Colleges Aren't Producing Discriminating Readers By JAMES SHAPIRO Social historians reflecting upon the "culture wars" on American campuses in the 1980s and 1990s will be hard-pressed to find any trace of those struggles in the reading habits of college students. If the evidence offered by "The Chronicle'"s monthly lists of "What They're Reading on College Campuses" over the past two decades is any indication, tenured radicals have failed miserably in their alleged efforts to transform the political orientation of their students. The dire warnings of conservative critics are misplaced at best, and, at worst, delusional. Edith Uunila Taylor, a senior editor who has compiled these lists of students' reading habits since 1971, made available to me unpublished lists that she has also compiled of the top-10 campus best sellers for each calendar year. Paging through these annual lists, I had to go back to 1979, to Marilyn French's "The Women's Room," to find a nonfiction feminist best seller; the next-most-recent feminist citation was "Our Bodies, Ourselves", five years earlier. For a book about Native Americans, I had to go even further back: to "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," in 1972. No nonfiction title about the African-American experience -- other than Alex Haley's "Roots" in 1976 -- ever made an annual top-10 list. Nonfiction books about race relations, gay rights, or left-leaning politics were nowhere to be found. Even environmentalism barely broke through, with "50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth," in 1990. No book of poetry has ever made its way to an annual top-10 list; and the only two books in translation that I came across since 1975 were Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera," in 1989, and Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose", in 1984. If anything, the lists underscore what appear to be the deeply centrist, if not conservative, values of the majority of American college students. A trilogy of American conservatism made the campus best-seller lists -- Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" and E.D. Hirsch, Jr's "Cultural Literacy" in 1987, and William Bennett's "The Book of Virtues" in 1994. Books celebrating corporate culture have done well, too, including "Iaccoca: An Autobiography; In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies;" and "The One-Minute Manager," all in 1983, and "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People ," in both 1991 and 1992. These choices not only indicate that the battle over what is taught in class has been largely insulated from what is read outside of it, but also suggest that colleges today are doing a poor job of nurturing discriminating readers. By far the most popular author on campus since the top-10 lists were first compiled has been the cartoonist Bill Watterson, whose books (such as favorites "Calvin and Hobbes" and "Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat") appeared on the annual list 17 times from 1987 through 1996. Another cartoonist, Gary Larsen, comes in second, having made the annual list nine times from 1985 through 1989, with such winning titles as "Night of the Crash-Test Dummies" and "Bride of the Far Side." Scott Adams, author of "The Dilbert Principle," seems poised to join the select company of cartoonists. As one might expect, mass-market novelists have also held their own, with John Grisham making the annual best-seller list nine times, and Tom Clancy and Stephen King five times each. Curious about whether similar trends prevailed a generation ago (and convinced that the reading habits of my generation would put those of more-recent graduates to shame), I decided to compare the list of what we were reading on campus in October 1977 with the list that appeared exactly 20 years later. The results were chastening and a little depressing. In October 1977, the top-selling book was "Passages," by Gail Sheehy, followed by Leon Uris's "Trinity," J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Silmarillion", Wayne W. Dyer's "Your Erroneous Zones," George Lucas's "Star Wars," Erma Bombeck's "The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank," James Herriot's "All Things Wise and Wonderful," Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky's "What Really Happened to the Class of '65", Judith Guest's "Ordinary People," and Red West's "Elvis: What Happened." Is that what we were reading back then? Elvis? Erroneous zones? Darth Vader? Twenty years later, the reading habits of college students haven't changed all that much. This past October's list offered a similar mix of popular novels, humor and self-helpbooks, and celebrity biography. "Cold Mountain," by Charles Frazier, and "Angela's Ashes," by Frank McCourt, topped the list, followed by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Kimberly Kirberger's "Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul," Stephen E. Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage," Mary Pipher's "Reviving Ophelia," Monty Roberts's "The Man Who Listens to Horses," Maya Angelou's "The Heart of a Woman," Andrew Morton's "Diana: Her New Life," Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm," and "Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul," compiled by Jack Canfield "et al." Some differences have crept in over the years, however. The most striking, if this limited comparison is representative, is the superiority of the novels and memoirs that students are now reading. At first glance, this trend is heartening, suggesting that students are reading more-demanding books. But on reflection, it becomes apparent that other trends may be at work. In 1977, only seven of the top-10 best sellers on campus also made the best-seller lists of "The New York Times." Now, the overlap between national and campus best sellers is complete: Every one of the books that appeared on "The Chronicle"'s list of titles in October 1997 also appeared that month on the best-seller lists published in "The New York Times." I asked Mrs. Taylor whether there were any trends that don't show up in "The Chronicle"'s lists, and she told me that when she started keeping track of reports from campus bookstores around the country, trends would begin on either the East or West Coast and then make their way through the rest of the country. Today, she said, that's no longer the case. With more and more college bookstores owned by chains such as Follett's and Barnes&Noble (which centralize their buying), the odds seem increasingly high that the books that appear in campus stores all over the country -- especially those most prominently displayed -- have been preselected as potential best sellers and promoted as such by mainstream publishing houses. The "Oprah" effect also has been felt in the campus bookstore: This past June, for example, three of 10 titles on the monthly list of campus best sellers -- "The Rapture of Canaan, Stones from the River," and "She's Come Undone" -- made the list after having been chosen for Oprah Winfrey's televised book club. But you can count the number of campus best sellers from small or alternative publishing houses that have made "The Chronicle"'s lists on the fingers of one hand. Students may dress differently, talk differently, and have attitudes toward body piercing or sexuality that differ from those of their parents, but when they buy books, they read pretty much what their parents are reading. It doesn't have to be this way, and it isn't the case in other cultural forms about which students care, such as music. College alternative-music stations, for example, have had a major impact on the fate of recordings that might otherwise have failed to attract much notice on mainstream, commercial stations. As a result, executives in the music business pay close attention to the music that alternative stations play. I can't imagine people in trade publishing paying the same kind of attention to student taste in "alternative" contemporary fiction that falls outside of the mainstream. One difference, of course, is that a student disk jockey, intent on exposing listeners to something new and different, can reach a large segment of the campus population quite easily. It's much harder for a student who is enthusiastic about a terrific new book to do the same. That lesson was brought home to me quite sharply in an "Intro to the English Major" class I taught two years ago, in which the students were responsible for choosing the contemporary novel we would read. I assumed that they would choose something from "The New York Times" paperback best-seller list that I had given them. To my surprise, after hours of spirited debate, a persistent student persuaded us to read what turned out to be a wonderful novel that only she had heard of: "Sights Unseen," by Kaye Gibbons. The class wound up running around town looking for scarce copies of the book, which at the time was available only in hardcover, since the campus bookstore didn't have any in stock. So students could be much more influential in what their peers read. Why, for example, does one find "staff picks" in better independent bookstores (and even the superstores), but no "student picks" in campus bookstores? Since students spend an awful lot of money in those stores, it might be worth ceding to them some authority about what titles get prominently displayed. In any case, I'd rather see "student picks" in the windows of campus bookstores than copies of dreary scholarly monographs by faculty members. I feel the same about the slighting of student advice in college libraries: Why can't more libraries set aside an area where titles recommended by students (rather than by librarians or faculty members) are displayed? By failing to do so, both campus bookstores and libraries continue to engender tremendous passivity in students as readers. One heartening sign that students are increasingly unwilling to have literary fare served up without their having much say in the matter -- much like dorm food -- is the establishment of a student-run, on-line review of books, "The Yale Review of Books" (http://www.yale.edu/yrb). It's heartening to read that its undergraduate editor in chief, Joey Fishkin, believes that "in the larger cultural conversation about books being written and published right now, we listen a lot and get very few words in edgewise. Some of the books published today will be forgotten by the time we've graduated; others may find their way into the college classroom. But thinking and writing and talking about them before their fate is settled is too much fun to leave to the professional literati." It's too early to tell whether experiments such as this on-line review will be shortlived, or whether they will make the book trade take notice. It may still turn out that students will choose mainstream titles, but there's no way of knowing whether they are actually choosing them or having those books chosen for them, until students are given more of a chance to shape the literary culture in which they live. "James Shapiro is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He writes regularly on publishing for" The Chronicle". Copyright (c) 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com ---- [is this below a real list of books that we can access?--connie ] http:/che-data/articles.dir/art-44.dir/issue-30.dir/bestbooks.htm Annual lists of best-selling books on campuses,