What Every Student Needs to Read Now

In the wake of the protests, 22 scholars recommend books to make sense of this
moment.

ANIMATION BY THE CHRONICLE; ISTOCK

 THE REVIEW | FORUM

MAY 17, 2024

O
ver the past month, American campuses have witnessed levels of political
unrest not seen since the anti-Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s.
Students, faculty, and staff at more than 90 colleges and universities have
organized demonstrations and set up encampments to oppose the Israeli government’s
military action in Gaza and demand their institutions divest from Israel. Many
administrations have responded with force, calling in the local police to clear
encampments and disperse protests. Students and faculty members have been arrested
and, in some cases, beaten. Buildings have been occupied. Graduation ceremonies have
been disrupted, and suspensions and punishments have been issued.

Those events have been much discussed in up-to-the-minute reports, op-eds, and quick
takes on social media. We wanted a longer view. So we asked 22 Chronicle Review
contributors: In light of the campus protests and police crackdowns that have swept
campuses across the country, what is the one book you’d recommend colleges adopt as
required reading for all incoming freshmen?

Their responses are below.

— The Editors
Noah Feldman
Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest, by Steven Kelman. The book is
a genuine classic: A near-contemporaneous view of the student protests of 1968 from
the viewpoint of an engaged socialist undergraduate at Harvard. It is at once a
compulsively readable, minute-by-minute account and a deep meditation on how
things fall apart.

Noah Feldman is a professor of law at Harvard University.

Michael Kazin
Poems: New and Collected, 1957-1997, by Wisława Szymborska. “After every war
someone has to tidy up / Things won’t pick themselves up, after all” reads the opening
line of a poem by Szymborska, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. From her
home in Krakow, Poland, she turned her experiences in the Second World War and the
rise and fall of Communism into stunning reflections on how to understand the
horrors that “torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues” commit — and how to
move beyond them. Eighteen-year-olds might learn as much about such matters from
her work as from any book of history. As her fellow poet William Carlos Williams
wrote: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / Yet men die miserably every day /
for lack / of what is found there.”

Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University.

Mohammad Fadel
Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is an indispensable source for
understanding the Palestinian perspective on what has happened to them as a people
since 1917. It strikes the right tone between scholarly rigor and accessibility, and is
ideal reading for general education in a liberal-arts setting.

Mohammad Fadel is a professor of law at the University of Toronto.

Merve Emre
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, by Vincent Bevins.
Bevins’s book is about the activists, hackers, punks, martyrs, and millions of ordinary
people whose small acts of bravery spurred the mass protests of the last decade. The
promise of those protests is unfulfilled; Bevins’s book might help us to fulfill them.

Merve Emre is a professor of creative writing and criticism at Wesleyan University.

Richard Thompson Ford
Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky. Not because I think all of Alinsky’s rules are wise
strategy but because he thought hard and systematically about how to organize an
effective protest movement. Today it’s relatively easy to organize a big protest through
social media, but it is still hard to be effective — maybe harder than ever, because
today everyone is used to protest movements, and institutions and opponents have
developed well-worn counter-strategies. For instance, movement organizers should at
least consider the risk that some of their actions are feeding a well-established
narrative about “out-of-control college students” that might make it easier for
politicians to ignore their legitimate concerns or help their enemies gain power.
Alinsky challenged movement leaders to think hard about their ultimate goals — Are
they realistic? What do you really want? — and he pressed activists to think
strategically about how to keep control of their messaging and make sure any
provocations were worth the effort and the risks.

Richard Thompson Ford is a professor of law at Stanford Law School.

Martha Nussbaum
Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life, by Sari Nusseibeh, to bring subtlety and
complexity to the students’ search for peace. Nusseibeh, the former president of Al-
Quds University, in East Jerusalem (he still teaches philosophy there), has carried on
the search for cooperation, mutual understanding, and a principled peace with
unparalleled integrity, even when both sides threatened him, and he still exemplifies
reasoned hope.

