Which the history of immigration from Eastern Europe to america between 1846 and 1940. Michael lynch looks at the impact of technology throughout the digital age in the internet of us. And in the end of alchemy, the former governor of the bankf of england argues the development of paper mun aand credit are equally responsible for economic benefits and volatility. Look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for interviews with the authors in the coming weeks on booktv. Welcome to the release of the National Association of scholars new report. I am the president of the fashion National Association of scholars. In 2009, a young man heading for a seaside vacation in mexico picked up an unusual heavy book for beach reading. An 800 page tome on the life of an 18th century immigrant. The story took possession of the man and he emerged from his reading of 2004 Alexander Hamilton which is now the hottest ticket on broadway. The play is widely noted for many things including its exact fidelity to the historical facts. Beach books are not Light Reading and the right beach book can kick up a lot of sand. As it happens, one of the top five most assigned common readings for College Freshman last year was also a book about the obstacles overcome by an immigrant. It is enriques journey had offers a harrowing account of a 16yearold boy making his way across mexico and through the texas border in larado. One of the books turning point is it is written at level appropriate for fifth graders. Well welcome to the launch of the new edition of the beach books. This Edition Covers books assigned in the summer of 2014 and 2015. We have a lineup of speakers to break the campagna bottle over beach books number five. We will hear from the executive director who conceived of studying common reading programs as a way to illuminate what colleges value. She wrote the first four reports and established the subject as something that book professors and the general public take seriously. We will hear from the nas director of communication, David Randall, who wrote the report. He joins the National Association of scholars only on october 1st and his first assignment was the synesise an analysis. He did astonishing good work in the last few months. We will have stimulator on for questions and answers. Our keynote speaker is the former director of research and analysis at the National Arts center and senior and editor at first things. Let me add how grateful i am firstthi first things is launching this report. The quality books shape the minds of the coming generation and it is a matter of urgent concern to them as it is to the national scholars. But professor can explain this much better. Thank you, peter. Thank you were coming here. It is not happy news to speak about Higher Education as an english teacher about some of the reading choices made by the colleges every year. What i am going to do here is layout 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 they are facing when they do assign these books and what they hope these programs, which can run all year long, they select a book, read it, spend a few weeks on the organized programs, bring assignments into the courses that are oriented toward the book. The author becomes very important to attend and so it is a long process. But just the assignment to read the book over the summer. They want it to be an extended experience. They want them to spend time with the book. Why . You have courses to take. You graduate from high school. You have been admitted to this institution. Why pile it on . The last thing you want to do is read books over the summer. Briefly, i chose three major problems that schools face today with their incoming students. This actually is not so much the hyperselective institutions but actually it affects other institutions as well. One is they read one book. 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, someone name two or three out of the 20 students who read the great gatsby the most poplar ones for High School Reading are to kill a mockingbird that is probably the pomost poplar but still abo 20 of the kids have read it. There was a report on this a few years ago. This is a unique actual condition in American Life. For 150 years in the schools and out of the schools the bible was the book everybody knew. The bible was everywhere. It was in political discourse. It was in School Reading books. In the american primmer, the biblical versus were there. You heard it read in church and at the dinner table. That book was common to everyone. I have my American Literature students read portions from genesis and liviticus and the sermon on the mound. So when i say president obama used the phrase time to put away childish things and does anyone know where that came from . That is much later than the simple sermon on the mountain. Okay. I dont want to say second corinthians. Over the years, the schools grew more secular and for a few decades there was a common core curriculum. In 11th and 12th grade where you had a set of american works that most students did read. You know those short stories like the Scarlet Letter by hawthorn, walt whitman, emerson, huck fin, gatsby, hemmingway. This was solid in the 60s and 70s but multi culturalism came along and broke it up. The promise was we would have those works being read but a richer set of traditions. More literature by women and minority authors and this would build greater knowledge. So we would have an africanamerican literary tradition people would know to 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 it became all over the place. Teachers are largely allowed, or school districts, allowed to