Our admission packets to Brown bore several instructions: return the “I will attend” card, mail the deposit, set up our Banner accounts and finally, read a specific book that you will discuss with your fellow first-years upon matriculation. I don’t know about you, but I personally dreaded that last assignment. At the risk of sounding cliche, summer reading — or winter reading for midyear transfers — seems so “high school.” High school was a time for some significant degree of uniformity. We had certain required courses and academic obligations that bound peers of the same grade level together. Brown exudes the antithesis of that atmosphere. When the University mandates the same reading for all of us, without regard for the diversity of our academic, political and cultural interests, it violates the New Curriculum’s spirit of intellectual individualism.
I can understand why the dean of the College finds value in requiring reading during our vacations. Keeping us mentally stimulated, prodding our thoughts and cultivating our literary awareness are noble, valid causes. The book is a common element that binds us when we arrive as new students, fosters a feeling of unity and provides for interesting conversations. The subjects of these books are sometimes intriguing and eye-opening. Leslie Chang’s “Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China” was the 2011 selection for incoming first-years and transfer students, a group that included me. It took us into the lives of teenage women who leave rural villages in China for mechanical, cutthroat industrial complexes in order to gain at least a modicum of financial independence. I will give Brown more credit for its title selection than I will extend Penn for my freshman year summer reading assignment. In “The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters,” Rose George wove a riveting tale of human waste and sanitation systems. Not.
If Brown wants to promote cerebral activities that we can subsequently discuss when we convene as new classes of students, the administration can find more suitable ways to achieve this goal while maintaining a healthier respect for our scholastic liberty. If books are to be mandated, we should have the freedom to select what we want to read. That route would preserve the spirit of the New Curriculum and might encourage us to experiment with works beyond our comfort zone and not confine our literary experiences to one publication.
Assuming the University aims to focus learning around a particular theme, we should be able to choose the medium through which we want to delve into that subject. Film, drama, poetry, nonfiction and fiction can all be powerful messengers of resounding lessons and perspectives, many of which are controversial and thus ripe for critical analysis. As many humanities and social sciences classes employ media other than nonfiction to teach students, we should recognize the validity of these creative approaches and be afforded the same nontraditional opportunities. By watching Latin films and discussing them with my peers in my Spanish courses, for example, I benefitted from their valuable insights into the conflicts that immigrants suffer. In an American studies class, we used a variety of sources to tackle structural workforce issues centered on gender disparities. These learning tools — PBS documentaries, journalists’ analogs, personal memoirs and think-tank publications — harbor significant value and intrigue by virtue of their genre. In fact, experimenting with a cross-section of works dealing with a particular subject would provide a more introspective summer experience for rising first-years.
Brown, first and foremost, is an institution where students drive their own learning. If we were capable of being admitted, we are theoretically intelligent and articulate enough to warrant summer assignments that do more than test our ability to read. Moreover, by requiring summer reading as a means to develop our reading comprehension and writing skills, the University is implying that honing these capabilities is more important than targeting other areas of knowledge. I would argue the conditioning of quantitative aptitude and data analysis is even more crucial and useful than adding a few new words to our vocabulary. So if the University must utilize these vacation-period assignments to improve our cerebral faculties, it should expand its focus and enhance the broader student body’s understanding of math and science as well.
Mandated vacation reading defies the individualized approach to learning with which Brown entrusts its students. Some say it is worthwhile, because reading can open up new frontiers and make us more eloquent, well-rounded individuals. Others consider it meaningful because we can find some stimulation or joy in absorbing new lessons in the books chosen for us. However, we are mature enough to decide what topics we want to learn about, how we want to satiate those interests and, more fundamentally, how we want to spend our time. For a university that gives us complete autonomy to choose our classes — except for the WRIT requirement, another overbearing requisite — and how we’re graded, the required summer reading policy is both restrictive and hypocritical.
Elizabeth Fuerbacher ’13.5 thinks the WRIT requirement must also be abolished, since four years at Brown should enable us to express our thoughts eloquently and intelligently without embarrassing ourselves. She can be reached at Elizabeth_Fuerbacher@brown.edu
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