Require college students to read long books: op-ed

Articles in recent months describe how professors across the nation have whittled down their reading lists to respond to students’ inability to focus.

But one recent college grad argued educators should be doing the opposite.

An op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on July 1 was headlined: “How to Get College Students Reading Again: Assign full books and kick anyone out of class who doesn’t come prepared for discussion. I’ve seen it work.”

Written by Moira Gleason, who graduated summa cum laude from Hillsdale College in May, she argued “that lowering expectations is a mistake. Good students respond well to a challenge.”

Case-in-point: An English Department course on Fyodor Dostoevsky that requires 2,500 pages of summer reading and kicks off with a final exam on the first day of class is actually one of the most popular.

“The inverted structure sounds like the kind of cruel and unusual punishment that would have an undergraduate calling his parents in tears. In reality, the class was the first in the department to fill and the professor kept a spreadsheet to handle the waitlist,” she wrote, adding:

As in any sustained physical or mental activity, the stamina required for reading comes with time. The more students read, the more they can read. Reducing reading loads for upper-level college courses will cause students’ abilities to atrophy further and limit their appreciation of rich texts. 

When an instructor assumes nobody has read the book and repeats the content of assigned texts in lectures, even the best students stop reading. But when he sets a clear expectation that students will read outside class, and then makes those texts structurally integral to the course, magic happens. Students pick up the book.

My Dostoevsky professor gave the class a clear choice: read or fail. 

Gleason concludes by acknowledging it’s hard — but very rewarding — work.

“Failures in K-12 education and college admissions standards have delivered a generation of underachieving readers,” she wrote. “But once students are in the classroom, the best thing a college professor can do is give them an incentive to try.”

MORE: Learning ‘crisis’: UC Berkeley history professor cuts reading assignments by two-thirds