Sometimes, even professors have to laugh to keep from crying.
This past winter, Geoff Rector, an English professor at the University of Ottawa was getting ready to teach a course on the traditions of King Arthur, one he hadn't taught it in more than a dozen years. "The first thing I did when I was putting the class together," he says, "was I went back and looked at the syllabus that I had given. And right away I just laughed out loud. "There's no way that I could assign the amount of reading today."
Dr. Rector's observation is the kind of anecdote that seems to be getting a lot of traction recently. Last fall, in an article in the Atlantic entitled "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books," Rose Horowitch, herself a 2023 graduate of Yale University, argued that "Many students no longer arrive at college even at highly selective, elite colleges prepared to read books." This, in her view, is catastrophic. "To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind's greatest achievements, you still need to read the Iliad all of it," she says. The essay - a largely anecdotal takedown of the reading skills of today's students that Ms. Horowitch attributed variously to smartphones, and a number of similar demons - predictably caused a sensation.
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