\n<\/p>\n
For 20 years I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve assigned long novels in every one of those classrooms. I\u2019ve also listened, with something between fatigue and disbelief, to the periodic insistence that if students aren\u2019t reading whole books anymore, the fault lies with us\u2014the professors who have lost their nerve, softened their syllabi and confused accommodation with rigor.<\/p>\n
Across three very different institutions\u2014elite, private urban, public flagship \u2014I\u2019ve encountered roughly the same distribution of students. Some are genuinely inspiring: They read ahead, argue with the text, revise and engage beyond what\u2019s required. Some do steady, competent work. A small percentage aim for the minimum and sometimes try to dip below it. That ratio hasn\u2019t meaningfully shifted in two decades. It didn\u2019t differ much between Virginia in the early 2000s and Kentucky now. The real shift that\u2019s occurring in reading culture isn\u2019t producing a new kind of student. The students I\u2019m teaching today are not less curious, less intelligent or less willing than the ones I taught 20 years ago. They are differently stressed.<\/p>\n
My students work. Not in the incidental way in which college students have always picked up shifts\u2014but 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\u2019t choosing not to read; she\u2019s choosing between reading and sleep, and sleep isn\u2019t a luxury. <\/p>\n
Students today aren\u2019t spending four buffered years discovering themselves; they\u2019re calculating risk with very little margin for error. When a student doesn\u2019t finish a novel, the explanation is rarely incapacity or indifference. Usually, it\u2019s scarcity: scarcity of time, of sleep, of unbroken attention. Professors can assign more pages. What we can\u2019t do is assign more hours to the day.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 future earnings. Administrators invoke workforce alignment. Accreditors ask about career readiness. (We are always<\/em> talking about career readiness.) <\/p>\n The university\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n This matters because students are rational actors. When a university\u2019s 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\u2019t revealing a moral weakness or a failure of imagination. She\u2019s responding sensibly to the priorities her institution has broadcast. <\/p>\n The wonder isn\u2019t that some students underinvest in reading; the wonder is that so many remain genuinely interested despite<\/em> receiving consistent signals that their time might be better spent elsewhere. That interest isn\u2019t something that professors manufacture. It\u2019s something students bring with them to our classes and it persists in spite of a lot of institutional pressure running the other direction.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also an unexamined assumption worth naming: that volume of pages equals rigor. It doesn\u2019t. I\u2019ve seen students skim short texts inattentively and read long ones with genuine care. Length isn\u2019t rigor. Exhaustion isn\u2019t seriousness. Staying up all night with a novel isn\u2019t evidence of virtue; more often it\u2019s evidence of panic. The point of teaching literature isn\u2019t to test stamina. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n I sometimes assign fewer pages than I did 20 years ago. That\u2019s true, and I don\u2019t 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\u2019d rather assign 200 pages that are read thoughtfully\u2014or 20, for that matter\u2014than 400 that are skimmed defensively. The rigor lives in the thinking, not in the thickness of the book.<\/p>\n The students in my classes have chosen reading-intensive majors. They haven\u2019t been steered into them by accident or by parents or by the promise of high salaries. They\u2019ve chosen them deliberately, often against economic logic, often despite being told they should have chosen something else. Their interest in literature isn\u2019t 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\u2019t have\u2014what the current arrangement systematically denies them\u2014is surplus time and the institutional validation that what they\u2019re doing is worth their time.<\/p>\n The more honest question isn\u2019t whether we\u2019re assigning enough pages or if we\u2019ve lowered our standards. It\u2019s what kind of institution we\u2019re teaching within and whether that institution\u2019s stated values are compatible with what we\u2019re 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\u2014and in a zero-sum calculation, thinking often loses. That dynamic doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s a contraction in long-form reading, its causes are institutional and economic before they\u2019re pedagogical. Rising tuition, credential inflation, the administrative fixation on measurable career outcomes\u2014these 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.<\/p>\n Meeting students where they are, for instance, doesn\u2019t require surrendering rigor. It requires recognizing that \u201cwhere they are\u201d includes workplaces, family obligations, financial precarity and a steady drumbeat of institutional messaging that equates worth with salary. Professors didn\u2019t create that calculus. We\u2019re operating inside it, alongside our students, trying to make the case\u2014sometimes against the grain of everything else the institution is saying\u2014that reading carefully and thinking slowly are worth the time.<\/p>\n That case is worth making. But it won\u2019t be won by doubling the page count. It might be won, if it\u2019s 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\u2019t that professors have lost their nerve. The problem is that we\u2019re being asked to row against the current and then blamed for not moving faster.<\/p>\n Hannah Pittard is the Guy Davenport Professor in English at the University of Kentucky.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For 20 years I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve assigned long novels in every one of those classrooms. I\u2019ve also listened, with something between fatigue and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48060,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[7332,1326,440,19096,2563,678],"class_list":{"0":"post-48059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-blame","9":"tag-dont","10":"tag-opinion","11":"tag-profs","12":"tag-read","13":"tag-students"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/48060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}