Martha Nussbaum is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Dorian Abbot
I recommend that incoming freshmen read St. John’s Gospel. The protests and the
destructive ideologies driving them are a manifestation of the deep spiritual crisis in
our nation. St. John’s rich, beautiful, and multilayered account of the Gospel story
would provide an excellent springboard for incoming freshmen to turn away from
Dostoyevsky’s demons and toward the eternal questions, fostering life-sustaining
spiritual development and freeing them from possession by the terrible ideologies that
are causing this unrest.

Dorian Abbot is a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago.

Corey Robin
In The Liberal Tradition in America, which came out in 1955 in the wake of another
crackdown against the American left, the great and troubled political scientist Louis
Hartz asked the question: What happens when liberalism becomes the instrument or
ally of reaction? That is what is happening, in part, today on our campuses, against the
pro-Palestine left, and though I don’t expect liberal university administrators to take
up Hartz’s question any time soon, his answers should trouble their sleep.

Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University
of New York.
Laura Kipnis
It’s not the students who need a reading list; it’s the presidents, administrators,
boards, and donors. Here’s a start: Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”; Martin
Luther King Jr., “Letter From Birmingham Jail”; and Immanuel Wallerstein, University
in Turmoil: The Politics of Change.

Laura Kipnis is a professor emeritus at Northwestern University’s School of

Communication.
Omer Bartov
What I think would be helpful for undergraduates to read these days are two novellas
written a good four decades ago. The first is Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa,
which simultaneously expresses empathy for the loss of home and family by a
Palestinian couple who fled Haifa in 1948 and for the Holocaust survivors who
adopted their baby boy left behind in the chaos of flight and raised him as an Israeli.
It’s a classic by one of the most important Palestinian writers of his generation.

The second is the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua’s early story “Facing the Forests,” about
the confrontation of an Israeli student with the remnants of a Palestinian village
covered up by a newly planted forest on Mount Carmel, in which an elderly mute (!)
Arab eventually sets fire to the forest the student was supposed to guard. Yehoshua’s
story, written in the 1960s, is an early Israeli confrontation with the subconscious
awareness of the destruction of Palestinian life in 1948. It’s also a classic of Israeli
literature and a more progressive encounter with the past than anything we might find
today in Hebrew. These are two rather short texts and can be read in tandem.

Omer Bartov is a professor of history at Brown University.

Randall Kennedy
Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter From Birmingham Jail” (1963), paired with Lewis F.
Powell Jr., “A Lawyer Looks at Civil Disobedience” (1966).

Randall Kennedy is a professor of law at Harvard Law School.

Andrew Delbanco
I would assign a short speech rather than a book. In June 1968, a few weeks after the
police had cleared a student occupation from Hamilton Hall, the Columbia historian
Richard Hofstadter gave the commencement address to a broken university. In the
face of rising hostility toward the protesters, he defended their freedom to confront
“difficult and inflammatory things,” including “the most troublesome questions of
politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” But he also
warned that freedom, if it is to prevail in the long run, “requires restraints” that are
“self-imposed and not forced from outside.” “The very possibility of civilized human
discourse,” Hofstadter said, “rests upon the willingness of people to consider that they
may be mistaken.” If I had to pick a single sentence for incoming college students —
or, for that matter, faculty members and administrators — to read today, I’d pick that
one.

Andrew Delbanco is a professor of American studies at Columbia University.

Davarian Baldwin
The anthropologist Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities
Deny Palestinian Freedom couldn’t be more timely: It offers a forensic examination of
what U.N. experts are now calling “scholasticide” in Palestine, through the complicity
of Israeli universities in settler colonialism. Wind’s attention to the details of Israeli
campuses as Jewish settlements of replacement in occupied lands, and their role in
servicing the local military industry and as sites of Palestinian intellectual suppression,
all speak to the current struggles being waged on U.S. campuses, where we are being
forced to name higher education as a critical political and economic battleground in
the broader fight for global freedom.

Davarian Baldwin is a professor of American studies at Trinity College in Connecticut.

