A college reading list from 1966

I've encountered a number of articles about how college students in the United States are unwilling (or unable) to read full books.  One relevant longread was in the November 2024 issue of The Atlantic, entitled "The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books."  Here are some extended excerpts:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover...

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot...

In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped...

Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works... At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel...

Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career...

For years, Dames has asked his first-years [university] about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite...

Intrigued by those observations, I dug into my "memorabilia" files and retrieved the reading list I had for one of my courses in college in 1966-67.  Embedded at the top is a copy of the course syllabus.  I was in my junior year of college; the course was a standard undergraduate-level course for one semester (not a full year).  I was thoroughly enjoying the course, and for some reason I annotated the reading list with the number of pages in each book.  The total came to 4300 pages in 16 books in 12 weeks = 350 pages per week.  Not an onerous load by any stretch of the imagination - just one (usually interesting) average-sized book per week.  

English 273 was a refreshing change from my other course work (physics and biology as pre-med requirements).  And it was a course that introduced me to a world of writing that I had previously been unfamiliar with (Faulkner and Wolfe were the only authors in the group that I had read in high school).

About six weeks ago I listened online to a Sunday sermon about the parable of the vineyard owner (Matthew 20:1-16); the rector quoted extensively from a Flannery O'Connor short story about a sanctimonious southern lady who is physically assaulted by a Wellesley student in the waiting room of a doctor's office:

The staff [leaps] to Mrs. Turpin’s aid and [pulls] Mary Grace away.  The girl, “held down on one side by the nurse and on the other by her mother, [wrenches and turns]. The doctor [kneels] astride her, trying to hold her arm down[, before finally managing to] sink a long needle into it.”

“The girls’ eyes [focus on Mrs. Turpin].  [Those eyes seem now] a much lighter blue than before, as if a door that had been tightly closed behind them [is] now open to admit light and air.

“Mrs. Turpin’s head [clears, as well,] and her power of motion [returns].  She [leans] forward until she [looks] directly into [those] fierce brilliant eyes.  There [is] no doubt in her mind that the girl [knows] her, [knows] her in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition. ‘What you got to say to me?’ [Mrs. Turpin asks] hoarsely and [holding] her breath [and] waiting, as for a revelation.

“The girl [raises] her head.  Her gaze [locks] with Mrs. Turpin’s.  ‘Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,’ she [whispers].  Her voice [is] low but clear … [and] Mrs. Turpin [sinks] back in her chair.”

Hearing that sermon immediately prompted me to get from the library the relevant short-story collection (Everything That Rises Must Converge) that I had passed over in college.  To be quite honest, I don't really enjoy reading Flannery O'Connor because the characters in her writing have so many unpleasant characteristics, but my god that woman sure knew how to capture the thought processes and language idioms of rural people in Georgia in the 1950s.

Enough for now.  I'm wandering away from the subject because I can't understand why modern college students can't read a book a week.  I'll let readers ponder that reading list, and perhaps in a couple days (after I finish celebrating America's retreat from neo-Fascism back to democracy), I'll dig out and post the final exam questions.