kurmyshov/iStock/Getty Images Plus
While many of my colleagues on college campuses regard the summer months as a chance to take a hiatus from teaching and recharge their batteries, I look at the summer as a chance to try new things, to teach things I wouldn’t normally teach, and talk with students about challenges they face. I’ve just completed one such effort, a summer teaching gig in a program I developed called “Why Read?”
What could be more fundamental than trying to explain to a generation of students for whom reading long, complex books is fast becoming an outmoded practice, what they are losing and why they should change their ways? We are used to telling young people why they should exercise or drink responsibly, but colleges and universities have taken for granted that their students would read what we assign without feeling the need to explain why.
That is a serious mistake. It is long past time for colleges and universities to take on the challenge of explaining to their students the benefits of reading challenging books. But instead of doing that, they make the mistake of asking students entering college in the fall to complete a summer reading assignment. Too often, the books sit on the shelves unread, and students get off on the wrong foot before they start.
Those of us in higher ed have been grappling with apparent declines in student reading for several years. In a 2024 article, Inside Higher Ed’s Johanna Alonso described a college sophomore who was “assigned about 100 pages of reading a week for three classes—most of which she skips in favor of gleaning the information from YouTube videos.” This student complained about the complex language of academic texts.
Alonso described various ways that colleges and universities are adapting. One response in particular caught my eye: “’I think we can’t persuade students to read what we want to teach them; we have to teach what students want to read.’”
That feels to me a bit like waving the white flag of surrender. I’m not ready to do that.
Before we give up and give in just to get students to read anything longer than an Instagram post, let’s try explaining to them why avoiding challenging, complex, yes, even boring reading is dangerous to their mental and emotional well-being.
As Rose Horowitch put it last month in The Atlantic, “the decline of reading seems to be ushering in a less rational, analytical, and sophisticated mode of thinking.” The article notes declines from 2006 to 2018 in “American adults’ ability to answer logic questions, reason effectively and analyze patterns.”
“Reading books,” she says, “is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding … The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.”
Given my own experience in a college classroom, I didn’t have to be convinced.
That’s why I designed and executed a three-week summer course called “Why Read?” I enlisted four other faculty members to teach with me, and invited a group of 15 Amherst College students, mostly rising sophomores and juniors, to be the Guinea Pigs.
We asked them to read and discuss Martha Nussbaum’s “Poets as Judges,” Walt Hunter’s “Why Reading Is Now Restless,” the first and second books of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth, and Book IV of William Cowper’s The Task, as well as selections from Toni Morrison’s Beloved and from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
During our sessions, we discussed whether and how reading complex texts helps readers develop their capacities for empathy and imagination, how it offers its own kind of consolation, how it works as a second mind, where readers can see their own thoughts more clearly, and how it functions as a kind of tactile activity rather than a passive and merely visual engagement with a text.
Our discussions were clearly not for the faint of heart. We didn’t try to sell them on any one answer or set of answers to the question, “Why Read?”
What did we learn? Here are some examples of what the students said about the program.
One participant delivered a mixed message. “I feel motivated to be a stronger reader in the future.” However, they also thought that in our sessions, we didn’t really need “to analyze the extreme particulars about an author’s arguments.”
A second participant said, ”I had never thought deeply about the authors of my readings before. I usually don’t consider how their experiences shape their writing or the deeper message they’re trying to convey. Thinking through those ideas … the way he writes, making his judgments about the characters so clear, adds another layer to the story. This habit is something I’ll definitely keep in mind while reading in the future.”
However, they added, “I’ll be reading my supposedly non-valuable and ‘not a brain workout trashy young adult books’ till I die.”
A third wrote, “I think the workshop … challenged the perception of reading in school as simply a way for the professor to export knowledge from their brain into yours.”
Finally, one of the participants reported, “I especially appreciated the readings (Marcus Aurelius, Tolstoy) that did not ask us to intellectualize the issue of reading but simply allowed us to experience its benefits.” They suggested that “Instead of simply addressing the question “Why read?”, maybe we could discuss in detail what the challenges are: be it busy schedules and lack of time, availability and temptation of immediate gratification, problem of finding absorbing texts.”
Instant converts, no. And as you can see, the takeaway was varied.
But I came away convinced that “Why Read?” was a step in the right direction.
Instead of asking students to do what we know to be valuable but what many no longer do—namely, read long, complex books—colleges and universities should take a step back. We need to help our students see why doing so will make them better able to think for themselves and better prepared for a world where such thinking is more necessary than ever.
I will certainly be doing that when I go back into the classroom for the fall semester.
