Gopnik's Lincoln
How the bestselling book given to the class of 2013 turns on its head everything the Great Emancipator stood for
Charles Johnson
Last Updated: 12/28/09 Section: Opinion
Breaking with tradition, this year's freshmen class Athenaeum speaker was not a member of the faculty, but Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker. On September 10th, Gopnik spoke to the Class of 2013 about his new book, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (2009). President Gann and Dean of Students, Jeff Huang, presented each member of the Class of 2013 with Mr. Gopnik's book. Although the book was sold at a discount of 40 percent, at a cover price of $24.95, 224 pages, such a collective experience for all 282 freshmen certainly didn't come cheap - and that isn't including the honorarium, lodging, or travel that Mr. Gopnik received as part of the deal. I wonder at the expense at a time when the college is purporting to cut costs, when it seems, from conversations with at least twenty freshmen, that few have gotten beyond the first chapter. Indeed it is from such conversations that I resolved to read it and see what ideas there are to be seriously considered.
Perhaps we should be grateful that Dean Huang decided to bring someone more serious to the Athenaeum. In 2007, there were no fewer than three speakers that dealt with the question of "burying the N-word." Apparently, my freshman mind thought, such a word was casually thrown around campus and needed an intervention of sorts. And efforts to create a common experience for the freshman class are to be commended, but one wonders why they can't take place in the curriculum. Isn't that, after all, one of the points of a liberal arts education? To create a shared basis of knowledge?
When asked why he invited Mr. Gopnik, Dean Huang wrote in an email that the college was looking for a book that was "interesting, recent, and relevant to new students." In a letter to the freshmen class, however, Dean Huang recommended that the students go to YouTube and watch a short video in which Gopnik discusses his book's theme: how Lincoln and Darwin, born on the same day in 1809, are emissaries of modern times.
Perhaps we should be grateful that Dean Huang decided to bring someone more serious to the Athenaeum. In 2007, there were no fewer than three speakers that dealt with the question of "burying the N-word." Apparently, my freshman mind thought, such a word was casually thrown around campus and needed an intervention of sorts. And efforts to create a common experience for the freshman class are to be commended, but one wonders why they can't take place in the curriculum. Isn't that, after all, one of the points of a liberal arts education? To create a shared basis of knowledge?
When asked why he invited Mr. Gopnik, Dean Huang wrote in an email that the college was looking for a book that was "interesting, recent, and relevant to new students." In a letter to the freshmen class, however, Dean Huang recommended that the students go to YouTube and watch a short video in which Gopnik discusses his book's theme: how Lincoln and Darwin, born on the same day in 1809, are emissaries of modern times.
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