TXST Announces 2019-2020 Academic Year Common Experience Theme

San Marcos – The Common Experience at Texas State University has announced that the 2019-2020 theme will be “Truth.”

Texas State presents an academic theme each year to provide numerous opportunities for students, faculty, staff and community members to share in a Common Experience.

As part of the Common Experience, all incoming first-year students receive a critically acclaimed book related to the year’s theme. Students discuss the book in their university seminar class and other courses. The 2019-2020 Common Reading book is “What the Eyes Don’t See” by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician who shed light on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The Common Experience Insight Series will bring Dr. Hanna-Attisha to Texas State to speak on Sept. 18.

The 2019-2020 Common Experience will examine truth through an array of perspectives: a quest for truth and an examination of authenticity.

Areas of exploration will range from an understanding of university truth — in scholarship and research — to a definition of Universal Truth with a capital T, and from one’s own personal truth to a sense of honesty, accuracy, validity and truthfulness.

The theme will highlight discourse, from the stories shared with friends to the words seen online to the labels read when shopping to answer one key question — how does one know what’s true?

Among the year’s innumerable activities, the university will host a new series of dialogue events focused on illuminating facts for students. Topics will include “The Truth about Life after College,” “The Truth about Finances” and “The Truth about Urban Legends and Myths.”

For additional information about the theme, events, and activities planned for the 2019-2020 academic year, contact (512) 245-3579 or commonexperience@txstate.edu.