What is the Great Read at Birmingham (GRAB)?
All incoming undergraduates will receive a copy of the same book in their Welcome Packs and be asked to read it before arriving to encourage to engage with academic ideas and to create a shared experience for all new students.
This Great Read provides a common topic for all new undergraduates to discuss, creating a shared experience for those debating its themes.
We believe that attending a University like Birmingham is about grappling with complex, multi-faceted, and even controversial ideas. As an academic community, we welcome and enjoy debate and hope that our book choice will stimulate it.
The idea was proposed by the Vice-Chancellor, and is based on many successful similar programmes run in North America. As far as we know, this will be the largest scale on which such a programme has been implemented by a UK university to date.
There will be University-wide activities around the book during Welcome Week and the first term. Your schools and departments will also use the book in study skills modules or in other ways.
Why evolution?
We feel that evolution is one of the central explanatory concepts of modern knowledge, not only in biology but in many other disciplines, and engaging with academic ideas is an important part of coming to University.
We ask all students to engage with the idea of evolution from its many perspectives and disciplines, and to participate in reasoned and constructive debate even if they disagree with the idea of human evolution.