Friday, September 12, 2008--Uncommon Reading

The most exciting thing that happened this week actually took place on Friday: the much-anticipated visit of Greg Mortenson, the subject and co-author of Three Cups of Tea. The best-selling account of Mortensen’s failed attempt to summit K-2 and his subsequent humanitarian work buiding schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan was required summer reading for the Stonehill Class of 2012, and from the extraordinary crowd of college friends, neighbors, retirees, alumni, and strangers that joined the first-year students, faculty, staff, and administration for Mortenson’s talk, it’s clear that our students were not reading alone.

So why do we do this summer reading anyway, and does it accomplish what we would hope?

To answer that question, let me step back for a moment. In summer 2007, I was invited to be a guest on National Public Radio’s noontime “Here and Now” program. The topic was summer reading for first-year students, and I was a panelist along with faculty members from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire.

From the living room of my summer vacation rental in Prince Edward Island, I described what we are trying to achieve through the summer reading program at Stonehill. We are signaling to new students that they are joining an intellectual community, and we’re hoping that the chosen text will create a common ground among students, faculty and administrators.

All the books we’ve chosen in these past few years: Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, Paul Rusesabagina’s An Ordinary Man, and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, were successful in creating community. And these selections also emphasize Stonehill’s mission to promote social justice, global learning, and interdisciplinary studies. I suggested, on that radio program, that we had struck on a valuable set of experiences: having students read a powerful story of self-discovery, bringing to campus the person who had the experience and found the voice to give shape to it, and offering opportunities for students and other members of the community to reflect on the text and its contexts. (If you are interested in hearing the radio program, it can be accessed on the NPR website at this link: http://www.here-now.org/shows/2007/08/20070810_2.asp).

The other guests on the program had similar hopes with a common reading, but they also took different approaches. Lafayette chose John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty,” in which Mill praises the Marquis de Lafayette for living a life of liberty. The college used the reading as a springboard for talking about “lives of liberty” throughout the year. They could not (to be sure!) bring Mill to campus for a visit, but they could certainly introduce students to the contemporary relevance of a classic text and, through it, explore the value of liberal education. Like us, they use a book to express their intention to transition their students into a community that cares about ideas.

Franklin Pierce had similar intentions. Their reading selection raised the whole question of “what is a community?” and asked what it means to be a member of one. They wanted a text that emphasized international experience and they were especially interested in the way their reading—Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea—emphasized how one person can make a difference.

At that time, I had never heard of Three Cups of Tea, and I certainly had no idea that it would become this year’s selection at Stonehill. But when we invited faculty input for the summer reading, more than a half-dozen people nominated this book. And when I read it, I understood why: it is an adventure story, a love story, a crime story, a war story—it opens up, through a most compelling tale, the politics, religion, geography, and culture of Central Asia. The vision of humanity in Three Cups of Tea insists that we are here to take care of each other, to give shelter and sustenance, and to protect and preserve the ordinary decencies that give order to our community. I hope the heroisms, large and small, of so many in this book would be recognizable in any culture or language. I hope it makes our students want to learn more (more languages, more cultures, more religions, more geography, more economics) and that it will inspire or reinforce their own moral courage and active citizenship.

Mortenson’s visit did help our students to consider how the journey on which they are embarking intersects with Mortenson’s own story of self-discovery. But the most affirming part of his message was that students should not just think about how they can help his cause, the Central Asia Institute. They should tune in to what they are passionate about and work to accomplish that. He also showed them, up close and personal, the humility and graciousness of a man who has accomplished truly great things. And I hope that the presence of so many members of the Stonehill community—and so many from beyond the community—demonstrated not only that students join a community interested in both ideas and action, but also that they can find communities after they leave us that care about the same things.

The event couldn’t have been so successful without the hard work of Joe Favazza, Todd Gernes, and Lori Hagerty, who all worked together on the details that made it appear seamless; the incredible commitment of the student peer mentors, who from summer orientation through the first weeks of the semester encouraged first-year students to read the book and conducted pre-and post-lecture discussions in small groups; and the work of faculty, who encouraged classes to attend and incorporated the book into their syllabi. Without all of you, the common reading could not have paved the way for what was surely an uncommon experience.

Best regards,

Katie