity would ensure that all new students have quick, direct access to the readings before they arrive on campus.
As far as content goes, we like the idea of a series of articles instead of a single book. The compilation offers a broader range of perspectives on an intellectual topic, and we like that the program did not simply mirror the novel-a-summer common reading programs of our peer universities.
We want an engaging intellectual environment to be emphasized early in the first-year experience. This year, O-Week programs did not call any attention to the common reading program. O-Week is the only time when new students are truly captive audiences to lecturers and upperclassmen. And while O-Week is already overstuffed with speakers and workshops, preexisting activities could easily incorporate common reading topics.
The English Composition Exam, for example, could offer an essay with a prompt relevant to one of the common reading topics. The hired speaker, introduced this year, could be an expert on a common reading theme — one of the article’s authors would be ideal, especially if that author were not a faculty member.
This year, two lunches during O-Week were devoted to giving new students opportunities to meet with faculty about academic prospects, in addition to the two-hour academic fair held every year. One of these academic lunches could be replaced with a common reading discussion group lunch, where new students, O-Week advisers and even faculty could bond while debating an intellectual topic.
These changes would not alter O-Week’s schedule severely. But they could improve the “intellectual community” that Dean of Undergraduates Robin Forman sought as a primary goal of the common reading program.
We hope the common reading program continues, and we hope that it continues to evolve to attract students’ interest.
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