Posted on 08/17/2009 7:33:00 PM PDT by Behind Liberal Lines
ITHACA, NY — Incoming students at Ithaca College will get together the day before the start of classes to discuss their summer reading assignment: Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father.” The 44th president’s autobiography was chosen as the 2009–10 First-Year Reading Initiative selection.
“President Obama’s ruthlessly honest self-examination on issues of race and identity gives us an opportunity to lead students through what could be the most important conversation they will have during their freshman year,” says Ithaca College President Tom Rochon.
The initiative was created in 2003 as a way to offer the incoming class a shared academic experience and bring together new students with faculty and staff to consider an important issue outside of the constraints of the classroom.
Published in 1995, “Dreams from My Father” tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother — a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.
First-year students will gather on Tuesday, Aug. 25, for a presentation and question-and-answer session with Michael Smith, assistant professor of history, and Cynthia Henderson, associate professor of theatre arts. Henderson — who has been a Fulbright scholar in Africa — will discuss Obama’s writings as they relate to his thoughts about identity and his African father. Smith will share his perspective on the cultural, social and historical connections of Obama’s introspection. Students will then participate in small discussion groups led by faculty and staff facilitators.
For more information on “Dreams from My Father” and the First-Year Reading Initiative, visit http://www.ithaca.edu/library/fyri/.
“..self-examination ..”
Mao Tse Tung used an eerily similar term for a strategy to strip people of all self-respect and defenses - “self criticism.” It was mandatory and repeated over and over until the person was a quivering mass of humanity unable to defend against guards and the state.
“Wild Swans” by Jung Chang is an excellent book about Obama, oops, I meant about Mao. Well, not so much difference.
They should learn about that ghostwriter too.
...sighs....
Oh, puke....
This is wonderful.
These young minds can be bent by the prose of Bill Ayers, posing as the Zero Messiah, to pre-start their mindless quest toward socialism to be ingrained into their pliable brains over the next four years!
Our next generation!
Fiction, Fiction, Fiction. This college is a picture of what is wrong and evil in our colleges in America. Turning out America-haters as fast as they can. Here is hoping that this college continues to do poorly. No one who graduates from there can get a good job.... it’s a joke.
My freshman year *honors* English class was forced to read the Autobiography of Malcolm X [in addition to slave lit], and it didn’t affect me in the least. What’s the difference here? Those with strong minds will ignore it and write their papers and those with weak minds would be co-opted by leftist chicks anyway, so who cares?
Fall and the nuts begin to gather. I look forward to future reports from inside the City of evil.
ML/NJ
There is, of course, this disclaimer to the book:
“For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people that I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology. With the exception of my family and a handful of public figures, the names of most characters have been changed for the sake of their privacy.”
They must have a tradition of reading works of fiction to begin the academic calendar.
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