Going to have it published. I want to also focus, again, a little bit on Alexander Hamilton. Not just because hes got wonderful musical but because even if your talk, the figure of hamilton, perhaps justifiable moves rather large. As you say, people were obsessed with him, fascinated with him, tell us more about Alexander Hamilton as a founder. Yeah, one of the things the book focuses a lot on the decade after the convention, those first years and i think one thing that people dont understand is how close these enormous egos came to destroying the country and maybe it was inevitable when you get that many brains in one room youre going to have problems. Very quickly on washington on one side hamilton fell and on the other side when jefferson returned, jefferson and madison are all in the same administration and hamilton was more comfortable with the british model. He thought there were problems with the british model but i think it admired the state status and he thought if you were going to be a nationalist government you needed to have that same kind of power, for example, the bank and jefferson thought that was a disaster that the state should be supreme, he was dubious about National Power and he had lived in france right before the revolution and was taken by that spirit of rhetoric object liberty and equality and worried about monarchy and the visions just completely collide and as i mention, poor washington was left to deal with them all, as long as washington was alive, everybody had enormous respect for washington. Hes one of the people who you cant find anybody to say anything about it whatsoever. As long as washington was there, the system kind of held. Once washington retired, then things really fell apart and whats quite remarkable is that the country i mean, its really quite remarkable that the country survived. We have time for a couple of questions, let me be one of them from the audience, are you aware any Supreme Court decision which cite in support of the decision . Decisions that may relied on some of the revision that is were made, lets say, later than the event itself. The Supreme Court for most of its history has been quite fairful not to cite directly to the notes, they tend to cite to the federal papers which they like a lot more which were written by madison and hamilton during this period when they are very close, so i dont think this book will change specific issues, i think what this book will cause difficulty for some people because people who believe may have some pause and originalism is sometimes misunderstood, its not the idea that you use history in constitutional interpretation, thats always been an important part of how we interpret the constitution, but originalism is the claim that the only legitimate way to read the constitution is what people in basically 1787 who wrote the document or the people who ratified it thereafter fought the constitution meant that no other meanings are acceptable and i think for that group of people the sense of how difficult it was even at the moment for people to understand what the constitution meant, how many disagreements there are at that moment will be a little bit complicated. I want to come back to my original question about madison often times thought of as a constitution, you think about looking at the revisions and what he did in terms of trying to serve, changed them a little bit to reflect his evolving views, is it fair to think of him still as the father of the constitution . Yeah, i dont know if he was the father of the constitution, but the thing i came away from is how terribly important the document is not as objective record but as a way to understand how difficult the task was that they faced. I came away from the whole project with enormous respect for how close the country was to falling apart and how much different people with different opinions struggle to try and hold it together, how remarkable the document was that was written in philadelphia but how different it looked to them than it looks to us, as i say, this is not the document they thought they were writing t fact that they ended up on playing cards would be a great surprise to all of them. Let me mention a couple of things about you see how short madison was which may be real victory for short people but maybe most importantly marrys book is on sale in the kirby lobby outside. I want to thank mary for taking her time. Thanks so much, i really enjoy being here. [applause] [inaudible conversations] youre watching book it have on cspan2, television for serious readers. Here is a look at whats on prime time tonight. We kickoff evening with a report on required reading for College Freshmen, then at 9 00, Jesse Holland describes the lives of slaves in the white house. Followed with after words with michael hayden, former cia director to discuss national security. We finish up our prime time programming at 11 00 with gym mayor on the influence on big money if politics. Investigative reporter will join us live next weekend to discuss all of our books and take your questions, that all happens tonight on cspans book tv, first up on book tv in prime time, here is a look at books assigned to incoming freshmen. [inaudible conversations] welcome to the release of the National Associations scholar report and my name is peter wood, im president of the National Association scholars. In 2009 a young man heading for seaside vacation in mexico kicked off an unusually heavy book for beach reading, 800page on the life of 18th century immigrant. 