Gandhi’s Way

The UC Davis campus embarked on an ambitious but very successful project last year, namely, to have students, staff, faculty, and the community read the same book and then talk about it. The chosen book was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Dozens of events were organized around this book in Fall 2002, culminating in the visit to Davis by the author and some of the protagonists of her book.

This was always going to be a hard act to follow, but in the end Gandhi’s Way, by Mark Juergensmeyer, a UC Santa Barbara professor of sociology, was selected as the project for Fall 2003. Published over 15 years ago, it calls itself a “handbook of non-violent conflict resolution”—a book whose time has surely come. We are hoping it will help campus and community members learn to welcome, instead of avoid, conflict, and think creatively about ways to bring about change that works for both parties. The Davis Enterprise ran a nice write-up about this project on Sunday.