Skip to main content

MCC Daily Tribune Archive

President's Wednesday Message


It seems I’ve been running from meeting to meeting this past month—many of them on the road. This has given me time to catch up on my reading. I decided to write on reading today because of two recent conversations I’ve had with colleagues who proclaimed, almost proudly, that outside of professional publications, they no longer read anything. In each case, my horrified response of “Anything?!” really took them by surprise because outside of their spouses, they didn’t know anyone who read non-work-related materials any more.

In contrast, I cannot imagine not reading. To be sure, I get in my fair share of professional and daily prep reading. I start each day with Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle, the Democrat and Chronicle, the New York Times, and my twitter feed (which includes USAToday, Wall Street Journal, Community College Week, and more). I also keep up with the latest publications from AACC, ACE, and AAC&U, as well as the occasional publications from Lumina, CCSSE, College Board, and others. Each week seems to bring a new blue ribbon report from a collection of higher education policy leaders that must be digested, and each month, there’s another new book either decrying higher education or proposing how to redesign it. So, these get added to the list as well. But, as has been said, people cannot live by bread alone.

With apologies to our most recent Visiting Scholar, Spencer Wells, I will claim to have the acquired-DNA of a lit major. One cannot survive a Victorian novels class reading one 500+ pager a week without developing a craving for texts (but it is relatively easy to escape such a class without a desire to read more Victorian fiction). So, I read constantly. On my last trip, I finished Lauren Groff’s Arcadia. While she grew up in Upstate NY, she currently lives in Gainesville, FL (my old hometown). I read her first novel, the Monsters of Templeton, while still in Florida and marveled when I actually visited Cooperstown, which is fictionalized as Templeton in that novel—walking the streets and sitting by the lake imagining the sad, lonely monster lurking below its Glimmerglass surface. Arcadia is an equally extraordinary novel, sometimes painfully beautiful and poetic in its description and narration, and I’d highly recommend either. (At this point, I also need to confess I read the recent oral history of MTV at the same time, so it’s definitely not all high brow on my Kindle.)

For me, reading both soothes and enlivens my soul and brain. It offers a wonderful counterbalance to a workday of budgets and strategy; it provides a quiet space in which to explore and expand. And, it takes me back to the never-ending joy of discovery that was seeded in my 6 year old heart when my father first took me to the Llewellyn Public Library near my grandmother’s house in Bay View, Wisconsin, and the sense of independence I had when a couple years later I got to walk to the Bookmobile at the top of Waterford Avenue near my home to pick out my own books from the bottom shelves. Reading opened worlds for me as a little girl from St. Francis, and it does to this day. I simply cannot ever imagine telling someone, with pride, that I have no time for reading anymore. I will never be that busy.

What are you reading? What do you plan to read this summer? Share it on the blog.

Anne M. Kress
President's Office
05/02/2012