True, Students Are Reading Less

There are two reasons why I don’t want to look at my phone right now. The first is that as I’m writing this in mid-October, it’s peak hurricane season here in Florida, and that means that whenever there’s the smallest disturbance off the coast of Africa, newspapers and TV stations send out warnings suggesting that danger is imminent. But if you click on one of those sites, usually you find that trouble is weeks away if, indeed, there is trouble at all, since most of these weather blips end up coiling up into the North Atlantic and making landfall exactly nowhere.

The other reason I limit phone time is that the algorithms that dominate our lives figured out long ago that I’m an English professor, meaning I’m going to be urged to click on articles with titles like (and these are actual examples from recent months) “The End of Reading,” “Is This the End of Reading?,” “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” “How Much Do Students Really Read?,” and “Are Students Reading Less Than They Used To?” It’s enough to make a teacher wonder what the course-prep equivalent is of filling the tub with water and buying extra flashlight batteries and checking if you can still get those hurricane shutters you were looking at last year.

Not that there’s not a problem. That last essay is from The Williams Record, a campus newspaper, and when its student author polled the faculty, he learned that more than 60 percent of Williams professors assign less reading than they once did, citing students’ inability or unwillingness to keep up. Specifically, that group said they assigned “less” or “significantly less” reading now compared to when they started their careers at the college, and not one reported assigning more reading.

Come on, guys—earn your salary.

Giving up on students is like giving up on solving global warming. Sure, there are more and worse hurricanes than there were 20 years ago, but that doesn’t mean you just sit around in your house and wait for the lights to go out. To do nothing in the face of every gloomy forecast means we’ll never change anything. We might not—we probably won’t—but then again, we might.

The first step is to design a class you’re excited about; if you are, the students will be, too. Enthusiasm—for the course material, for the students, for your job, for yourself—is infectious. The best way to make students love something is to show them that it’s worth loving.

And make big demands—smile when you do it, but ask them to do more than they want to do or even think they’re capable of. In “Is This the End of Reading?,” author Beth McMurtrie reports on how Theresa MacPhail, an associate professor of science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology, has met the challenge of teaching a generation more tuned in to videos and podcasts than The Brothers Karamazov. At one point, MacPhail did what a lot of professors are doing these days, which is that she began assigning fewer readings and then even fewer, but most students still weren’t doing them.

Then she reversed course. Now “I assign a book a week. I tell them that it’s important for them to tackle big assignments and learn how to get by, even if they can’t manage to read everything.” That’s because “when they buy into something,” MacPhail says of her classes, “they can be very creative and work hard. If they can see the point, they are eager to put that to use.”

She’s right. Each spring I teach a class called “The Role of the Public Intellectual.” Like MacPhail, I believe in piling the work on. So, in the first half of the course, we might read Aristotle, Spinoza, William James and Martin Buber, and then move on to Roxane Gay, Greil Marcus, Tara Westover and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Another term, it might be Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Malthus and Ida B. Wells, followed by Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Susan Sontag and Cornel West.

That’s a lot to read. Or it is if you don’t know how to read as part of a group. On the first day, I tell my students never to start a book unless they have time to read at least 10 percent of it, which is enough to get a sense of the author’s syntax, diction and overall take on the subject matter. After that, I say it’s okay to skim: No writer captivates the reader on every page, and not all pages contribute to the book’s Big Idea. Speaking of which, I let them know that they should read with pen in hand but mark only the passages that engage them. The Big Idea can wait; at the moment, we want to put as many different little ideas on the table as possible.

In other words, no single student (or teacher) is solely responsible for coming up with a book’s import. We’re working as a team here. Bring your findings to class, I tell my students, and we’ll discuss them, much as we might if we have a friend or partner who’s a reader or if we belong to a book club. We’ll air our ideas. We’ll reach a consensus or, more likely, several consensuses. And then, each student will write a short paper; I’ll grade those papers, and we’ll workshop them together the next week and talk about our findings a final time to see how they’ve stayed the same and how they’ve changed.

By the way, the authors needn’t all be philosophers and cultural critics; I’ve taught such novels as Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, which dramatizes youth prison brutality in a way no work of nonfiction can. Nor do the contemporary authors all have to be center-left; I’ve taught Mein Kampf as well as Sayyid Qtub’s Milestones, which advocates violent jihad against a decadent west. (Not all big ideas are good ones.)

So, what’s the carrot that Theresa MacPhail says a teacher has to dangle before her students if they’re to do the work she demands? In my case, I tell my students the rewards are immense. First, they’re going to encounter ideas that have shaped the world since the dawn of literacy. Second, they’ll become experts in working with those ideas and communicating them, and that leads into the third and biggest reward, which is this: Whether they admit it or not, every thinking person wants to be a public intellectual, that is, somebody who deals with big ideas in a way that speaks to the broadest possible audience, and this class will provide them with a road map for their own progress toward that goal.

Does this pitch work? “Though the reading load was a lot at times,” said one student in a recent course evaluation, “I knew what I signed up for, and I enjoyed every minute of it.” Another student said that “by taking this class I have read eight books I never would have even heard of.” In a sense, they even liked the books they didn’t like; as one student wrote, “Spinoza was dense and annoying to read but at least you could think [about what you read] and challenge and agree or disagree.”

It’s a hard class, in other words. But as I tell my classes, what have you ever done that you’re proud of that was not hard?

So pile on the work, my fellow professors, tell your students their lives will be changed immeasurably if they do the work, and smile every time you walk through that classroom door. And keep smiling.