“The task of the modern educator,” wrote C.S. Lewis more than half a century ago, “is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” The Oxford don suggests by this statement that the college classroom is at its best when it is a place where unformed minds confront a lofty standard, in the hope that students will rise and follow the exalted example. At its worst, college educators enter the academic arena determined to "cut down jungles" of prejudice and replace them with their own beliefs.

The Clemson committee selection of the book Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett shows education at its "cutting down jungles" worst.

For those who haven't read the book, the Amazon.com summary provides a glimpse into its purpose. "This memoir of (Ann) Patchett's friendship with ... Lucy Grealy shows many insights into the nature of devotion ... moving from the unfolding of their deep connection in graduate school into the more turbulent waters beyond." Patchett describes their attempts to be writers, while Grealy endures continuous rounds of operations as a result of cancer, as well as "heartbreak and drug use."

The moral theme of friendship in the book is lost in mind-numbing descriptions of reckless sexual liaisons, affairs with married men and students, financial irresponsibility and abortion. In the words of a local pastor in his letter to President James Barker, "Lucy eventually pays the price ... not for these mistakes, but for her false sense of invincibility. Little is done to dissipate the moral fog, even by the book's end."

This is where the selection committee failed the incoming freshmen at Clemson by making this universally assigned reading. They did not consider that, in the words of John Gardner in his book On Moral Fiction, "art is essentially and primarily moral -- that is, life-giving -- in its process of creation and moral in what it says." In the end, Patchett's book doesn't succeed for the same reason her friend didn't survive: because she has no moral standard to offer to pull her back from the brink.

At one point Ann Patchett says to Lucy, "I'm not going to try to solve your problems, I just want to make you happy." The author's work is supposed to be about love, but it reads more like manipulation and dependency. Ann leaves her friend in a self-destructive lifestyle, which ends in death. She violates one of the sacred responsibilities of what college students call a "relationship": the obligation to help.

Cicero said in 44 B.C. that "friendship lightens adversity by dividing and sharing it." The Bible says in the book of Proverbs, "faithful are the wounds of a friend." Both understand that friendship involves uncomfortable commitments to confront and intervene.

Whenever possible, good literature should do the same thing. Good art should hold up models of decent behavior in contrast to destructive ones. One need only think of the lasting literary works: The Iliad and The Odyssey, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles; Virgil's Aenid, the plays of Shakespeare; the novels of Tolstoy and Melville. These works have a civilizing effect century after century, long after the cultures that produced them have decayed.

Characters in good fiction -- who struggle against confusion, error and evil both in themselves and in others -- can offer us firm intellectual and emotional examples in our own struggles. Scout's defense of Atticus, and her recognition of Mr. Cunningham at the jailhouse door, in the book and movie To Kill a Mockingbird may have done more to dissipate racial prejudice in the South than a dozen laws. Storytelling has great power in a culture, and that is why we must be careful which ones we endorse.

Compare the freshman reading at Clemson with that at the University of South Carolina. The book being read in Columbia is by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder, and is titled Mountains Beyond Mountains. Again, the Amazon.com description tells you all you need to know. "The title ... is a metaphor for life -- once you have scaled one mountain there are more to come ... this is especially true for Paul Farmer, MD, who has devoted his life to what he calls the “impossible” task of trying to cure infectious diseases worldwide." At the center of the book is a doctor who is selfless in solving one problem after another, far different from Lucy's self-absorption.

Clemson University is justifiably proud of its new ranking as a Top 30 public university, and of its more than 100 new faculty members. But in the selection of its freshman reading project, Clemson is a poor second to USC. The former adopted the "cut down" approach to education, while the latter chose to "irrigate" the minds of its incoming students.

Dr. J. David Woodard (PhD, Vanderbilt), Professor of Political Science at Clemson University, is author of a number of books, including The America that Reagan Built, which was released by Praeger earlier this summer.