Silke-Maria Weineck
“Before the Law,” a parable by Franz Kafka. It will prepare them well for the academy’s
doorkeepers, and they will enjoy counting the fleas in their collars.

Silke-Maria Weineck is a professor of German and comparative literature at the

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Robin D.G. Kelley
Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Erakat provides a
brilliant critical history of a century of struggle over Palestine, as well as an excellent
primer on the evolution and application of international law. She delivers a nuanced
analysis of how law was contested ground: a tool for dispossession, settler rule, and
occupation, as well as a tool of resistance and an archive for historical reconstruction.
And she introduces some brilliant comparisons, notably the case of Namibia.

Robin D.G. Kelley is a professor of U.S. history at the University of California at Los
Angeles.
Samuel Moyn
Domenico Losurdo, Non-Violence: A History Beyond the Myth. Even as states are
clearly not done with violence, abroad and at home, protest has generally taken the
form of “nonviolence.” This edgy book tells a disquieting history of nonviolence,
raising the possibility that it may have its own problems as a strategy, even if it avoids
the mistakes of violence.

Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale University.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
I recommend Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir because it will introduce the
reader to the exilic poetry of Palestine.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a professor of English and comparative literature at

Columbia University.
David Greenberg
Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, by Yossi Klein Halevi. The protesters who have
disrupted American universities since October 7 — from the Stanford lecturer who
forced a Jewish student to stand in a corner to the throngs of activists who barred
“Zionists” from common campus spaces — share an empathy for Palestinian suffering
yet often lack an accurate knowledge of the history of Israel and the Jewish people. In
lyrical and accessible prose, Yossi Klein Halevi, an acclaimed journalist who has
migrated politically from right to left, reaches out across the political and ethnic
divides to offer to an imagined Palestinian neighbor an insightful Israeli perspective
on the conflict. Many Palestinians have found this book to be an olive branch, a basis
for reviving the spirit of the 1990s, when a two-state solution seemed nigh. Pro-
Palestinian students may find it opens their eyes — and their hearts — as well.

David Greenberg is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at

Rutgers University at New Brunswick.
Vaughn Rasberry
William Gardner Smith’s recently republished 1963 novel The Stone Face chronicles
the vibrant and close-knit Black American expatriate community in Paris during the
time of the Algerian Revolution, and is one of the very few contemporaneous
narratives of the 1961 massacre of Algerian protesters by the French National Police.
For the novel’s protagonist, Simeon, life in Paris is unimaginably good. But when
Simeon witnesses the persecution of the Algerian population by the French state, he is
faced with a choice: Stay quiet in the face of injustice, as his expat friends choose to
do, or speak up and risk losing his newfound freedom in Paris. Simeon chooses the
latter — paying the “price of the ticket,” in James Baldwin’s memorable phrase.

Vaughn Rasberry is an associate professor of English at Stanford University.

Anthony Abraham Jack
Eddie Cole, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black
Freedom. When it comes to accountability for leaders of all sorts, the old maxim goes,
“The buck stops here.” The historian Eddie Cole shows how much this is true for
college presidents. He documents how, throughout history, college presidents have
wielded their power in ways that further disenfranchised already vulnerable
communities as well as other colleges, especially those that serve historically
underrepresented groups. The book forces us to confront how hollow current gestures
toward racial and social justice are when, just a generation ago, college presidents
were key players in shaping policies that undermined both.

Anthony Abraham Jack is an associate professor of higher-education administration at

Boston University.
Lila Abu-Lughod
Amahl Bishara’s Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian
Political Expression. A Palestinian anthropologist looks to sites of political practice
across the Green Line that separates Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians
under occupation in the West Bank.

Lila Abu-Lughod is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University.

Nicholas Dirks
Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, by Robert Cohen.
This authoritative biography of Mario Savio shows the deep links between the civil-
rights movement and the struggle for free speech and academic freedom at Berkeley
in 1964. Savio was relentless in his advocacy for political rights but also clear that with
freedom came responsibility, both for democracy and for the institutional life of the
university.

Nicholas Dirks is president of the New York Academy of Sciences and a former
chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley.

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