I've been getting myself moved back to the U.S. after spending last year living and working abroad, so blogging has been non-existent for the past week and will continue to be light for the next few days. Posting should return to regular patterns soon. In the meantime, check out my piece in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education on the controversy surrounding UNC Chapel Hill's decision to assign all incoming freshmen Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

Subscription is required, unfortunately. But here's an excerpt:

... The book's detractors claim that it is so much agitprop from left-wing scholars openly attempting to indoctrinate students. Its defenders cast the critics as narrow-minded fundamentalists who do not understand the importance of wide reading and spirited debate.

But almost everyone agrees with the astounding premise that it's reasonable to use the freshman reading program to stage a political debate. As North Carolina State Senator Ellie Kinnaird told The Herald-Sun, of Durham, N.C., "The program has created exactly what it intended --Ýdiscussion, debate, and a lot of political activism. ... The purpose has been fulfilled." State Senator Austin Allran suggested that the freshman reading assignment should come from the classics, to which Vice Chancellor Bresciani responded that students are expected to read the classics on their own. But the principal argument of the Committee for a Better Carolina is that the reading program should include conservative views. Zach Clayton, a student at Chapel Hill who is a member of the group, told the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer that the university should have assigned the autobiography of Sam Walton, Wal-Mart's founder, along with Ehrenreich's book. On both sides of the debate, a book's politics are assumed to matter more than its scholarly merit or literary quality.

The committee's seemingly unimpeachable plea for "greater fairness and balance" in the reading program conceals a less savory jockeying for ideological position. "It's intellectually dishonest to present only one side," says the group's founder, Michael McKnight. That's true. But couched in that demand for balance is the committee's conservative agenda. The group seeks more balance not because balance is inherently desirable, but because of the committee's interest, as its Web site announces, "in promoting conservative and free market ideas and perspectives on the UNC campus." It is protesting because Nickel and Dimed gives conservative politics a bad rap. As McKnight told The Herald-Sun, "as a Christian, I was offended, and as a conservative I was really offended. It's one thing to disagree with someone's point of view, and it's another thing to ridicule them." Tellingly, McKnight frames his complaint in terms borrowed wholesale from the liberal identity politics that he and his group oppose.

The tacit assumption by both liberals and conservatives that Chapel Hill's summer reading program is more about politics than about reading should give us pause. We ought to be asking what it means to read opinionated works as either a confirmation or negation of identity --Ýbut instead we are fighting endlessly about whose identity gets top billing when readings are assigned.