Claire V. Miller is a first-year student at Harvard College. In an opinion piece for the The Harvard Crimson, she writes that her fellow students should read books:
Harvard students complain about readings constantly. They lament any assignments requiring they conquer more than twenty-five pages as tedious or overwhelming (if they aren’t passing the work off to ChatGPT). It’s far too rare that we’re assigned a full book to read and rarer still that we actually finish them.By which she means a course in literature. And yes, she’s an English major.
Literature is worryingly absent from many Harvard students’ course of study. My proposal? The College should instate a new requirement: an English course.
See also Natalie Wexler’s recent commentary “Becoming a Nation of Non-Readers.” Wexler points out that the National Council of Teachers of English says that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Got memes? (Read the NCTE statement, and you’ll see that I’m not joking.)
See also Nathan Heller’s “The End of the English Major,” in which Stephen Greenblatt wonders whether literature departments should spend more time on television.
I recall on more than one occasion a student writing on an evaluation form that the upper-level gen-ed course I was teaching was the first in which they’d read a book in college — in other words, a whole book, from start to finish. Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Invisible Man, whatever. They were grateful.
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comments: 4
This makes me sad. What are we to become?
If I were still teaching, I’d be even more dedicated to doing what I did. But it would be terribly dispiriting to be surrounded by colleagues who saw things differently.
My colleagues are trying to adjust to an academy very different from the one we knew, but most of them agree with you and me and George. Our administration, however, does not. When a friend who is an excellent teacher but also the head of two divisions told his bosses that his administrative duties were interfering with his teaching, the provost told him to assign less reading and writing.
I’ve read about that kind of thing happening. What really gets me is when the practice of literature is undone from the inside. In my department, the two-semester first-year sequence is now without any required literary study — it’s all composition and research (and “multimodal” writing). Sure, you can bring in some poems or stories if you want, but you’re already an outlier in doing so. Years ago, an administrator pushed to get the lit out by calling it “recreative reading.” Now the department has done his work for him.
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