select their own works. Common core does not have a required reading list. It has a recommended reading list and it is largely ignored in the implementation of common core we dont want to tell people what to read. We dont want to get to that because you start excluding things and telling people what to do and it is going to be too narrow. This leaves us with people who havent read a common book and if people dont have some cultural things in common you cannot build a culture out of them. The schools in the report often talk about community. They are right. One of the ways in which you have a community is people read the same thing and have the same cultural backgrounds. This is one problem. The lack of any common readings the program tries to address. Students dont like to read is the second problem. They dont read on their own much. We might want to talk about harry potter. That is the one thing you can mention in class most of the students know. At this point they may have just seen the movies. We are pretty far behind the b publication in their lives at this point. But they dont read very much on their own. I am give you numbers on this. This is from the 2014 American Freshman survey. A large survey project housed at ucla going back to the mid60s. These are firstyear students and Fouryear College students. Not twoyear or vocational. But four year institutions. The rate of reading for pleasure. How often in a week do you read for pleasure . How many hours do you log was the question. This the largest cohort with 31 answering none. Nearly one third of them never read for pleasure. Less than one hour. 0 minutes to one hour 24 . 12 hours a week 22 . We are only about three quarters of the students reading as a negigable activity at best. College is going to ramp up the reading requirements on your own. You are not knowing to see a teacher every day who is going to go through a few pages with you at a time. You will have to be a selfstarter, on your own. If you drop out the teacher doesnt care. There is no baby sitting here. No parachute for you. So if you just disappear, this is letting you know you have to get used to going through a 2300 page book and live with this book over time. Many english teachers say it is getting harder to assign a book over 200 pages. Doesnt go with the rhythm of their life. They cannot read a few pages and go back and read a little more. The one book program tries to get them to be more bookish. That is the intent. Some people say they dont read because they dont have time to read because they are piling up so many hours of homework. This is problem number three. This is where the American Freshman 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 and these are Fouryear College students. Less than two hours a week. 29 . Three to five hours 27 . Six to 10; 21 . That is not much more than an our a day all weekend long two hours of studying time. You get below that what about an hour a day for nearly 60 of the Fouryear College students. So it is not homework that is taking away reading minutes from them. It is not making them less bookish. We have to get them there. Colleges are partly graded on retention. Dropouts look very bad for institutions. The obama accreditation issues can come into play. There is a lot of pressure to keep kids there on the campus. Let me add one more factor to this that relates somewhat to the reading factor. If you dont read on your own, you dont to that much work, how dont know very much. The Knowledge Level that students come into college with an abyss. Last years sats reading scores were the lowest in 40 years. Act does the collegereadiness and only 46 of students taking the act, and the vast majority are going to college, only 46 are College Ready meaning they can get a b minus in a freshman english class. Most get c or below. The sat writing test in 2005 last year the lowest scores ever. The scores have gone done every single year except two years when they were flat. This is what is happening. If you look at the National Assessment of progress. The nations report card given to 12th graders. In geographic areas, only 12 of 12th graders proficient. Same with u. S. History. In civics, only 24 . So you have very low college levels. If i am in a clas and refer to the french revolution i have to explain what that is. I cannot just assume that the students have historical Civic Knowledge about things. This is another issue that the one book reading can solve. You select a book that has a lot of accompanying knowledge. You select a tale of two cities and you get something about the french revolution which carries over. You want to select a book that is knowledge rich. It is going to bring cultural literacy to them that will again fill out those big gaps in their heads. So that is what the one book program is ideally going to do. It is going to address those. Did you want to tell us if that happens . Thank you for coming out on a night they are predicting snow and mardi gras and thank you to first things for hosting us. I wanted to get 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 assigning was something called common reading. I didnt know what this was. Where i wanted to find out if other colleges were doing this and it turned out 300 colleges across the country were advertising this one book for College Freshman. We put together a list for the first time. Peter and i had subject categories to focus on the themes in the book and look at the trends among what was most poplar in the books. We gave our own analysis of what this means for Higher Education more generally and started a list of recommended titles colleges could pick from as better books