WTA*Mart

Aggier than the Aggies, more Baptist than Baylor, West Texas A&M University in Canyon acts as the intellectual underbelly for the upper Panhandle’s conservative culture. But The- Hallway- Formerly- Known- as- the- T.- Boone- Pickens- School- of- Business and other equally seedy and equally regressive corners of the school have had limited success in fomenting the loony rightist ideas bubbling up from the students and faculty. One factor has been the perennial inability of incoming 1^st-year students to read or write a complete sentence.

So last year WTAMU instituted a readership program that requires all 1^st-year students to read a core book before they come in off the ranch. (In a related program, they’re required to kick the manure off their boots before they come inside Old Main, but that program has had much less success.)

As a current graduate student at WT, I received an e-mail requesting that I vote for next year’s core book. The choices include Rick Bragg ‘s All over but the Shoutin' and Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man, among others.

There are several worthy books on the list, but I’m going to vote for Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. When I was an incoming 1^st-year student at SMU I participated in a similar program which greatly broadened my horizons. Hopefully students who read Nickel and Dimed will kick some of the provincial mythology they have been sold about Hard Work and Making It in America off their boots before they enter college. And, hopefully, at least some of them will be motivated to work to find lives—for themselves and for us all—outside of the exploitative hypercapitalistic machine that threatens to plow all of us under.

SPACEDARK