Yes, College Students Can’t Read Good
A Dartmouth student reflects on his generation’s lack of literary ambition.
Many professors, in these pages and elsewhere, have declared that students are not reading books anymore. An oft-cited article by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic reads as a humanist horror story. One professor declares, “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad … It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.” High school teachers and professors alike report to Horowitch that they have decreased the numbers of pages and lists of books they assign. She writes, though, that “it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning the syllabus.” Her story is one of decline: less reading begets less reading.
As a student at Dartmouth College, I can say these reports are true. If you sit on Dartmouth’s large outdoor common ground—“the Green”—with a book, it will be assumed that you are reading for class. And even to do class readings for many people is too strenuous. I have glanced over in class at laptop screens opened to ChatGPT. Students proceed to read aloud from the AI output to earn their participation credit. Professors have told me about having to decrease the amount of pages they assign per week, but, even then, some students just cannot be bothered.
One can ascribe this change to cellphones, as Horowitch does. I, like everyone else, have experienced a decline in attentiveness. Most people I know would claim that they “read less” because of Instagram and TikTok. A friend described to me attending an overseas prep school where phones were banned, and time moved slower—at the pace of long hours with long books—and what a radical shift in experience that was.
But it is worth considering that perhaps worries about attention spans are overstated. Serious reading has always been a fringe activity. And, besides, two hour podcasts and three hour movies seem to have become standard fare. It is not the inability to read, it is the missing inclination. And that has derived from a different change—a loss of cultural legitimacy for the books one is supposed to have read.
In 1985, the young editor of The New Republic, Michael Kinsley, slipped cards with his phone number and a promise of five dollars into bestselling politics books in Washington DC. He never got a call. Similarly, Saul Bellow declared that although his 1964 novel Herzog sold 142,000 copies and was on the bestseller list for 42 weeks, he suspected only 3000 people read it, and of those, 300 understood it. And this is not (or not merely) the churlishness of a novelist—books have long been mostly decoration in America, not sustenance. Indeed, the statistical studies that demonstrate a decline in reading suggest, at the same time, that serious reading has never, actually, been a popular activity. We have fallen from reading an average of 15 books in 1990 to 12 in 2020. A fall yes, but a fall from a low height.
It’s possible to trace this philistinism to a certain strand in American self-conception. We do our thinking for ourselves, without books, the inner monologue of that strand would run. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal “The American Scholar” declared that American learning must end its European tutelage. And part of this tutelage is to cease reading, to be guided by Nature. “When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings,” Emerson writes. It is not clear how literally to take this, but something of an Emersonian ethos has always existed in America.
Still, that notion of radical self-reliance goes only so far. Americans do want to be seen reading. Books have a way of playing a totemic role in American culture. During the COVID-19 pandemic, professionals competed with each other with ever more erudite volumes prominently displayed behind their Zoom screens. Politicians invoke classics of political theory and celebrities start book clubs. But while public libraries across America carry the great works of the Western Canon, it is the movies, magazines, and romance novels which better define the culture.
My generation, too, will not be found curled up with Chaucer. But we seem to care less than others about being seen as well read. At a collegiate summer fellowship I attended, the CEO of a prominent foundation presented on why the great books nourish mind and soul. He spoke in airy abstraction without reference to any details about the actual experience of reading—I wondered when the last time was that this CEO had opened up any text in the canon. A student raised her hand and declared without irony that she thought Taylor Swift was better than Shakespeare. Why read that fusty, inaccessible old Briton, she wondered aloud? The CEO grew intemperate, but was unable to provide an argument beyond gesturing at “the canon.” The CEO argued that Shakespeare was part of a legitimate education and Taylor Swift was not. But this legitimation meant nothing to the student. Neither mind was changed. The student had admittedly not read much of the canon. But she was not ashamed of that. When the arguments of books can be summarized in minutes by AI, why read the entirety of a text?
At a local bar by Dartmouth, books line the wall. But pick a book up there, and they turn out to be decorative, not real books at all. Older generations engaged with books in this manner. Even if they may not have read much, they valued the appearance of reading. That led to many glancing at books there that they would not have done otherwise. Even if the books weren’t real, the titles might have inspired some students to seek out the book elsewhere. My generation, alas, does not pretend. But reading has always, in reality, been the domain of small groups. It does not take many people to keep such a practice going.
Elan Kluger is a student at Dartmouth College studying intellectual history. He is an editor at The New Critic.
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My daughter went to Dartmouth and I can confirm that her friends did not read much, they watch films and videos to relax. I remember reading one of her papers and chastising her for some poor writing and she told me, Mom, the other students write much worse. Then she shared with me a paper by another student and indeed it was not even worthy of a mediocre 10th grade student.
I think some of the blame needs to go to the absurd school system and its overstuffed but fatuous curriculum. Kids heads are stuffed with curriculum which they will need to pass AP tests. But engaging with reading actual books, and taking the time to think about an discuss ideas, is not done in any deep way.
The QUANTITY of what high schoolers on an elite track are expected to cover, destroys any QUALITY. Kids aiming for elite colleges will have 4 hours of homework a night, as well as extra curriculars and a full day of classes. This leaves no time to actually read for pleasure, whether assigned reading or not. It leads to a superficial type of intellect.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that past generations did not actually read. Back in the early '70's we idolized authors like Vonnegut, Pynchon, Barth, Heller, Salinger, Bradbury, Rand, Robbins, Roth, and Asimov. And those were just the contemporary writers; no book was more widely read than Siddhartha. I'm not sure what generations since then have been up to, but if they haven't been reading they have a world of pleasure ahead of them if they make the effort. I'd give my right arm to encounter these folks again for the first time.