Props are owed to the First Year Book Program on choosing Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat for this year’s freshman class. This book has been a part of the national dialogue for two years and has enjoyed an extended stay on the bestseller list. Of course, I’m a little biased, because Friedman is one of my favorite authors, and I have read all of his books, including this one. That notwithstanding, The World is Flat is a perfect selection because not only is the content timely and relevant to many academic disciplines, but it also raises awareness on issues that affect all of us.
This year’s selection stands out especially because it is much more appropriate than the choices made in the previous two years at the university. During my freshman year, we got copies of The Stakes, a mediocre book whose selection seemed like a plug for its author, a Maryland professor. Last year’s book was Juan Williams’ biography of Thurgood Marshall, which had an admirable and interesting subject, but because the book lacked a high profile, it failed to generate much excitement from the student body.
The way I see it, college students today get a thorough education in their four years of school, but what they receive really constitutes only half an education. They get “book smarts” but never “street smarts.” By that, I mean that they are never exposed to the political, economic and cultural forces shaping our country and the world. One develops “street smarts” by reading non-fiction books, newspapers, periodicals, etc. That’s why I believe that ideally, the first-year book should be one that will help students gain a better understanding of the important issues of the day.
Toward this end, I think that the school should do more than just hand out one book at the beginning of the year, and that too, ostensibly only to freshmen. The school should do more to encourage students to read books on the New York Times bestseller list, or a good history book, or a biography or magazines such as Time and The Economist. Each college and/or department at Maryland should publish a monthly list of popular and noteworthy books related to its field. Those selections should be displayed prominently at the campus bookstore and sold at a steep discount, with the school creating a new, expanded reading program that would go beyond just the first-year choice and subsidize the cost of the discounted books.
McKeldin Library has an excellent and up-to-date selection of leading magazines and journals, and I encourage you to make use of that. But really, students would benefit most from greater access to such resources. In 2005, I cheered the introduction of the Collegiate Readership Program, which provides free copies of The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today at a handful of locations across the campus. I’m happy to report that the program has been a huge success and that this semester, steps will be taken to ensure that the papers are going specifically to students and not faculty or staff. I would like to see the program further improved by providing more copies of the various papers (they seem to always run out by 10 a.m.), offering them in more locations (why not at the front desk of every dorm?) and by adding The Wall Street Journal (a business major’s best friend).
Every school’s goal is to produce graduates who are able to understand, interact with and contribute to the world we live in. This university, by helping its students become well-read and media-literate, would go beyond being about just GPAs and diplomas. That is the greatest service it can offer us.
Jay Nargundkar is a junior finance major. He can be reached at terpnews@gmail.com.