50 pages or so into the book the story took possession of the 29yearold lined miranda, what emerged from his reading 2004 Alexander Hamilton, hottest ticket on broadway, broadway play is widely noted for many things including its exact fidelity to historical facts. Each books be not be like reading and can be a lot of things, one of the top five most assigned common readings for College Freshmen last year was also a book about the obstacles overcome by an immigrant, it is the being shorter enriques journey by sonia nosario, 16yearold honduran boy, drug user and thief, makes us way through mexico and across the texas border at laredo. The book contrasts on several points, one of them is that enriques journey is written at a level appropriate for fifth graders, engaged by the rating system. Well, welcome to the launch of the National Association of scholars and new edition of books, its our fifth, this addition covers the books assigned by colleges and universities to their incoming freshmen classes in summer of 2014 and 2015. We have splendid line of speakers. A little later we will hear from executive director of the nas, ashley thorn, Reading Program to illuminate, she wrote the first four reports and established the subject that something that both professors and general public take seriously. Selection on data and Reading Program into a coherent analysis. He did astonishingly good work in the last few months. We will have time later on by the way for questions and versions, but our keynote speaker professor at english, former director of research and analysis and senior editor. Let me add how grateful i am hosting the launch of this report as one of the true storm walls in our society against raging, threatening to public culture. The book that changes the minds of generation is of urgent concern as it is to the National Association of scholars. Professor can explain that better than i can, mark. [applause] thank you, peter. Thank you all for coming here. Its not happy news to speak about Higher Education about some of the reading choices that are made by the colleges every year and what im going to do here is just lay out some of the background about why Colleges Even have these programs at all and actually to give a little bit of sympathy for the problems that theyre facing when they do assign these books and what they hope these these programs which can run all year long, they collect a book and they have incoming and students read it on organized programs, they bring assignments into the course that is are oriented towards the book. They have the author, its very important to have the author attend and speak, so its a long process. Not just the assignment of book to read over the summer, and they want it to be an extended experience. They want them to spend some time with this book. Why . Dont they have courses to take . Theyve been admitted to this institution, why pile on this extra reading, this extra task . The last thing they want to do is read books over the summer. And well see thats one of the issues. So just briefly there really are, i chose three major problems with their incoming students and its actually not so much the selected institutions but all those others. Actually it affects the solicited institutions as well. One is that they read one book and this is something that doesnt exist otherwise, okay. There is no common reading now either in American Life, in general or in the school curriculum. I ask students in a class if i refer to a book, i teach American Literature often. Two or three out of the 20 students have read it, great gaspy. The most popular one these days for High School Reading is to kill a mockingbird, 20 . This is a unique actual condition in American Life of 150 years in the schools and out of the schools t the bible was a book that everybody knew. It was in School Reading books, you know, the american primmer, lessons around biblical, that was the book that was common to everyone. I actually have my American Literature students all read portions genesis which was important at the time of the founding, and when i say president obama first inaugural used time to put away childish kings, does anyone know where that came from . [laughter] okay. I dont want to say second. [laughter] but american and Public Schools certainly grew more secular. Readied have for a few decades there there was a fairly common core curriculum in 11th or 12th grades, sometimes earlier grades where you did have set of american words that most students did read, short stories and Scarlet Letter by hawthorne, a little bit of emerson, gaspy. This was fairly solid for 50s, 60s and 70s and we know what happened there. Multiculturalism came along and broke it up and the promise of multiculturalism was that we would have those words being, we would have more literature by women and minority and that this would actually build Greater Knowledge and so we would have an african tradition where people would go along with other traditions, that isnt what happened, what happened was that instead of having a bigger tradition that everyone would read portions of, this came all over the place. Teachers are largely allowed to select or School Districts select their own works, common core does not have a required reading list as a recommended list and largely ignoreed. They dont want to tell people what to read. That sounds like prescriptionness, telling people what to do and its going to be too narrow and so on. This leads us with a set who havent read a common book and the problem there is that if people havent they dont have some cultural thing in common, you cant build a culture out of them. The schools and the report you can see often talk about community, well, and theyre right, one of the ways in which you have a community is people have read the same thing, they have some of the same cultural backgrounds, so this is one thing, one problem, the lack of any common reading that thethat the program tries to address. Two, students dont like to read. They dont read very much on their own. Its not they dont have a common reading, harry potter is one kids know. You never know, they may have just seen the movie. We are pretty far beyond the publication in their lives at this point. But they dont read very