Should students be required to violate the terms of their faith for an assignment?

Colleen Flaherty reports at Inside Higher Ed.

Not So ‘Fun Home’

Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has won numerous accolades and its stage adaptation swept this summer’s Tony Awards. The book is an autobiographical meditation on love, family and identity, and with its constant references to Greek mythology and literary greats from Shakespeare to James Joyce, it’s not hard to see why it was Duke University’s recommended summer reading for incoming freshmen. But some students are objecting to the novel’s depictions of lesbian sexuality, arguing that the book is borderline pornographic and they shouldn’t have been asked to read it.

Duke’s not the first campus on which Fun Home has caused a stir, but a number of students have taken their concerns public — fueling ongoing debates about expectations of emotional comfort in higher education and whether the medium matters when it comes to controversial content.

“I objected because I think sexuality is becoming more and more commonplace in our culture, and that’s a risk,” said Brian Grasso, an incoming freshman who began a critical conversation about the book on a Facebook page for Duke’s class of 2019. “Universities like Duke which are very pro-sex risk isolating or even discriminating against people with conservative beliefs.”

He added, “It seems to me that in making this recommended summer reading Duke broke its own rules about diversity and about cultural sensitivity.”

Grasso, 18, identifies as a Christian and follows the Bible’s teachings on what he called sexual purity. He said he was alerted to Fun Home’s depiction of oral sex between two women by a friend, and reached out to the Facebook group to ask about others’ experiences with the book before reading it.

“I feel as if I would have to compromise my personal Christian moral beliefs to read it,” Grasso wrote.