Campus Reading Program
The Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement is pleased to sponsor the Campus Reading Program. Each year, the Litowitz Center oversees a process to select a reading that will engage undergraduate students and the wider campus community. Works across genres will be considered, but a thread of enlightened disagreement will run through all readings that are ultimately selected. This thread may be reflected—perhaps subtly—in journalistic reporting, social scientific research, narratives of a memoir, or character development in fiction.
Through the Campus Reading Program, the Litowitz Center seeks to introduce diverse segments of the campus community to themes, mindsets, and skills associated with enlightened disagreement. Along with an annual keynote event to focus students, faculty, and staff on the selection, the Litowitz Center will partner with schools and units to host events related to the selection. Participation in the campus reading program will hopefully prompt further interest in enlightened disagreement and involvement in the life of the Center.
How to participate
Programming for the Campus Reading Program selection, Vigil, will be available before the start of the 2026-2027 academic year.
Any campus units interested in contributing to the program schedule can write to litowitzcenter@northwestern.edu
The Campus Reading Program carries on the tradition of bringing our community together through a shared text while enhancing it with an additional purpose of promoting engagement across difference.
About the 2026-2027 Book
A wise, playful, electric novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO, in the twilight hours of his life, as he is ferried from this world into the next.
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life. Crowds of people and animals—worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead—arrive, clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room, a black calf grazes on the loveseat, a man from a distant drought-ravaged village materializes, two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for the man’s post-death future.
With the acuity and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.
About the Author
Note from the Faculty Co-Directors
If scrolling through social media satisfies a desire for distraction, keeping vigil feeds a hunger for focus and clarity. In Vigil, George Saunders imagines the invisible labor—emotional, cognitive, and spiritual—of those watching, as well as those being watched over. Readers see the period of a man’s passing through the eyes of characters in liminal states—not yet dead, not quite free, not entirely at peace. Saunders’ vigil upsets our conventional understanding of vigils. This one is a social experience, at times loud if not profane and constantly introducing participants from across the world and planes of existence. In a strange brew of players and purposes, coercion competes with persuasion, hubris wrestles humility, and values collide with facts—sometimes all in one mind, and at times when minds meld in radical attempts at mutual understanding. The shifting pace and perspectives of the text will challenge readers to hold on tight. Upon reaching the end of this literary carnival ride—perhaps haunted house is a more apt metaphor—we hope our community of readers will excitedly discuss memorable moments and characters. We also encourage them to consider the internal and interpersonal dynamics that capture the ongoing work—even in the afterlife—of engaging in enlightened disagreement. It is telling that Saunders has written a ghost story with the core concepts of enlightened disagreement floating through it like a specter. Vigil is a book both for our campus and for our times.