With a new school year starting, I am regularly asked why I continue to choose to teach at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. The school is famously progressive and activist and many of the school’s students, faculty, and administration habitually attack me for my beliefs. I have been thinking quite a bit about this and realize that I opt to remain on faculty because, like in higher education generally, there are actually a large number of students at Sarah Lawrence who want to hear a diverse set of views. Offering courses and being a resource to them in a sea of liberalism (though the number of liberal students is not as numerous as it often appears, albeit they are loud and well organized on social media) is important to me.
But there is something else that keeps me so interested in working with Sarah Lawrence students: the fact that significant numbers of my students read books. They don’t just read articles and Wikipedia; they read physical books—cover to cover. They choose this very school because they care about hearing a story or argument in its entirety. That is absolutely thrilling, especially in a world today where reading is in decline.
It turns out that even with lockdowns and life slowing down because of the global pandemic, Americans read only read 12.6 books on average in 2021. Gallup found this is a number notably smaller than what they measured in any earlier survey dating back to 1990. Gallup revealed that US adults are reading roughly two or three fewer books per year than they did between 2001 and 2016. The data showed that 27 percent of Americans reported reading more than 10 books in the past year, a figure down 8 percentage points since 2016 and lower than every prior measure by at least four points.
Even more troubling, decline in reading was greatest among subgroups that tended to be avid readers, such as college graduates, women, and older Americans. College graduates read an average of about six fewer books in 2021 than they did between 2002 and 2016, 14.6 versus 21.1. Gallup was quick to note that “reduced book reading among these groups is more a function of fewer people reading larger numbers of books than fewer in the subgroup reading at all.” They found that between 2002 and 2016, close to half of college graduates (48 percent) read more than 10 books in a year. Last year, 35 percent of college graduates read more than 10 books.
This concerns me, for understanding the human condition, passion, drive, and so much about history, biography, social structure, and change requires the treatments that they can be given in full-scale, monographic work and not articles and other short works. Shorter material is valuable, but reading books remains critical. It is clear that many of our future leaders are reading less and are not necessarily as open to absorbing the full scale and scope of ideas contained in many books.
In some sense, failing to read today—which often means being open to engaging with a whole, complete narrative and understanding context that is present in books—poses a real danger for our democracy. For communities to be both healthy and civic and break through so much division, its citizens must hear, see, listen, and then engage with alternative views, stories, and rationales. With social media and short-character tweets so dominant, and fewer educated Americans reading, I worry that the skills needed to work with others and take in real viewpoint diversity and have empathy for others is being lost. So much of our politics today is explicitly designed to be sound bites, not thoughtful explanations and reason. So being able to work with students who are attempting be well rounded and understand the social world makes teaching a real joy.
As I put the finishing touches on my syllabi, I am excited that I will be able to assign a large number of books throughout a term and know that my students will read them. While some works like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker are quite dense and lengthy, others are far shorter, like that of Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal. My students and I will have heated conversations and discussions about these works and even if we disagree, it remains exciting and truly unusual to know that my students will try to make sense of the human condition and grapple with fairly complete narratives that they will find in their various books. Outside of my classroom, college community members may dislike my political or pedagogical views, but inside the room and around the seminar table, I have the chance to connect and work with students who are interested in a world of ideas and stories; that is fairly unique in higher education today.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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