Common Reading

Summer Common Reading - A Letter from Provost Schneider

Welcome to Knox! An exciting new stage of your college journey is about to begin. Every year, we select a Common Reading for all incoming students. This year, the book is Learning to Disagree by John Inazu. Please view this book as an invitation to conversations. The reading touches on many themes related to dialogue and invites you to engage your classmates, friends, family, and others in the Knox community in conversation about how we have conversations. The book is a gift to you. Please take some time this summer and read it so that you can discuss it with fellow students, faculty, and staff.

Beginning with its very first chapter, Learning to Disagree challenges us to consider ideas and intellectual stances with which we might not agree. Indeed, we may disagree with those ideas so firmly we cannot ever imagine agreeing with them--or even understanding how someone else could agree with them. An important intellectual goal of college is learning why you believe the things that you believe. If we take that a step further, we also need to understand why someone else believes what they do, why they disagree with you and your beliefs, and how we learn to live in a world in which we simply disagree about things. We would like to believe we are open-minded, but how do we live with significant disagreement over ideas? Professor Inazu asks us to enter this space and find strength in learning from disagreement.  

For first-year students, the Summer Common Reading will be part of your first course: First-Year Preceptorial. In preparation, your Preceptorial instructor would like you to reflect on Learning to Disagree prior to arriving for New Student Orientation. FP is all about engaging new ideas and material. Writing is a key way that we engage and think. To help you begin to process the book, we are asking you to engage in a reflection. We will do more of this in class — this is just your first chance to reflect on what you have read and to start to articulate what you think about it.

More info about the FP Common Reading Writing Assignment will appear soon.

By the end of your first term, you will have had a chance to read a lot, to write a lot, and engage with your peers around many issues. At Knox and in the Summer Common Reading, we challenge ourselves to reflect on how we think about the world; we may attempt to persuade others and, in turn, allow ourselves to be persuaded by new ways of seeing things. We may develop firm new beliefs rooted in well-crafted arguments but we will also not always know all the answers. Throughout your Knox education, our aim is to help you to become a critical thinker and a life-long learner. Your journey starts here.

A Note on Paper Copies of Learning to Disagree: For students with a domestic U.S. address, we will mail a paper copy of the book to you in early July. If you have an international address, your paper copy of the book awaits your arrival to Knox. In the meantime, students outside the U.S. can check out an e-version of the book from the Knox Library. Instructions are here. [MyKnox login required.] Ebooks are limited in number. If you have a U.S. address, please wait for your paper copy and permit international students to access the ebooks.

We look forward to welcoming you to campus soon.

Sincerely,

Michael A. Schneider

Provost and Dean of the College
Professor of History