for next years pick. Common reading programs were on the rise at the time so everyone involved was looking for a onestop place to go learn what books were being assigned and what the trends were. So we unknowingly created something that was very useful for people and it has now become their goto source. It has been sited by the mla and their national conference, faculty members come to us when serving on committees for selecting the book. We included aerobic common included every common reading we could find and because of that 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. I have spoken with a lot of people who coordinate common reading programs and they are faculty members and administrative workers who want students to love reading. They are concerned with communities because they see there is a lack of intellectual community but they get stuck using templates and patterns that have been setup and are expected for the way the party runs. They use Large Committee to select the book by poplar vote instead of having a few wellread people chose good books for all of the students. They dont assess whether students have actually read the book. They dont have a test or grade to hold them accountable. They also try to bring the author to speak on campus which is fine but limits them to choosing contemporary books. They dont think outside of the box of what or colleges are doing. One way nas has been encouraging common coordinaters to think outside the box is encouraging classics. When i say classics i am thinking of that in a generous way and not limiting it to roman classics. But the things mark was talking about. Dickins and twain and agustine. Works that stood the test of time and are considered of value and importance. Coordinators we have talked to have given a lot of push back 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 very last pages. I have 25 so far and thought of another couple while sitting here. My hope is to say yes, it is possible to those more difficult, more 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 is because this is not for a grade if students dont like the book they will not read it so the only hope we have to get the students read is pick a book they will read. So our yaub is find out what they want to read and we will assign that. In principle it is a good idea to pick books they will enjoy but in the long run it doesnt help them. The whole reason people go to college instead of reading the books at home you like is to have your mind informed by people who know more than you. Another push back i have heard is the classics are elitist and for the privilege. To that, i say it is a privilege to read these books, and we should give that privilege to as many as we can. A lot of people, and especially the ones taking the trouble to go to college, you hear them talk about giving more access to Higher Education. If we want to give people access to what are we opening up their world to something truly hire. We have two people in the essay that agree with us. One is bruce gan, the creator of the great books curriculum that has been used across the country in community colleges. He has shown that anyone can benefit from and enjoy reading the great books. The other is linda hall who is a professor of english at skidmore college. She refers to herself in her essay as a liberal feminist. She sees value in letting books cool for a while and letting them prove themselves over time before assigning them as common readings. She also thinks colleges are trying to accomplish too much with just one book and that common readings programs should be reevaluated. So i am really grateful to have gotten to have had these conversations and others through these last few years with this project. I now place the baton to my colleague David Randall who has taken it up with great talent and skill and it has been gratifying seeing him notice things i havent noticed. So i will let him share the findings. [applause] thank you. I would also like to add again thank you very much to first things and mark who personally did an awful lot to make this possible. I would like to thank everybody else ought nis to worked when with me. Many are not here tonight but it is a wonderfully better thing because of everything they have done with it. Now, i have been talking an awful lot about beach books with everybody over the last few months. Just today i had a conversation with someone who had a common reading in 1967 at boston university. He was assigned adventures of idea in 1933; a history of intellectual history combined with the effect of history on mankind history in general. This is what was considered a reasonable common reading in 1967. Four of the fairly common readings. Garbology; a Nonfiction Book about the problem of too much trash. You have march a graphic memoir of john lewis and a comic book written at a fourth grade level. We have enriques journey and the account of an illegal immigrant and it is meant to influence current policy. A great many of these common readings do. Common reading. What the report is, something about what the common reading programs are. I would like to emphasize they lean toward the problems with the books they choose, which are very limited and not as good as they could be. All that en route to what we could hope for and i will be unduly optimistic and hope for Something Better despite all that we have been hearing about the problems. You know what common reading is, summer reading, everybody reads it. It is everywhere. 360 colleges a year, elite colleges, public, private, half of the top hundred universities of liberal arts colleges. It is meant to build community fo