Conversations

ON JESUIT HIGHER EDUCATION Fall 2006 • Number 30 Is ‘Reading at Risk’ in Jesuit Universities? TAKING A LOOK AT OUR LIBRARIES Forum • Talking Back • Student Essays • Reviews FALL 2006 NUMBER 30 Members of the National Seminar on Jesuit Higher Education ON JESUIT HIGHER EDUCATION Sara van den Berg Saint Louis University Joseph J. Feeney, S.J. Saint Joseph’s University Features Laurie M. Joyner Loyola University New Orleans 2 Facing the Reading Crisis: An Interview with Dana Gioia, Stephen R. Kuder, S.J. Raymond A. Schroth, S.J. Gonzaga University Cheryl C. Munday 6 UnReading America? Dean Rader University of Detroit-Mercy John J. O’Callaghan, S.J. 10 Facing the Book Gap, JoAnne Young and Betty Porter Stritch School of Medicine Loyola University 13 Reflections of an Alumnus Author, Jim Dwyer Raymond A. Schroth, S.J. Saint Peter’s College 14 Common Reading and the First Year Experience, Wilburn T. Stancil Rockhurst University Mary McCay and Melanie McKay Timothy H. Wadkins Canisius College Anne Walsh, R.S.H.M. Fordham University 18 Student Essays Charles T. Phipps, S.J. Santa Clara University Reading is a Committed Act, Cristina Baldor Conversations is published by the National Seminar on Jesuit Higher A Nation of Readers? Justin Goldman Education, which is jointly spon- sored by the Jesuit Conference Reading is a Chore, John Matthews Board and the Board of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and The Private Voyage, Ray Dademo Universities. The opinions stated herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the JC or the AJCU. Libraries Comments and inquiries may be addressed to the editor of 22 Building Together on our Strengths, Janice Simmons-Welburn Conversations Raymond A. Schroth, S.J. 23 The Robot’s Grip, Ronald Danielson Saint Peter’s College 2641 Kennedy Boulevard 25 Don’t Touch, Cory Wade Jersey City, New Jersey 07306 Phone: 201-432-8083 Fax: 201-432-7497 26 The Campus Bookstore, A Live-Action Tour, Steven Elwell e-mail: [email protected] For information about subscriptions to Conversations: Charles T. Phipps, S.J. Secretary to the National Seminar 27 FORUM: What Shall We Read? on Jesuit Higher Education Santa Clara University Edwin Dickens, Eileen Z. Cohen, Dean Brackley, S.J., 500 El Camino Real Santa Clara, CA 95053-1600 Astrid O’Brien, Eloise A. Buker, William Neenan, S.J., Phone: 408-554-4124 Fax: 408-554-4795 Faith J. Childress, Alice V. Clark, John Coleman, S.J., e-mail: [email protected] Eric Gansworth, Tim Healy Conversations back issues are available online at www.ajcunet.edu We would like to thank the Rev. Joseph R. Hacala, S.J., President of Wheeling University for providing Talking Back us with the cover shot, an untitled painting of a boy sitting with a 37 Feminist Theology and Education People for Others, Tim Wadkins book at a table, which is displayed in the Hodges Library at Wheeling 40 Gender Matters, Laurie M. Joyner Jesuit University. Design and layout by Pauline Heaney. 43 Book Reviews: Mark Mossa, S.J., Ronald Modras Printed by Peacock Communications, Fairfield, N.J. From the Editor Reading, Risk, and Freedom n his classic article in Thought (1955), “American volunteerism, philanthropy and political engagement. Catholics and the Intellectual Life,” John Tracy Ellis Jesuit education, especially in America, has trained Iquotes a letter from the 15-year-old John LaFarge, the men and women for citizenship. They will not become 19th century painter and stained glass artist and father of “men and women for others” if they do not read. John LaFarge, S.J., the interracial pioneer. Away at school, Among the report’s key findings: the decline in lit- the boy asks his father to send him some books — erary reading (fiction and poetry) parallels a decline in specifically the works of Herodotus, Plautus, Catullus, total book reading; the decline has accelerated; women Theocritus, Dryden, Goldsmith, Michelet, Moliere, read more literature than men, only one third of men Corneille, and Victor Hugo. Monsignor Ellis regrets that read literature; the decline includes all groups, but the the modern Catholic family has not sustained that read- situation is worse among African Americans and ing tradition. Hispanics; the decline correlates with increased use of In 1935 a young, would-be writer asked Ernest the electronic media. In 1999 the average household had Hemingway what books should a writer have to read? 2.9 TV sets, 1.8 VCRs, 2.1 CD players, 1.4 video game Hemingway replies, “He should have read everything players, and 1 computer. We can imagine more today. so he knows what he has to beat.” A few more interesting facts: about one in six liter- Pressed, Hemingway names about 30, including ary readers (17 percent) read 12 or more books a year; War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The