NEWS: What Books are College Students Reading? A Cool New Online Tool Reveals All

NEWS: What Books are College Students Reading? A Cool New Online Tool Reveals All
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

The following article first appeared in The National Book Review

For decades now, universities have been caught up in the "canon wars" -- battles over what students should be reading on their path to a liberal education. While this debate has raged -- with the classicists squaring off against the multi-culturalists, the traditionalists against the modernists -- there has not been a lot of actual data.

That is now changing -- thanks to a new online tool, the Open Syllabus Explorer, which ranks all of the books students are assigned in college, from #1 -- traditionalists can rejoice, it's Strunk & White's The Elements of Style -- on down.

In fact, traditionalists will likely be pleased with most, if not all of the top 10, which includes Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Hamlet. There are a few radicals and outsiders banging on the gates of traditionalism, though, including Marx's The Communist Manifesto (#4) and Edward Said's Orientalism (#12).

The Washington Post today did its own riff on the list -- which incorporates about one million college courses -- by separating out books assigned in Ivy League schools. The Ivy League has a somewhat different top 10. Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, Martin Luther King'Jr.s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and John Rawls's A Theory of Justice are all on the Ivy League list, but not the general one.

The tool is a lot of fun to play around with -- you can search by college or university, by state, or by academic field. Or type in the name of a book, and see how often it has been assigned. We can imagine the tool's website being kept plenty busy just with authors searching for their own books . . .

You can find the Open Syllabus Explorer here.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot