For 20 years I’ve taught undergraduates: first at the University of Virginia while I was still a graduate student, then during a visiting appointment at DePaul University and now as a professor at the University of Kentucky. I’ve assigned long novels in every one of those classrooms. I’ve also listened, with something between fatigue and disbelief, to the periodic insistence that if students aren’t reading whole books anymore, the fault lies with us—the professors who have lost their nerve, softened their syllabi and confused accommodation with rigor.
Across three very different institutions—elite, private urban, public flagship —I’ve encountered roughly the same distribution of students. Some are genuinely inspiring: They read ahead, argue with the text, revise and engage beyond what’s required. Some do steady, competent work. A small percentage aim for the minimum and sometimes try to dip below it. That ratio hasn’t meaningfully shifted in two decades. It didn’t differ much between Virginia in the early 2000s and Kentucky now. The real shift that’s occurring in reading culture isn’t producing a new kind of student. The students I’m teaching today are not less curious, less intelligent or less willing than the ones I taught 20 years ago. They are differently stressed.
My students work. Not in the incidental way in which college students have always picked up shifts—but structurally, necessarily, as a load-bearing part of how they survive. They pay rent. Many send money home. Some are primary caretakers for siblings or children or ailing grandparents. They schedule classes around employment, not the reverse. A student who works a closing shift until 11 and opens at 6 (or 5, as in the case of one my current students) isn’t choosing not to read; she’s choosing between reading and sleep, and sleep isn’t a luxury.
Students today aren’t spending four buffered years discovering themselves; they’re calculating risk with very little margin for error. When a student doesn’t finish a novel, the explanation is rarely incapacity or indifference. Usually, it’s scarcity: scarcity of time, of sleep, of unbroken attention. Professors can assign more pages. What we can’t do is assign more hours to the day.
At the same time, something has shifted in the institution itself. Universities now speak openly, almost proudly, about return on investment. Departments are measured by placement rates, salary data and quantifiable outcomes. State legislatures debate proposals to rank programs by graduates’ future earnings. Administrators invoke workforce alignment. Accreditors ask about career readiness. (We are always talking about career readiness.)
The university’s public case for itself has become, in substantial part, an economic one, and students, who are paying attention, have absorbed it. As Helena Kadmos and Jessica Taylor have written, institutional emphases on job readiness, combined with the financial precarity shaping the lives of students and faculty alike, are increasingly shaping teaching and learning in the humanities.
This matters because students are rational actors. When a university’s loudest message is that education is preparation for earning, students naturally organize their time around earning-adjacent activities. A student deciding whether to spend four hours finishing a novel or preparing for a credentialing exam or a job interview isn’t revealing a moral weakness or a failure of imagination. She’s responding sensibly to the priorities her institution has broadcast.
The wonder isn’t that some students underinvest in reading; the wonder is that so many remain genuinely interested despite receiving consistent signals that their time might be better spent elsewhere. That interest isn’t something that professors manufacture. It’s something students bring with them to our classes and it persists in spite of a lot of institutional pressure running the other direction.
There’s also an unexamined assumption worth naming: that volume of pages equals rigor. It doesn’t. I’ve seen students skim short texts inattentively and read long ones with genuine care. Length isn’t rigor. Exhaustion isn’t seriousness. Staying up all night with a novel isn’t evidence of virtue; more often it’s evidence of panic. The point of teaching literature isn’t to test stamina. It’s to cultivate perception, suggest connections, hone a facility for nuance. Literature is about developing an awareness of syntax, structure, juxtaposition, ambiguity. That kind of work can be demanding without requiring theatrical suffering.
I sometimes assign fewer pages than I did 20 years ago. That’s true, and I don’t say it defensively. I do this not because I believe my students are less intelligent, but because their time is less contiguous. Many are reading between shifts, between obligations, in fragments of 20 minutes rather than unbroken hours. I’d rather assign 200 pages that are read thoughtfully—or 20, for that matter—than 400 that are skimmed defensively. The rigor lives in the thinking, not in the thickness of the book.
The students in my classes have chosen reading-intensive majors. They haven’t been steered into them by accident or by parents or by the promise of high salaries. They’ve chosen them deliberately, often against economic logic, often despite being told they should have chosen something else. Their interest in literature isn’t performative. They want language to matter. They want to think in ways that resist easy summary. They are, in other words, exactly the students this kind of education is designed for. What they don’t have—what the current arrangement systematically denies them—is surplus time and the institutional validation that what they’re doing is worth their time.
The more honest question isn’t whether we’re assigning enough pages or if we’ve lowered our standards. It’s what kind of institution we’re teaching within and whether that institution’s stated values are compatible with what we’re asking students to do. If universities define value primarily in economic terms, students will internalize that definition. If education is framed as preparation for earning rather than preparation for thinking, thinking will compete with earning—and in a zero-sum calculation, thinking often loses. That dynamic doesn’t originate in the English Department. It originates in the choices institutions make about how to justify themselves to legislatures, donors, parents and prospective students. Syllabi are downstream of those choices. Insisting on more arduous syllabi without addressing the choices upstream is a little like insisting the river flow uphill.
If there’s a contraction in long-form reading, its causes are institutional and economic before they’re pedagogical. Rising tuition, credential inflation, the administrative fixation on measurable career outcomes—these shape the ecology in which reading occurs. Locating the blame primarily at the feet of individual faculty members simplifies the story in a way that happens to be convenient for everyone except the faculty.
Meeting students where they are, for instance, doesn’t require surrendering rigor. It requires recognizing that “where they are” includes workplaces, family obligations, financial precarity and a steady drumbeat of institutional messaging that equates worth with salary. Professors didn’t create that calculus. We’re operating inside it, alongside our students, trying to make the case—sometimes against the grain of everything else the institution is saying—that reading carefully and thinking slowly are worth the time.
That case is worth making. But it won’t be won by doubling the page count. It might be won, if it’s won at all, by changing what the institution says it values and meaning it. Until then, asking reading to survive in an environment that steadily devalues the conditions reading requires is less a pedagogical challenge than a structural contradiction. The problem isn’t that professors have lost their nerve. The problem is that we’re being asked to row against the current and then blamed for not moving faster.
Hannah Pittard is the Guy Davenport Professor in English at the University of Kentucky.
