Universities routinely tell students to read books that advance left-wing ideology on issues such as social justice and class warfare.
The College Fix reports that a new study published in late May from the National Association of Scholars (NAS) documents just how books deemed written by “dead white authors” have been replaced with political tomes designed to indoctrinate students.
The investigation, entitled Beach Books, looked at 350 reading lists assigned to freshman students across America and discovered that instead of reading Shakespeare, Dickens or Hemingway, they are learning about the alleged crisis of racism and white privilege in the country.
“Hundreds of American colleges and universities assign a summer reading to entering freshmen — usually one book, which the students are asked to read outside their courses. For many students, this is the only book they will read in common with their classmates,” according to the report.
The study revealed that 75 percent of the books assigned to be read by students in the 2016-17 school year had a publishing date between 2010 and today. Less than 2 percent were written before 1900.
“The themes register most strongly the common reading genre’s continuing obsession with race, as well as its infantilization of its students, its middlebrow taste, and its progressive politics.” Students were told to read books about African-American, Latin-American and Muslim characters.
The most referred book of the academic season was Just Mercy, a tome about a poor blacks being victims of the criminal justice system.
Not only does the reading list advance “progressive” ideals but so does the prescribed discussion and proposed activities that go with it. NSA spokesman David Randall called this student activism ruse a means of getting “free labor” from students to advance a left-wing agenda.
The reports cites the example from San Jose State University where “The True American” reading included attending a lecture by For example, San Jose State by Morehshin Allahyari, “a new media artist, activist, educator, and occasional curator [who spoke on] the intersections of art, activism, jihad, and technocapitalism.”
Randall told The College Fix: “It’s been like this for at least the last decade,” he told The Fix. “They’re getting even more homogeneous — greater concentration on individual titles, greater concentration in subject matter — but the progressivism is much the same.”