The Daily Tar Heel reports that this summer UNC-Chapel Hill’s incoming freshmen and transfer students will be assigned Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Stevenson is a long-time “social justice” attorney and is the director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a progressive legal advocacy group. His latest book is a legal memoir that examines issues related to racial inequality and mass incarceration. The author encourages readers to “take action” on those issues.

Mass incarceration – especially of non-violent offenders – and racism in the justice system are real problems that deserve serious attention. But Chapel Hill should not require first-year students to read Just Mercy before they’ve had the opportunity to study history, economics, statistics, and logic – a base of knowledge that would give such students a firmer understanding of the public policy issues raised in Stevenson’s book and help them separate facts from the author’s occasionally ideological rhetoric.

Besides, as a recent report from the educational assessment company Renaissance Learning reveals, many students entering college are reading books on 7th and 8th grade levels. Instead of assigning Stevenson’s memoir, why not urge students to read some of the literary classics that they might have skipped in high school? The students will have plenty of other opportunities to become “social justice” advocates and learn that some groups are “oppressed” and that others are “privileged” and that, as Stevenson says, “The opposite of poverty is justice.”