More reading

On one page of The Chronicle of Higher Education, an argument for less reading and more “writing.” But on another page: an account of a community-college’s effort to make use of Columbia University’s core curriculum:

The first texts in the two-course sequence focus on nonfiction and typically include Plato’s dialogues, Wollstonecraft, Du Bois, and founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Federalist Paper No. 10, as well as a speech by Frederick Douglass on the meaning to slaves of the Fourth of July. The second semester is dedicated to fiction and has included The Odyssey, Hamlet, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

I know the responses many academics will have to such a program. There will be talk of hegemony. And “We can’t ask our students to,” &c. But you can.