Many college students do not read books. For those who work with students, this should not be a surprise. For nearly two decades, I have taught students who struggle to engage with long narrative arcs and themes. This does not apply to all students, but it is startling to see the number of students who cannot read lengthy texts.
When students do have to read for class, they generally focus on identifying key themes, facts, and ideas essential for their grade and move on. While social media and its omnipresent distractions have changed how students engage with their learning, the fact is that deep reading is not how countless students want to spend their time, nor do they view it as essential for their post-graduate plans.
A recent article from The Atlantic cataloged these observations. The article explained how students from elite schools are overwhelmed by the prospect of reading numerous books in a semester. Pundits and commentators offered several thoughts about this collegiate problem and identified a host of causes from standardized testing in high schools to diminishing standards and expectations of students.
In all this chatter around reading challenges on college campuses, however, two critical ideas are missing from the discussion. The first involves what is lost by not reading books and thus contemplating narrative and struggling with arguments in full. By reducing long-form work into small pieces, a truly liberal and humanistic college education becomes hollowed out and a shell of its former self; it is far less nuanced, dynamic, and authentic and has opened the door for simplistic and reductionist ideas to take hold. It is little surprise that the dangerous ideas coming from the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement have gained so much traction among students because they have not been trained and given the tools to truly understand the complexities of life, history, and humanity.
As students are looking for shortcuts rather than having an appetite for complex ideas, simple, reductionist ideas are better able to take hold. The result is that as opposed to layered and nuanced ideas and concepts being dominant on campus, identity politics and reducing individuals and their lives, historical moments, and social change to little more than crude representations of power, race, sexuality, and gender, have been embraced by so many. Countless students would have formerly rejected these simplistic conceptions about the human condition acknowledging that this wipes out unique personalities and a real understanding of history and change. But that is no longer where we are today; not reading books and, more importantly, faculty accepting that students in higher education do not have to embrace and struggle with complex ideas has created a have a sophomoric worldview about life and humanity. Not reading deeply has regrettably helped create campuses which are fractured, segregated, anti-intellectual centers of activism and victimhood as opposed to sacred spaces of scholarship, debate, viewpoint diversity, and opportunity.
A second idea missed in this discussion around college students not reading books is the question of why so many faculty have accepted this new norm. The Atlantic article mentions that faculty have altered their courses in response to students’ inability to read heavy volumes of literature. Columbia Professor Andrew Delbanco, for instance, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose as opposed to an earlier survey course on literature, opining that “One has to adjust to the times.” The article notes that faculty have also been surprised by this change citing another Columbia professor being amazed by the fact that students who came to his class were no longer “prepared to read books.” Only recently did he ask a student why undergraduates were unprepared, and upon learning that they had not been taught, his “jaw dropped.”
The article offers no clear answer as to why have faculty ceded this sacred ground and overlooked their essential duty of helping students learn to read deeply and critically. One can argue that this superficial approach helps scholar-activist faculty promote their political agendas but the skill of reading is a foundational component of liberal education and that does proficiency not impede but may even enhance their inappropriate activist mission.
Sadly, it appears that numerous faculty are actively allowing their students to coast through their collegiate years, shifting their expectations rather than addressing the problem. In my seminars, books are central and essential for deeply understanding our guiding questions. I spent significant time teaching my students how to approach and work through a text; I never assign excerpts or accept ignorance as an excuse—I work through the books with the students.
Student’s reading habits have changed, creating an opening for dangerous ideas to proliferate. This can stop if professors step up and help students read deeply rather than changing their courses and ideas to accommodate diminished standards.
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