literary reading is most popular in the West and least in Brothers Karamazov, The Dubliners, Portrait of the the South; about one in 14 people (7 percent) said that Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, The Turn of the Screw, they wrote creative works during the survey year. Huckleberry Finn and all of Turgenev. The articles that follow, we hope, do several We chose to build this issue around the NEA 2004 things: allow NEA director Dana Gioia to speak direct- report because our experience as teachers and our dis- ly to us; submit the NEA report to critical analysis; cussions with faculty and students in our three annual describe what libraries, English departments and spe- campus visits have convinced us that the problem is cial programs are doing in Jesuit Colleges and univer- real and that we in particular should respond because sities to respond; let students tell us why they do or reading is so central to Jesuit liberal arts education. don’t read; guide us through a familiar campus book- Also, for many of us who teach literature, history, the- store; in the forum, invite our own faculty to step into ology and philosophy, a book is a moral force — a the contemporary shoes of LaFarge and Hemingway; door into the human heart, a prod to the reader’s con- and finally invite a Pulitzer Prize-winning alumnus of science faced daily with decisions to tell the truth or two Jesuit institutions to relate his reading to his work. deceive, take responsibility or flee, to love or to betray. Let me close with a story from Doris Kearns Recently New York Times columnist David Brooks, Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of referring to the National Endowment for the Arts study, Abraham Lincoln. When the eloquent former slave and Reading at Risk, points out that the percentage of young abolitionist Frederick Douglas was still in captivity his men who read has plummeted over the past 14 years. second master’s kindly wife taught him to read. When The answer, he suggests, is to assign boys more “manly” the master discovered this he ordered the instruction authors, like Hemingway, Homer, Tolstoy, and Twain. stopped. It would be unsafe to teach a slave to read he Times readers answered that Brooks is stuck with “gen- said, because it would make him discontent and der myths” and that when boys are old enough to read unhappy, forever unfit to be a slave. In a sense, he was an adult book they are already addicted to video games. right. Douglas said that “learning to read had been a With this in mind, the two most significant findings curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of of the NEA survey, based on a sample of 17,000 adults, my wretched condition, without the remedy.” It was six are: for the first time in modern history, less that half of years before he would be free. Meanwhile he secretly the adult population now reads literature; and since learned to write. n readers play a more active part in their communities, their loss diminishes civic and cultural life — including RAS sj Conversations 1 Facing the Reading Crisis FACING THE READING CRISIS Will American Catholics Take the Lead? An Interview with Dana Gioia National Endowment for the Arts Raymond A. Schroth, S.J. Introduction. Three things led Conversations to Harvard. He gave up the vice presidency of General Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment Foods to become a full-time poet, published poems for the Arts, as we prepared this issue on what is in the New Yorker and the Hudson Review, and a often termed the “crisis” in reading in American much talked-about article in the Atlantic in 1991, education. First, the report itself, Reading at Risk: A “Can Poetry Matter?” in which he charged that Survey of Literary Reading in America (2004), with American poetry was controlled by a coterie and its findings that less than half of the adult American failed to speak to the public. population now reads literature and also that there is a correlation between reading literature and one’s At the 2000 Pew conference he said, that, “The active involvement in volunteer and charity work, as U. S. Church has never quite known what to do with well as various art events, in one’s community. the human hunger for beauty,” but that the “arts Second, articles in the New York Times (September have always been a vital part of the Catholic identi- 7, 2004) and Commonweal magazine (November ty and that Beethoven and Mozart, Michelangelo 21, 2003) depicting Mr. Gioia as someone who, and El Greco, Dante and Saint John of the Cross, though not a Jesuit student, embodied ideas which Bernanos and Mauriac, the anonymous architects of Jesuit colleges and universities strive to communi- Chartres and Notre Dame, have awakened more cate.

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