College Professors Face an Emerging Challenge: We Know Students Are No Longer Reading Entire Books

College Professors Face an Emerging Challenge: We Know Students Are No Longer Reading Entire Books

By Austin Sarat, Amherst College Anyone who has spent time on a college campus lately has probably heard laments from faculty about their students’ reading habits, or rather nonreading habits. Such complaints are more than an unfounded nostalgia for a bygone age. Reading – not just any kind of reading, but reading long, complex, challenging books – is quickly vanishing from the American scene. As Sunil Iyengar, who directs the Office of Researc…