Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 9:32 AM by Gene

On Thursday, the National Association of Scholars -- a group that advocates for a more rigorous and traditional college curriculum -- released what it says is the most comprehensive analysis of what freshmen are being asked to read. The findings suggest that certain kinds of books -- on multiculturalism and the environment -- dominate these reading selections. And the study, called "Beach Books," questions whether the choices of colleges are too similar, too left-leaning and not sufficiently challenging....

What are the freshmen reading? Based on the report's analysis of 290 programs (excluding books that are required parts of courses), the top books this year are This I Believe (an essay collection assigned at 11 colleges), followed by Enrique's Journey (the story of a Honduran boy's struggle to reach his mother in the United States, assigned at 10 colleges) and two books assigned at 9 colleges each, Three Cups of Tea (about building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan) and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (about a poor woman who worked on a tobacco farm whose cells were used, without her knowledge, for research).

These books reflect some of the trends found in "Beach Books" about the genres of choice. Books about multiculturalism, immigration or racism were the most prevalent (60 colleges), followed by environmental issues (36 colleges), the Islamic world (27 colleges), New Age or spiritual books (25 colleges), and issues related to the Holocaust or genocide (25 colleges). Only 6 colleges assigned classics. The study also looked for other patterns in the selections, and reported that 46 of the choices have a film version, 29 are about Africa, 9 are related to Hurricane Katrina and 5 are about dysfunctional families....

Though anti-alcohol initiatives generally target college students, underage drinking, binge drinking, raucous behavior and negative consequences, Americans often think of only the last as a bad thing. “There’s no consensus that alcohol use by college students is a big problem,” Ehlinger said. Though there is agreement about preventing deaths, injuries and crimes, alumni and administrators often “hearken back to being drunk in college” and don’t see binge drinking as a problem.

And yet, underage and college drinking are where efforts to curb alcohol abuse are focused. “Folks, by focusing on underage and college students, we’re missing the boat,” he said. “I think we are being stooges for the alcohol industry. They know what we do [on these issues] is not going to impact sales; they’re fine with us doing that.”

It’s why, he said, Anheuser-Busch happily donates to projects like the National Social Norms Institute, whose executive director is James C. Turner, the current president of the ACHA and executive director of the University of Virginia’s department of student health.

(Turner later defended himself, telling the crowd assembled to hear Ehlinger that the Anheuser-Busch funding “was a gift, they said 'do what you need to do,' ” and came only after the project failed to get funding from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. He left the room a few minutes later to prepare for a lecture on the norms program, which had a far smaller audience than Ehlinger's talk, despite being in a larger room.)

One and the same.