Sunday, September 27, 2009
A common book for Tech and Blacksburg
Christian Trejbal
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From the RoundTable blog
Heading off to college for the first time often is a stressful experience. Unless some of your buddies from high school are going and land in the same dorm, freshmen dive headlong into a sea of mysterious strangers.
Virginia Tech tries to ease that transition as much as it can, and one innovative way it does so is by giving all new students something to share -- a book. Think of it as newbie initiation but with fewer paddles, less verbal abuse and binge drinking, and more intellectual stimulation.
The school's Common Book Project goes back a decade. Each winter or spring, a panel of students, faculty and staff choose a book for the next incoming class. The school buys thousands of copies and distributes them during summer orientation. Professors receive copies, too, and are encouraged to integrate them into their classes.
What's new this year is that the program spilled off campus. The common book is no longer just for students. The town urges all residents to give it a read.
A flash book club with potentially tens of thousands of members will not soothe every tension between full-time town residents and the students who live here only part of the year, but it creates opportunities for interaction and something to talk about besides noisy parties.
This year's selection is "Ecological Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman, which made sense as a community book because it ties in well with Blacksburg's annual Sustainability Week. It kicks off on Sunday, Oct. 11, with a public keynote address by the author in Burruss Auditorium.
"This is a wonderful opportunity for us to gather as a community and make this a common reading experience for everyone," Blacksburg Vice Mayor and Sustainable Blacksburg board member Leslie Hager Smith said in the announcement for the town's participation.
Goleman's name might be familiar to some readers. He also wrote the best-selling "Emotional Intelligence" and "Primal Leadership."
In "Ecological Intelligence," he asks readers to think about the full impact of what they consume on the environment, other people and themselves.
His basic idea is that "radical transparency" someday soon will allow consumers to know all of the environmental costs associated with producing something as well as all of the costs associated with disposing of it eventually. With that knowledge in hand -- or at least summarized by trusted, independent auditors like www.goodguide.com -- people will choose the items that cause less harm. That, in turn, will drive businesses to adopt greener practices.
It's an interesting argument. I'm not sure I buy all of its details, but Goleman is adept at laying out his thesis with colorful examples that apply to average shoppers. His book is entertaining and thought-provoking.
And if he's at least partially right, Tech is the right place for his message. Conducting full lifecycle analyses of complex manufacturing processes requires people with technical training -- the engineers, mathematicians, chemists and other scientists Tech graduates.
Your thoughts
- What do you think of the Common Book Project? Will you read it? Post to the RoundTable.
"The student body at Tech is quite unique in its potential to move this ecological transparency along," Goleman said in an interview last week. "It's going to open a whole new range of job opportunities that never existed before."
Not only that, but as more and more companies look to go green, they will need new workers and new industries to help them.
"It will mean enormous entrepreneurial opportunity for people with a strong technological background," Goleman said.
For town residents, Goleman offers new ways to think about the things they buy every day. After reading his book, one will never look at a bottle of shampoo the same way.
Readers have two weeks before he arrives in town, plenty of time to make it through the book's 276 pages.
In the future, Tech might not choose a book that fits so well with Sustainability Week, but that should not prevent residents from picking up future common books.
