This week, as residential students flood the quad at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, there’s a less visible but equally might tide of students coming to campus: the 2024 cohort of Odyssey Project scholars. And those scholars are going to receive something that is as precious, if not more so, than the opportunity to study with the world class humanities faculty we have at the U of I.

They are going to get their course books for free.

Odyssey students are income-eligible adults from the East Central Illinois community who enroll in humanities classes over two semesters. The course subjects — Philosophy, Art History, Literature and History — are the legacy of the Clemente Course in the Humanities , a nationwide program which aims to provide “a transformative educational experience” to adult students and to “empower [them] to further their education and careers, become effective advocates for themselves and their families, and engage actively in the cultural and civic lives of their communities.”

The Odyssey Project has been operating in Urbana-Champaign since 2006, serving students who have had limited access to higher education.

At the U of I, thanks to both the generosity of the College of Liberal Arts and Science, which awards free university credit to those who complete the courses, and the labor of staff at the Humanities Research Institute (HRI), where Odyssey is housed, students of all ages and from all walks of life can experience the humanities come alive in the space of a seminar room two nights a week.

And thanks to the dedication of donors who understand how utterly indispensable the humanities are for opening a path to more education, better employment opportunities and, of course, for the school of life — Odyssey students receive their books for free.

And I mean the physical books. Some of them, like Art: The Whole Story by Stephen Farthing and Richard Cork, are too big to fit in the palm of your hand. But others, like Muscogee/Creek poet Joy Harjo’s book collection, A Map to the Next World , are what we might call “handheld” — bigger than a cell phone but just as graspable.

We give out the course books free of charge every year. And while it’s always exciting to be able to provide the materials Odyssey students need, I will confess I have grown so used to it as a regular feature of the Odyssey experience that I have lost my sense of how wondrous it is.

It is wondrous. Because the ability to read freely is something we cannot take for granted in our country in 2024. Books are banned from libraries all over the United States, in some cases by parents, in some cases by state legislatures who, as in Houston, Texas , have taken over the entire municipal school district and turned libraries into after-school detention centers.

According to Emily Knox, professor in the School of Information Sciences at Illinois and author of the 2015 study Book Banning in 21 ^st Century America , the American Library Association has reported a historically unprecedented number of challenges to books on the shelves, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning title like Art Speigelman’s Maus .

Last week, as part of a conference called Free People Reading Freely , Tony Diaz, a writer, activist and founder of Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say , was in town. He reminded a rapt audience at the I-Hotel about the stakes of standing up for books and making them freely available to readers of all ages.

He calls himself “El Librotraficante” (book trafficker, dealer) in order to drive home the point that in some states, providing books can take you not only to the edge of criminality, but over it.

His new book, The Tip of the Pyramid: Cultivating Community Cultural Capital , tells the story of Nuestra Palabra’s struggles against state-sanctioned book banning. And as the subtitle suggests, his energies are focused on accelerating the cultural knowledge, and power, of communities living in book deserts.

Though not all of that community-based knowledge will end up in books, some of it might. For the last few years at Odyssey the students, with the help of their instructors and HRI staff, have produced a poetry book of their own writings.

Free books generate more books, which activate greater knowledge, and more book warriors like Diaz and his fellow traficantes.

Meanwhile, at Odyssey this week, a raft of free books will help Odyssey students launch an academic year of learning and growing and making sense of the world with a new set of lenses. Let’s all take a moment to go to the library and take out a book, or support an independent bookstore and buy one.

And if you buy a book, new or used, give it to a friend or donate it to Urbana Champaign’s Books for Prisoners . Whatever you do, take up Diaz’s call to champion the book as “the tip of the pyramid” for sustainable social change.

Let’s all be “Librotraficantes.”

The Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois is a partner to Smile Politely .