TO:           The University of Rhode Island Community

FROM:      Donald H. DeHayes, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs

DATE:       July 1, 2009

SUBJECT:    URI Summer Reading

As you may already know, we have introduced a new URI Summer Reading Initiative for our incoming first-year students and the broader URI community this year at orientation. The overall goals are to introduce first-year students immediately to a campus culture focused on academic engagement and learning and to build a sense of community and common bond among incoming students by having them all read the same book. I invite you too to the read the book and engage in discussions with our students and each other.

The book selected this summer is Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. This Pulitzer Prize winning book is a collection of short stories that eloquently describes people living between cultures they have inherited and ones they have discovered in the new world. Ms. Lahiri will be visiting URI this fall as a speaker in the fall 09 Honors Colloquium entitled Demystifying India.

Each of our 3,000 or so new first-year students and their advisors have been given a copy of the book at orientation and asked to read it this summer. Students have been asked to select the story that engaged them the most and the least and be prepared to explain why. We have established a URI blog community to exchange reactions to the various stories. Ms. Lahiri has agreed to kick off the blog exchange and each of our deans will share their thoughts about one of the stories. Our new students will be notified on July 7 about the blog via email and facebook. We welcome you too to blog in at: uricommonreading.blogspot.com.

In addition to the blog, students will be discussing the book as part of their URI 101 class this fall. Several faculty have already indicated that they will incorporate aspects of the stories into one or more of their classes. We invite you to weave it into your teaching as appropriate or to simply engage in informal discussion about the book with students and colleagues over a cup of coffee at the Rams Den this fall. Books will be available for purchase at the URI Bookstore.

So, please join this new URI community initiative and blog away with our students.