Jonathan Malesic teaches writing at Southern Methodist University, and in the early 2010s he was assigning his students nine books a semester to read. Now, more than a decade later, after COVID and the full-fledged arrival of AI, "that reading list seems not just ambitious but absurd," he writes for the New York Times. "I haven't assigned an entire book in four years." Malesic notes he's not the only instructor tamping down on such assignments, as college students these days simply seem to balk at any extensive reading—and he suggests he can't really blame them. "I'm beginning to think students who don't read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them," he writes. "In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort."
Malesic notes that "in an economy that seems to run on vibes"—one in which social media influencers reign—he can't really fault this recoiling from reading, or from taking jobs that go "where the money is" (tech, finance, consulting). "All in all, it looks as if success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype, and access to the right companies," Malesic writes. "If this is the economy students believe they're entering, then why should they make the effort to read?" Not that he's lost total hope in his students: Malesic notes that not all of them "aim to sail on vibes," and he plans on continuing to coax them to crack open a tome now and then. "Nine is too many," he writes of his planned upcoming syllabus. "But one? They can read one. Next semester, they will." His full op-ed is here. (Kids across America aren't reading as much in middle school or high school, either.)
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