Surprise! 9/11 is controversial.

Book choice proves divisive; Sept. 11 satire required reading for new students.

In short, Lafayette College hands out In the Shadow of No Towers and, for balance, some Bush transcripts to incoming freshmen, controversy results. Sort of like putting two spiders in a jar and shaking it until they fight, i.e. the Crossfire method. The college's claimed intention is to provoke "intellectual discussion" but as usual the discussion is more on their choice of required material than on "defining the American Identity" (the purpose of the initiative).

The sadder thing about this is, In the Shadow of No Towers simply isn't very good. People don't want to say this too loudly, because there simply isn't any definitive artistic statement on that terrible day at this point and we're feeling that lack right now. I'm not going to go into my criticisms of Shadow (I wrote about it here when it was released, and my opinion has become somewhat more negative since then), I just think it's a minor work from a gifted artist. It's been lifted up as some sort of definitive statement, maybe because of Spiegelman's New Yorker and Pulitzer connections, to the degree that it's already making its way to the college cirricula. But honestly, if they wanted to give students a thought-provoking statement in a comics format, they could have selected This is Information. What they were probably going for was polemic, which is more in keeping with our current political climate, in a format that seems novel/current enough (Bam! Pow! Comics!) to invite innocent academic scrutiny.

Anyway, read the article.