much on their own. Im going to give you some numbers on this. This is from the 2014 survey, very large survey project thats at ucla, goes back to mid60s, here are the rates for those students who come into college, firstyear students and these are Fouryear College students, no twoyear college or vocational, these are fouryear institutions. The rate of reading from pleasure, how often in you week do you read for pleasure . How many hours do you log . That was the question. This the largest cohort, 31 answered none. Nearly onethird of them never read for pleasure. Less than one hour, zero minutes to one hour, 24 , one to two hours a week, 22 . Okay. Got that. We are about three quarters of the students reading as negligable activity. Youre entering the world in which you have to read books. Okay. College is going to ramp up the reading requirement on your own. Youre not going to see a teacher every day who is going to go through a few pages with you at a time. Youre going to have much more of a selfstarter, if you drop out t teacher doesnt care, sometimes we dont even know because there are larger classes, theres no babysitting here, no parachute for you and if you just disappear, this is letting you know you have to accustom yourself to going through a 300page book and spending time with it, live with this book over time, many english teachers is saying its getting harder and harder to assign a book more than 200 pages. It just doesnt fit, doesnt go with the rhythms of lives. So onebook program tries to get them to be more bookish. Thats the thats the intent. Now, some people will say, well, they dont read because they dont have time to read because they are piling up so many hours of homework, here is problem number three. The survey comes in on homework time. This is what students report. Not how many hours of homework they are assigned, how much homework they actually do and here is studying homework hours per week and these are Fouryear College students. Less than two hours a week 29 . 3 to 5 hours a week, 27 . 6 to 10, 21 . 6 to 1, not much more than an hour a day. More than an hour a day all weekend long. Two hours of study time. Now, below that, less than an hour. 60 of the youryear College Students. So it is not homework thats take agoway reading minutes from them, its not making them less bookish, but weve got to get them them there. I mean, colleges are partly graded on retention, drop outs look very bad for institutions. The obama the accreditation issues can come into play, so theres a lot of pleasure to keep students there on the campus, so let me add one more factor to this that relates somewhat to the factor. You dont read on your own. You dont do that much homework, you dont know very much. The Knowledge Level that students come into college with are abismal. As much as their reading skills which are quite low, last year the scores, the lowest in 40 years. A. C. , the college readiness, only 46 of people taking a. C. And the vast majority of them are going to college. Only 46 are college ready. That means they can only get a b my news in a freshmen english class. Most of them are going to get c or below there. The a. C. T, scores have gone down every single year except when it was flat. This was what was happening with the act scores. If you look at the National Association of progress, thises this is the nations report card by the federal government in content, areas and geography only 20 of 12th graders and 2010 were efficient, in u. S. History only 12 were proficient in civics only 24 . If im in a class and i refer to the french revolution for some reason, something about thomas jefferson, you cant just assume this, the students have historical Civics Knowledge about things. This is another issue that one book reading can solve. You select a book that has a lot of accompanying knowledge thats going to go into it as well. So you select charles dikens. Youre getting something about the french revolution which will carry over to other so you want to select the book that is knowledge rich, all right, its going to bring cultural literacy that will fill the big gaps in their head. Thats what the onebook program is ideally going to do. You want to tell us that, is that happening . [laughter] thank you all again for coming out on a night theyre predicting snow and actually mardi gras. Can you hear me . Great. And thank you for hosting us. We did get started on this. I wanted to give a little bit of background and david is going to tell us about the findings, we got started in 2010 when faculty member told me about the book that his college was assigning and something called the common reading and i didnt know what this was and wanted to find out if a lot of colleges were reading this and it turned about 300 universities around the college that were advertising that they had one book for College Freshmen and so we put together this list for the first time, peter and i came with subject categories to talk about what the book foe kissed on, the themes that they focused on and looked at the trends among what was the most popular in the books, we gave our own analysis of what this means for Higher Education generally and all started a list of recommended titles that colleges could pick from as better books for next year and at the time common Reading Programs were on the rise and so everyone involved in these kinds of programs was looking for a onestop place to go to learn what books were being assigned and what the trends were so we unknowingly created something that was very useful for people and its now become their goto source. Its been cited by the mla and their national conference, faculty members come to us now when theyre serving on committees for selecting the books, we include every common reading we could find from stanford to Community College and so because of that, this is the only comprehensive list like this and each y