Now we kickoff the weekend with a report on required reading for College Freshman. If we dont have enough people go out and find some. [inaudible conversations] welcome to the National Association of scholars. I am peter wyatt wood, president of the National Association of scholars. In 2009, a young man heading on vacation in mexico picked up and unusually heavy book for his beach reading, and 800 page tome of the life of an 18thcentury immigrant. 50 pages or so into the book the story took possession of the 29yearold. Would emerge from his reading of Alexander Hamilton is now the hottest ticket on broadway, the hiphop musical hamilton. Broadways play is widely noted for many things including its exact fidelity to historical facts. Each bowl must not be Light Reading and the right beach book can kick off a lot of things. As it happens one of the top five most common readings for College Freshman last year was also a book about the obstacles overcome by an immigrant, the considerably shorter and ricans journey which offers a harrowing account of the 16yearold under an boyd, drug users and thief who makes his way through mexico across the texas border. The book contrasts on several points, one is that henry k. s journey is written at a level appropriate for fifth graders by an independent rating system. Welcome to the launch of the National Association of scholars new edition of beach books. This is book designed by colleges and universities to Incoming College classes in the summer of 201415. We have a splendid lineup of speakers to break the champagne bottle over the bow of beach books number 5. We will hear from executive director Ashley Thorne who first conceived of studying, and reading programs as a way to illuminate what colleges really value. The first four reports established the subject and something professors and the general public take seriously. We will also hear from the director of communications, david randall, who wrote this report. He is phd from rutgers in history, joins the National Association of scholars october 1st and his first assignment was to synthesize our collection of data on these common breeding programs into a coherent analysis. He did astonishingly good work in the last few months. We will have time later on for questions and conversation, but our keynote speaker, Mark Bauerlein, former director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the arts, and Senior Editor at first thing. Let me add how grateful i am the first things is hosting the launch of this report, first things is one of the truce form walls in our society against the regions seas of mediocrity, that threaten to drown our public culture. Follow these books that shape the minds of the coming generation is clearly a matter of urgent concern and it is to the National Association of scholars. But Mark Bauerlein can explain that much better than i. [applause] thank you. Thank you all for coming here. It is not happy news to speak about Higher Education, about some of the reading choices that are made by colleges every year. What i will do here it is lay out some of the background about why Colleges Even have these programs at all. And to give a little bit of sympathy for the problems they are facing when they do assigned these books and what they hope these programs which can run all year long, they have incoming students read it, spend a few weeks on organized programs, debates, the courses that are oriented towards the boat, they have the author, very important to have the honor to attend and speak so it is a long process, not just the assignment of a book for the mall to read over the summer. They wanted to be an extended experience. They want them to spend some time with this book. They graduate from high school. They are admitted to this institution, might pile on this extra reading. Lasting you want to do is read books over the summer, we will see that is one of the shoes. Briefly, there really are i choose three major problem this schools face today with their incoming students. This actually is not so much the hyper selective institutions but the other is that actually it affects selected institutions as well. One is they read one book. This is something that doesnt exist otherwise. There is no common reading now either in American Life, in general, or in her who the school curriculum. I ask students in a class if i refer to a book, i teach American Literature, huckleberry finn, two or three out of the 20 students in class have read it, the great gaps the, the most popular ones these days for High School Reading of to kill a mockingbird, probably the most popular novel that is chosen in high school. But only 20 of the kids, there is a report under this from a few years ago. This is a unique condition in American Life for 150 years in schools and out of schools the bible was the book everybody knew. The bible was everywhere. It was in political discourse, it was in School Reading books, the american primer, everyone read the bible. If you did not actively reading you heard it redding church, at the dinner table, that was the book that was common to everyone. I have my American Literature students all read portions of genesis and leviticus which is very important at the time of the founding, and the sermon on the mount. President obama in his first inaugural used the phrase put away childish things. That is not the sermon on the mount. That is much later. Okay. I am getting simple. I dont want to say second. All right. Over the 20th century, Public Schools certainly grew more secular, we did have for a few decades a fairly common core curriculum in eleventh or twelfth grade, some times earlier grades where you did have a set of american works that most students did read, short stories, the Scarlet Letter by hawthorne, walt