Avoiding the classics

       At The Guardian's Comment is Free Ashley Thorne discusses Why are American universities shying away from the classics ? summarizing the findings from the fascinating report she co-authored, Beach Books: 2012-2013 - What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class ? (warning ! dreaded pdf format !).
       They focused on the 'common reading' assignments for incoming college freshmen popular at many American colleges -- and, as she sums up:

Last year, 309 colleges made such assignments. It's a great tradition, but something curious has happened since my days as a college student. Only eight schools assigned anything published before 1990, and only four assigned books that could by any stretch be considered classics.

       The report lists the outliers:

• Antigone and King Lear, The King's College
  
  
• Frankenstein, Fairmont State University
  
  
• Bartleby, the Scrivener, Le Moyne College
  
  
• An Enemy of the People, Goucher College
  
  
• A Canticle for Leibowitz, Belmont Abbey College
  
  
• The Life Before Us, Cornell University
  
  
• To Engineer Is Human, University of Virginia (School of Engineering and Applied Science)
  
  
• In the Time of the Butterflies, Queens University of Charlotte

       So Thorne finds and wonders:

For American college students, 1990 appears to be a historical cliff beyond which it is rumored some books were once written, though no one is quite sure what. Why have US colleges decided that the best way to introduce their students to higher learning is through comic books, lite lit, and memoirs ?

       The report is well worth perusing, with lots of fun/shocking data: for 66 books "a film version exists or is in production", 17 are comic books or 'graphic novels', only 6 are translated from another language -- but 20 deal with orphans and 18 with animal rights and food.
       Among the devastating conclusions:

colleges typically settle for Midcult books. They select as common reading popular books that affect to have higher standards than mass culture books but are in fact merely faddish.

       Higher education indeed .....