A group of Duke University students have declined, for now, to participate in one such heady activity. Students in the incoming class are refusing to read Alison Bechdel's graphic narrative Fun Home because they consider it insensitive to conservative Christian values. They have protested its “pornographic” nature (there are drawings of breasts, and of sex between consenting adults in one or two panels), as well as its depiction of homosexual realities.
Fun Home is a complex, deeply literary memoir that uses work by Proust and James Joyce as narrative scaffolding for a layered examination of family secrets, from Bechdel's father's death (a probable but not certain suicide), to his mostly hidden sexuality, to the author's own development as an artist and asa
lesbian. The book and its author have both won many awards and are highly regarded in cultural and artistic circles. The university no doubt included it as part of a recommended summer reading list because of its provocative themes, as well as for its literary merit and cultural relevance.
lesbian. The book and its author have both won many awards and are highly regarded in cultural and artistic circles. The university no doubt included it as part of a recommended summer reading list because of its provocative themes, as well as for its literary merit and cultural relevance.
The shocked, negative reactions many people are having to the students' refusal to read it is both justified and touchingly naive. College is meant to be a place to try new things! critics have said. It's where you go to have transformative experiences, to learn new perspectives, to see things from the point of view of the Other and learn empathy and tolerance. That is to say, university is where you get to do these things, because heaven knows you won't get to do them anywhere else.
As much as the ideal of university-as-beacon-of-progress-and-free-thought is wonderful, it is just that: an ideal. As many professors, administrators, and students will tell you, the university experience increasingly resembles a four-year trip to Ikea: shopping for those things that fit your personal brand, rejecting the ones that don't match the sofa. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that students feel completely justified in cherry-picking ideas that feel right to them and leaving others on the shelf. They're simply preparing for life as savvy intellectual consumers in a world where empathy costs more than a bedroom set, and is worth less.