whitman, anderson, huckleberry finn, great gatsby, hemingway, a fairly solid, 50s, 60s and 70s, multiculturalism came along and killed that tradition, broken up and the promise of multiculturalism was we would have those works being read but we would have not much richer set of traditions, more literature by women and minorities. Authors. This would actually build Greater Knowledge and we would have an africanamerican to go along with other conditions. That isnt what happened. What happened was instead of having a bigger tradition should everyone would read portions of, it became all over the place. Teachers are largely allowed to select for school districts, select their own works. Common core does not have a required reading list as it has recommended reading list that is largely ignored in the implementation of common core. We dont want to tell people what to read. That sounds like a prescription medicine. We dont want to get to that because you start excluding things, telling people what to do indeed is too narrow and so on, so it leaves us with a set of kids who havent read a common book and the problem is if people havent if they dont have some cultural things in common you cant build a culture out of them. The schools in the report talk about community. And they are right, one of the ways in which you have a community is people have read the same things. They have the same culture background. This is one thing, one problem, lack of any common reading that the program tries to address. 2, students dont like to read. They dont read very much on their own. Not just they dont have a common reading assignment in school or on their own, they might want to talk about harry potter. That is one thing you can mention in class that most of the kids know but at this point they may have just seen the movies. We are pretty far beyond the publication in their lives at this point, but they dont read very much on their own. I will give some numbers on this, this 2014 American Freshmen survey, very large survey project, at ucla, back to the mid 60s. The range for students to coming to college, a frisky students, four year college students, not two year college, vocational, these four year baccalaureate institutions, the rate of reading for pleasure, how often in a week to you read for pleasure, how many hours do you log, that is the question. This is the largest, 31 answered none. Nearly 1third of them, and never read for pleasure. Less than one hour. Zero minutes to 1hour, 24 . 1 to two hours a week, 22 . Three quarters of the students reading is a negligible activity. At best. They just dont read many books on their own at all. Assigning common reading, you are entering a world in which you have to read books. College is going to ramp up the reading requirement on your own, you are not going to see that feature every day who is going to go through a few pages with you at a time, you have a much more adult started, youll be on your own. If you dropout the teacher doesnt care, dont even know in larger classes, there is no babysitting here, no parachute for you. If you just disappear this is letting you know, you have to accustom yourself to going through a 300 page bill, 200 page book and spending time with it, you have to emerge with it, live with this book over time. Many english teachers will take it is getting harder to assignable more than 200 pages, students just dont it doesnt go with the rhythms of their life. You can read a few pages and do this for a while and then go back, it doesnt work at the College Level so the one book program tries to get them to be more bookish. That is the intent. Some people will say they dont read because they dont have time, they are piling up so many hours of homework. This is where the American Freshmen 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. Here is studying homework hours per week. These are four year college students, less in two hours a week, 29 , three to five hours a week, 27 , 6 to 10, 21 . 6 to 10, that is not much more than an hour a day. One hour a day, all weekend long, two hours, steady time. You get below that, less than an hour a day for 60 of the four year college. So it is not homework that is taking hallway Meeting Minutes from them. Is not making them less fat bookish but we got to get them there. Colleges are part degraded on retention. Dropouts look very bad for institutions. The accreditation issue is can come in to play. There is a lot of pressure to keep students on campus. Let me add one more factor to this, that relates somewhat to the reading hackett, you dont read on your own. You dont do that much work, you dont know very much. The Knowledge Level students coming to college with our abysmal. Abysm. Not just their reading skills which are quite low. Last years as 80 reading scores the lowest in 40 years since 1972. Act, college readiness, 46 of students taking the act, the vast majority of them are not going to college, 46 are college ready. That means they can get a b minus in a freshman english class. Most will get seat or below. The s 80 waiting test in 2005 last year the lowest scores ever. The scores have gone down every single year except two years when they were flat. This is what is happening with the s. A. T. Scores. If you look at the National Assessment of educational progress this is the nations report card, given to twelfth graders by the federal government in content areas in geography, only 20 of twelfth graders in 2010 were proficient. In u. S. History only 12 were proficient. In 6 Dirksen SenateOffice Building 04 . You got very low levels coming. If i am in a class and referred to the french revolution for some reason, something about Thomas Jefferson high have to explain what that is. You can just assume the students have historical knowledge