California Lutheran University Selects Black Dog Of Fate As Required

CALIFORNIA LUTHERAN UNIVERSITY SELECTS BLACK DOG OF FATE AS REQUIRED READING FOR FIRST-YEAR CLASS

By MassisPost
Updated: November 18, 2013

By Taleen Babayan

California Lutheran University became the fifth U.S. university to
use Peter Balakian’s memoir Black Dog of Fate as the requiring book
for nearly a thousand incoming freshmen. In recent years, The College
of New Jersey, University of Connecticut, Sienna College and Colgate
University have also made the book a core text or a required first
year read.

California Lutheran University, a private liberal arts institution
located in Southern California, found Balakian’s memoir a compelling
way to inaugurate its Freshman-Year Experience Program, which aims
to integrate students into the school’s academic way of life.

“In the First-Year Seminar, we are especially committed to assisting
students in choosing and developing an ethical stance in their
academic and professional commitments,” said Professor James Bond,
Associate Professor of English at CLU and Director of the Freshman-Year
Experience Program. “A key emphasis in fostering an emerging ethical
stance is helping them learn about what it might mean to participate
in a global citizenship.”

Bond said that Balakian’s “elegant, moving, and critical memoir,” fit
the program needs perfectly because it helped demonstrate to students
the importance of discovering purpose. He noted that Balakian’s
“younger self” does not occur through one event or moment, instead
evolving over time and after much struggle, reflection and historical
and family research.

“This process isn’t merely academic or narrowly personal,” said Bond.

“Both are fused together, as they should be, and that fits our sense
of educating the “whole person.”

While Black Dog of Fate is a personal story, focusing on Balakian’s
life growing up in American-Armenian family in the 1950s and 60s,
unaware that his family had been victims of the Armenian Genocide,
Bond remarked that the memoir went beyond that and helps others
understand the importance of being aware of one’s past “for the
purpose of contributing to a higher good.”

“Professor Balakian is showing our students one viable and noble way
for developing a calling beyond mere self interest, and also one that
engages the self in the context of being a global citizen,” said Bond.

Professor Balakian discussed his book with incoming freshman at
California Lutheran University at the start of the academic year. The
book won the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir
and has been through dozens of printings. It was published in a 10th
anniversary edition, with the addition of two new chapters several
years ago.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress