“AWOL from Academics”

In Harvard Magazine, Aden Barton, a Harvard undergraduate, writes about what it’s like to be “AWOL from Academics.” The context: a “high-level seminar” with hundreds of pages of reading each week:

Despite having barely engaged with the course material, we all received A’s. I don’t mean to blame the professors for our poor work ethic, but we certainly would have read more had our grades been at risk. At the time, we bemoaned our own lack of effort. By that point in the semester, though, many other commitments had started requiring more of us, so prioritizing curiosity for its own sake became difficult.

In my final years of teaching (decidedly not at Harvard), I used to ask students if anyone had said anything to them when they arrived on campus about college being more difficult than high school, about the work demanding more time and more effort. To a person, the answer was no. What were these incoming students told? To get involved, to join an organization — other commitments.

A place to read further about how much effort students put into college coursework: Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. I wrote a review of that book when it appeared in 2011, and I sense that the shape of things is now more dire still. In 2011, Arum and Roksa found that the less selective the college, the less likely it was that students were doing much reading and writing. If Aden Barton’s description of Harvard undergraduate life in 2023 is accurate, just imagine what undergraduate life might now be like in the lower tiers of academia — not for all students, certainly, but for too many.

One more point, which can’t be repeated often enough: the alleged death of the humanities is, in truth, a death of reading. Books! They’re why so many students hate “English.”

A few related posts
Arum and Roksa on life after college : Hours in and out of class : Rule 7 : Time-management in college

[Found via TYWKIWDBI.]