about things. This is another issue that the one book reading consults, you select a book that has a lot of accompanying knowledge going into it as well. You saw like Charles Dickenss tale of two cities, you have to know something about the french revolution which will carry over to other things. But you want to select a book that is knowledge rich, right . That is going to bring cultural literacy. That will again fill out the big gaps in their heads. That is what the one book program is ideally pointed to. Tell us if that happens. Thank you all again for coming out on a night they are predicting snow, and it is also marty drawbridge can you hear me . Great. Thank you to first things for hosting us. We did get started on this. I want to give a little background and david is going to tell about the findings. We got started in 2010 when a faculty member told me about the book his college was a signing, something called a common reading and i didnt know what this was and wanted to find out if a lot of other colleges were doing this and it turned out there were 300 colleges and universities around the country that advertising they had this one book for a College Freshman and so we put together this list for the first time, peter and i came up with subject categories to talk about what the book was focused on, the themes they focused on and looking at the trends, what was most popular in the book, give our own analysis of what this means for Higher Education more generally and also started a list of recommended titles colleges could pick from, as better books for next year end at the time, and reading programs were under prius. Everyone involved in these programs was looking for 1stop place to go to learn what books are being assigned and with the trends where. We and knowingly created something that was very useful and it has now become their go to source. It has been cited by the m l a and the national conference. Faculty members come to us when serving on committees for selecting a the book. We included every common reading we could find from stanford to Community College and in this is the only comprehensive list like this. Each year we have done a new edition and it has taken on a life of its own. During this time i focused with a lot of the people who coordinate, and reading programs, and these are faculty members and administratorss who genuinely want students to love reading and to talk with one another about the books, they are concerned with communities, as they see there is a lack of intellectual community but they get stuck in using templates, these patterns that have already been set up and are now accepted as the way these programs are run and this is what we should do. Large committees select the book by popular vote instead of having a few people who are well red shoes good books for all students, they dont assess whether students have actually read the book, they dont have a test or agreed to hold the accountable. They always try to bring the author to speak on campus which was fine but it limits them to only choosing contemporary books. A generally dont think outside the box of what colleges they are doing. One way and a s has been encouraging common reading coordinators to think outside the box is to assign older classic books, these are the underrepresented items in these lists of what is being assigned. When i say classics i am thinking in a generous way, not limiting it to greek and roman classics or a specific can but things mark was talking about, authors like dickens and twain, works that have generally stood the test of time, that are still considered to of enduring value and importance. Coordinators we talk to have given a long pushback as to why they say they cannot or dont want to assign older classic books. So i have collected these objections and answered all of them in the last section of the report, the last pages. I have 25 so far. I just thought of another couple of while i was sitting here. My hope is to say yes, it is possible to choose more difficult, challenging and better books and still accomplish the things you want to do with these programs and make the most of this opportunity. One of the objections i have heard is because this is not for a grade, if students dont like the book they just wont read it. The only hope have is to pick a book that they like. Our job is to find out what students want to read and assign it to them. In principle, a good idea to choose books the students will enjoy but in the long run, it doesnt help them because the reason people go to college instead of being home and reading the books you already know you like is to have your mind informed by people who know more then you do. Another pushback i have heard is classics are elitist. They are for the privileged. To that i say it is a privilege to get to read these books and we should give that privilege to as many people as we can. A lot of people, especially the ones who are taking trouble to go to college, we hear talk about giving more access to Higher Education and so if we really want to give people access, opening up their world to something that is truly higher. In this edition we have just essays by two individuals who agreed on these things for different reasons. One is a truce began, the creator of the great books curriculum that has been used across the country in Community College, he has shown that anyone can benefit from and enjoy reading the great books. The others linda hall, professor of english at skidmore college, refers to herself in her essay as a liberal feminist, she sees value in letting book school for a while and let them prove themselves over time before signing the mass, and reading. She also thinks the colleges are trying to accomplish too much with just one book and, in reading programs