Every time I talk to an academic, or email with one of them, which is not infrequently thanks to this blog, I ask them the same thing. Do your students still read? If you read the news, or some Substacks, you will get the impression that the answer is: “no”. But the answers I get range from “they struggle read a novella” to “everything is basically fine” or “the best students are just as good” or “it’s nothing like as bad as reported”. I am surprised how often I hear the positive answers, because I have become moderately more pessimistic about this trend in the last year or so, noting that I don’t think the “students can’t read Bleak House” study ought to be quoted in the way it always is. (One or two dozen undergrads, a decade ago, in Kansas, is not definitive of anything…)1 Plenty of people say that students are, overall, harder to teach, or more distracted, but there’s another group, many of them at elite universities, who simply don’t encounter the reported problem to anything like the extent you are led to believe. For every academic on the record saying that Oxford undergraduates don’t read any more, I have spoken to someone else who is much more moderate, often quite positive. This whole debate is also wretched with data problems. How much reading did the average student used to do? Do you have any sort of measured evidence? When I was a recent graduate I met someone in their forties who had been at my college who told me he had preferred studying poets as that involved the fewest number of pages of reading. A lot of my friends at other universities just didn’t read that much. I’m not denying the problem, I just don’t think it is currently well described. And I think a lot of the “good news” is being ignored. Who even knows what’s going on? It’s a very mingled, high-variation picture. Beware the narrative!
I originally said “not-great universities” but someone in the comments clarified my error
One caveat on the Bleak House study. While we don’t know which universities these were, both the University of Kansas (KU, with a $2.5 billion endowment and 30,000 students) and Kansas State University (KSU, with an $850 million endowment and 20,000 students) are respected research institutions of a high caliber. (Please don’t use The Wizard of Oz as your primary source on Kansas! Ha!)
IF these were the two universities in the Bleak House study, and these were upper division undergraduate English majors at such universities, then yeah, it’s actually concerning. How broadly concerning is hard to tell, but it’s not a great look for sure.
Beware people making sweeping generalizations. Literature is not kind to them.