At the start of this month, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”. The writer interviewed various English Literature professors at Columbia University about a new trend among students; they can’t read long books. The main takeaway from the article was not only that students are unable to read long books but that even when they are reading, they are unable to grapple with complex ideas and often give up when they don’t understand something.
Trinity News asked students and staff whether they think reading is becoming more and more difficult; the answer was a resounding no. Both lecturers and students agree that rather than reading multiple books or academic articles per week, it’s better to instead focus on one text at a time and take longer to fully understand it.
All of the students that Trinity News interviewed had finished a book, cover to cover, within the last three weeks. Tara Dempsey, a fourth year Sociology student, said “I’m sure a lot of people are talking about the bad effects of social media and TikTok on our attention spans and our ability to read. I also think it is interesting to note the effects of online communities, things like Goodreads, like ‘booktok’, … I think those groups that are created on these platforms and fostered by these platforms do have an effect on people and their willingness to read… [making them] feel more connected, because reading is a pretty solitary hobby. Having those communities online can really help make that hobby more social”.
Marnie Clarke, a fourth year English Literature student, agreed, saying “Booktok, love it or hate it, has done wonders for reading. I have family members that would never read, but now they love Colleen Hoover or Emily Henry. I think that reading is widespread to those that it’s accessible to.”
As well as regularly finishing books cover to cover, all of the students interviewed also said they read widely. From the contemporary Frankenstein and Cleopatra to The Iliad, students enjoy and regularly read ‘difficult’ books for pleasure, such as Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch.
“It’s important to have that escape”
These Trinity students therefore concluded that reading remains extremely popular. As Clarke said, “I think reading is as essential as TV, where it’s entertainment. That’s what it has always been – it’s entertainment. It’s important to not always be so stuck in work and college. It’s important to have that escape. And then at its most serious form, it’s educational, and also helps empathy. It is a very useful tool to have in your life. Whether it’s essential to your job or it’s just essential to your sanity, coming home and reading a chapter of like, Girl, Woman, Other might be essential. I do think people are at least buying books. People are reading some of them.”
Problems arise, as Julie Stroemple, a fourth year Sociology and Politics student told Trinity News, when lecturers assign too much reading for their modules. She said, “If there was one reading that I could actually focus on that would be way better than having three readings and not knowing which one is going to be the most beneficial for me. Especially in Sociology, I know that if everyone’s read a different article, It can be hard to facilitate a discussion.”
She estimated that if she was to read every single reading assigned for all of her classes properly, it would take her seventy five hours. She wishes lecturers would do the “math in their head when they’re publishing the reading list of readings of actually how much this is.” Dr. Roderick Condon, a teaching fellow in Trinity’s Sociology department, told Trinity News that he wasn’t aware of how many other modules his students took and could not estimate the amount of hours his students spent reading.
“As soon as the difficulty is encountered, the competition for attention comes into bear”
He spoke to Trinity News about this, saying “I’m less inclined to assign abstract or harder readings. My sense is that as soon as the difficulty is encountered, the competition for attention comes into bear, and then my fear would be that students would give up.”
Codon emphasised this issue of students’ short attention spans, especially when it comes to challenging texts. He asserted that “rather than students not doing the reading, they [will] look at the reading, but they want to short circuit through it. And so they’ll be looking for ‘how do you do it quickly?’ And that might involve maybe just glancing at the abstract or just glossing over it”. He understood the importance of reading academic books cover to cover but also admitted that it would be unrealistic to expect students to read a full length book for his classes. When asked if she re-read articles that contained difficult to understand topics, Stroemple told Trinity News “I typically don’t have time… to read it multiple times, to understand it. I just kind of do my best to get through it and hope I take something from it”.
The solution to this problem might be to assign less reading but to expect more analysis from students. Dr. Margaret Robson, a lecturer in Trinity’s English department, teaches a class which focuses on just one text, the eleven hundred page Underworld by Don DeLillo. She believes that there is little difference between the current generation of students and past generations, saying, “some students read everything, some don’t. Some students read what they need to read. It’s always been the same”.
She is not worried about her students’ abilities to grapple with complex ideas. As she told Trinity News; “I am really proud of the way the students deal with such a long and complex text. They’re making connections between one section and another, which is not easy. It’s not a sequential narrative. It’s not simple, but they’re reading back, they read something in the first chapter and then subsequently said, ‘Hang on a minute. That connects with that.’ That’s attentive reading. I’m very impressed.”
Perhaps in the past, students would have been expected to read more than they do today, but this does not mean that students’ aren’t engaging with complex ideas. The students interviewed spoke about reading with passion and emphasised its continued importance in the world for professional, as well as personal reasons. As Dempsey said “I think that any kind of reading, whether it’s shorter articles, or big, long novels and series of books, is going to be useful to you in your professional life, in your future career. Reading books since a very, very young age has made me much more competent in my academic work and in any professional work that I’ve done. It’s my literacy skills that have helped me: having that command of the English language, even in writing emails or applying for jobs, being able to use English in a way that is understood by people very well… it’s really important”.
