In mid-summer 2007 a package arrived in the mail containing the reading assignment for Yale’s freshman orientation week. The assigned book, by Beverly Daniel Tatum, had quite a title: “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” And Other Conversations About Race. Tatum was the keynote speaker at Yale’s freshman orientation that year, and we were expected to read her book in advance, to prepare for small group discussions surrounding her talk.
I had been primed, by my education and the cultural mythos surrounding the place, to expect the summer reading going into my first year at Yale to be a little more demanding than Why Are all the Black Kids, which is a series of psychologically-grounded reflections on racism and racial identity. At the time, I thought of Tatum’s book as a missed opportunity—a lame attempt at topicality disconnected from the broader goals of undergraduate education. Furthermore, while I was sympathetic to Tatum’s interest in invisible structures of racial prejudice and oppression, she painted with too broad a brush, claiming that anyone who happens to benefit from a system that prejudicially disadvantages racial minorities is himself a racist. This logic of racial grievance—the idea that anyone not actively fighting against invisible injustices is guilty of oppression—was one of the basic themes of the book, and proved to be a major topic when it was discussed at orientation.
Once I arrived at Yale, I discovered that I was wrong in thinking that the assigned summer reading was disconnected from the mission of the school. Fostering identity politics and doing deference to aggrieved parties proved, over the next four years, to be one of the primary interests of the student body and university administration.
This became clear to me by the end of my first semester. In October, some students were seen wearing blackface as part of their halloween costumes. A week later someone spray-painted slurs (one racial, one against thespians) on two campus buildings. Among the student body there was little initial concern over these three incidents. Disdain for the graffiti and the poorly conceived costumes was all but universal.
But the Yale administration leapt into action. Small group discussions were organized in dormitories. A “Rally Against Hate” was held in one of the main quads. The Dean (now President) of Yale College, Peter Salovey, initiated a four-part series of panel discussions about “Hate”, as a way of fighting back against the menace of blackface and graffiti.
I was baffled. The overwhelming majority of students around me were progressive liberals for whom being guilty of any sort of racial discrimination was considered one of the greatest forms of moral failure. There was no question of racism being a problem on campus—none at all. And yet the administrators and student leadership managed, somehow, over what was in all probability the foolishness of perhaps a dozen people out of six thousand, to behave as if it were 1965 again and we were marching against the bastions of segregation at Selma.
What really strikes me now about these events, and others like them that have happened at Yale over the past eight years, is the extent to which the focus on Beverly Tatum's book in the first week of school captured the trajectory of my peers' attitudes about race, diversity, and justice, as they developed throughout college. The book was chosen by the administration with a purpose in mind. I did not realize it then, but it was set down quietly as the initiation into a formation in a particular kind of liberalism which the administrators wanted to inculcate in their students, a project which was carried out in a thousand minuscule ways throughout my undergraduate years.
Looking back, this is the obvious role of assigned reading for freshmen entering college. In most schools the initial summer reading will be the one book that unifies a class. If administrators are provident in their choice, then, book selections will tend to reveal the pedagogical orientation of the undergraduate program to come, and tell us what sorts of political projects are being undertaken in student formation. Studying summer reading assignments can be a window into more complex (and more amorphous) pedagogical tendencies.
Next Tuesday First Things will be hosting the National Association of Scholars as they present their annual report on trends in summer reading assignments for incoming college freshmen. The panel of speakers at the event (including our very own Mark Bauerlein) will discuss the implications of those trends for the trajectory of undergraduate education in America. The event promises to be lively and illuminating, and will be covered by C-SPAN. Please join us.
For more information, click here.
Elliot Milco is an editorial assistant at First Things.
