At Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, students at the Tepper School of Business are eating lunch in the expansive dining area of the new $201m campus building

In a small seminar room upstairs, 30 MBA students have gathered to discuss What We Lose, a novel by an African-American author, Zinzi Clemmons, who grew up in Pennsylvania. This is the Tepper Reads book club, created to help its students — many of whom hope to be future business leaders — better empathise with people from backgrounds very different to their own.

Tepper Reads is somewhat better resourced than a typical informal gathering of book-loving friends. Between meetings, students can listen to a podcast in which teaching staff from Carnegie Mellon’s English department discuss themes in the books under discussion. At this gathering, students are meeting the author — the university has paid to fly her over from her home in Los Angeles.