RALEIGH — “They just don’t get it.”
I’ve always disliked this comment. It’s trite, it’s smugly superior, and it’s lost whatever rhetorical punch it once enjoyed. But try as I might, I simply can’t think of a more apt reaction to the news that UNC-Chapel Hill faculty members have picked the school’s summer reading assignment for incoming 2003-04 freshmen — and seem not to have understanding what all the fuss was about last year.
I have no interest in revisiting the Approaching the Qur’an controversy. I wrote quite a bit about it at the time. I didn’t agree with much of what the critics of UNC said about the reading requirement. I certainly thought it was a good idea for freshmen to have some kind of common educational experience, and I further agreed with the choice of Islam as a worthy subject for study in the wake of 9/11. But the choice of Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’an was a disastrous one. The book, fine as a piece of literary appreciation, is not an introduction to Islam. It does not aid a young person who comes unarmed with prior knowledge of the religion and is seeking to understand it in the context of terrorism and modern Islamo-fascism. In choosing the work, a UNC faculty committee exhibited poor judgment and a frankly political (rather than academic) agenda. Its members seemed to believe that Chapel Hill was on the verge of some kind of anti-Muslim pogrom that only a book of selective quotations from the Qur’an could avert.
Given that there were many brief, concise, balanced, and scholarly treatments of Islam and its history available, I concluded that the faculty members involved must have made a conscious decision not to give their students any reason to ask difficult questions. And since past selections for the freshman reading assignment ranged from the mildly to the not-so-mildly leftist, I saw the real offense as one of political bias, not violations of religious liberty.
The 2003 choice, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, confirms my prior judgment. Some media reports have strangely described this book as “noncontroversial.” Well, it’s not about religion, but it certainly is controversial. Ehrenreich is a well-known, and very annoying, media commentator of the hard-left variety. Yes, I mean the truly soft-on-Marx, conspiracy-theory variety. As one of my favorite economists, Larry Schweikart, wrote in this incisive review, Ehrenreich’s book was cleverly written but economically uninformed and profoundly dishonest. If the goal of the reading assignment is for students to learn about and debate issues of poverty and economic opportunity in the United States, this book — like the Sells book before it — is a horrible fit.
Indeed, an excellent though probably overly long book that would have really aided UNC-CH students in their exploration of these important issues would have been Schweikart’s own excellent history, The Entrepreneurial Adventure: A History of Business in the United States.
I wonder if the silly “scholars” who have put together UNC-Chapel Hill’s reading assignments over the past few years realize how transparent they are.
Oh, yeah, I forgot. They just don’t get it.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.