Throughout high school, reading was one of my greatest loves. By immersing myself in literature, I was able to engage in a dialogue with unfamiliar voices and experiences, all while gaining deeper insights into my own identity. Upon arriving at Princeton, I carried my love of language with me. I spent hours on readings because I believed that true understanding was never instantaneous. I carefully cultivated my attention, attuning myself to the subtle conversations occurring within and between texts.
But eventually, it became overwhelming to devote a high level of focus to hundreds of pages of reading each week. When I complained about my reading load to a friend who seemed less overwhelmed, she responded, “You know you don’t need to actually read everything, right?” A pattern emerged through subsequent conversations with my peers: Most students arrive at Princeton expecting to complete their readings thoroughly, but after a semester or two, they realize it simply isn’t practical.
Course evaluations demonstrate that students don’t actually complete their overwhelming reading loads, which can include more than 200 pages of reading per week for each class. Student evaluations for my politics class include, “Take it, but you basically don’t have to do any of the readings,” and, “You can get by with just skimming the abstract/conclusions.” In order to balance heavy academic and extracurricular commitments, students are taught to skim texts and read with the sole purpose of quickly churning out scholarly content. As a result, we lose the ability to be changed by the language and ideas that we encounter.
Far from encouraging thorough reading habits, Princeton directs students to practice “purposeful skimming” through selective reading strategies. The McGraw Center advises students to “determine as much as possible in advance what you want to get from the text,” and to “keep in mind the assignment or task for which you are reading.” A reading guide in my politics class tells students to skim “the first and maybe second sentence of each paragraph or section.”
Princeton students are inducted into this utilitarian approach to reading at the very beginning of their academic journey, through writing seminars. Although Princeton’s writing program claims to strengthen thinking and reading skills, their website specifies that readings primarily serve the purpose of “crafting ethical, persuasive, and elegantly composed texts.” This misguided ethos is also present in course materials. In illustrated handouts, images of bricks, wood, and cement are used to depict texts as “raw materials,” and pictures of hammers and screwdrivers represent how students must process and integrate source texts into original scholarly work.
Princeton teaches us to read solely for the purpose of writing passable essays and performing well on tests. Readings are not meant to be critically contemplated. Instead, they are solid, unchanging materials to be selectively mined. They can be diluted into topic sentences and signposts, without regard to subtextual implications or accumulative chains of analysis. As a result, learning becomes a banal obligation, not an opportunity to truly interrogate the human condition.
Today, professors at elite universities find that students are increasingly incapable of reading longer works. According to Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic, this is largely due to the fact that secondary educators create curricula intended to help students “make clear arguments” and pass reading-comprehension tests rather than teach them to “grapple with long-form texts.” Princeton’s curriculum makes these same mistakes, thereby fueling a self-fulfilling prophecy: Students lack the ability to comprehend long texts, and the University teaches us to cope using superficial reading habits that further erode our attentional abilities.
Princeton’s harmful reading practices are rooted in a fixation on time management. Rather than challenging students to think and read more deeply, Princeton forces us to keep up with incredibly lengthy and fast-paced reading assignments. The University outright admits that academic success relies on doing as much as possible, as fast as possible—in the barrage of emails I receive from the McGraw Center, I’m often invited to events on “Time Management for Balance & Success,” or “Managing Big Reading Loads,” but I can’t find a single event that teaches students to engage with readings more thoughtfully and creatively.
Evidently, Princeton isn’t trying to remedy the national crisis of reading ability cited by Horowitch. Instead, it promotes a misguided definition of excellence by turning the reading experience into a timed strategy simulation. So-called “purposeful skimming” promotes constant acts of scanning and judgement, devoid of real understanding. Given Princeton’s supposed commitment to humanistic inquiry and critical reading skills, we should not be requiring students to engage perfunctorily with texts in order to beat the clock.
Princeton must enact structural curricular changes in order to move past superficial metrics of efficiency and obsessive evidence-mining. Seeing as it is logistically unachievable for students to thoroughly read hundreds of pages for each class every week, professors should curate shorter readings and mandate more deliberate textual engagement. Furthermore, writing seminars and University workshops should teach students how to be more engaged learners through a focus on close reading, rather than simply teaching us how to take apart and reassemble texts for exams and essays.
Prioritizing lower volume but in-depth reading does not make our education any less rigorous. In fact, it can enable students to flourish in new ways. This semester, in Professor Yiyun Li’s course “Reading Like a Writer,” I’m tasked with reflecting on fifteen pages of “War and Peace” daily. It sometimes takes me upwards of an hour. But with every sentence I read, I grow more attuned to the spectacular, tragic momentum of human history. Unclouded by time restraints, patient reading opens the reader to the associative connections that underlie every aspect of the human experience.
The four years of college are a special time — rarely in our lives are we afforded a space to pursue knowledge for its own sake. In a world where thought and language are too easily commodified, reading is a chance for us to brush against our own astonishing reality. But until Princeton commits to fostering a more thoughtful reading experience, we will never realize the full potential of our college education.
Ziyi Yan is a first-year student and a prospective history or anthropology major. She is from Riverside, Conn. and Shanxi, China.
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