Next year’s freshmen are in for a nasty surprise.

Saddled with skyrocketing tuition, they will quickly see there has been a correlative plummet in the resources offered to them. Faced with the decision of dropping out or putting up with an expensive but meager education, I think many will choose to leave.

But before they leave, the university will have forced them to read at least one book due to the Common Reading Program, perhaps the last book they will ever read in their lives.

This past year, the Common Reading Program did a good job of assigning an engaging book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and providing interesting programing. The book dealt with issues close to home, and they were perfect issues for freshmen to explore and investigate.

For next year’s book, I suggest a departure from the norm. When the Common Reading Program was accepting nominations for new books last month, I nominated “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders” by Daniyal Mueenuddin, a National Book Award finalist. This book deals with issues farther afield, in Pakistan and rather than reportage, it is fiction.

My nomination is in part remedial. In addition to a state legislature that does not consider providing affordable education essential, this university is cursed with the worst president in the state. If one imagines that every academic discipline presents a different way of thinking, then one can see how WSU President Elson S. Floyd is extinguishing ways of thinking with his policy of vertical cuts. With last year’s vertical cuts, Floyd made it clear he does not care about what the study of the arts nor the study of foreign cultures has to offer.

Mueenuddin’s book could help to keep these ways of thinking alive at WSU. This book of stories set in Pakistan would confront students with a foreign culture. To navigate this culture, they would have to develop tools to help them think in different ways, to see what seems hidden and to understand what seems incomprehensible. To attain new systems of thinking is the best possible product of academic inquiry. It is the reason universities exist.

What I love most about this book is Mueenuddin’s artful way of telling a story. In the story “Saleema” Mueenuddin describes the “order within disorder” that is lost when one of the main figures, K.K. Harouni, dies, along with the world he represented.

The reader enters not just a different culture, but different worlds. These are the worlds of lords and servants, men and women, young and old. It is astonishing, the way Mueenuddin is able to portray the messiness and tragedy inherent in all varieties of human life, as well as the beauty, this “order within disorder,” that we all must find to make life worth living.

If next year’s disillusioned freshmen leave in bitterness and anger, never to read a book again, at least their last book will have been worth remembering.