Quote of the Day (Rose Horowitch, on College Students’ Fewer, and Slimmer, Books)

“Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.”—American journalist Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” The Atlantic, December 2024

I well remember the shock all over an English teacher’s face in my parochial high school in the mid-1970s when one of her students confessed that he’d never read a book all the way through. When she was finally able to recover her composure, she demanded to know how he’d managed to get through 11 years of elementary and secondary school without accomplishing what she saw as a basic educational task.

My high school classmate would have plenty of company these days. Rose Horowitch’s report from the current groves of academe begins with a student telling a teacher in the literary humanities course at my college alma mater, Columbia University—an institution considerably more selective than my high school way back when—that she, too, had never read a book cover to cover.

Columbia is hardly the only college facing this dilemma. Most of the 33 academics contacted by Horowitch related similar experiences.

So, what gives? The article offers several reasons for this, including:

*Electronic devices that compete for attention with apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

*New educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core that led to short informational passages that mimic standardized tests, rather than longer texts.

*Shifts in values rather than skill sets—i.e., students can still read long books, but they don’t want to.

*Jobs and extracurricular activities that sap the time they need to read in depth.

*Identity politics that makes young readers less inclined to tackle the thinking of writers far away in place and time.

*Grade inflation that doesn’t penalize students for failing to keep up with the course load.

I read with particular interest an admission by Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American Studies professor at the school, that, in now teaching a seminar on short works in American literature rather than a full survey course, he had dispensed with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in favor of the author’s Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

For my American lit survey course back in the day, my class had to read these shorter works and the epic novel. Our professor urged us, if we had time, to get a jump on Melville’s stab at the Great American Novel: “It’s a long whaling expedition,” he joked.

I finished reading this article right after listening to a podcast on the English novelist Anthony Powell, who created a 12-novel sequence chronicling more than four decades in 20^th-century life, A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell’s style is not daunting, and believe it or not, readers years ago managed to plow through most, if not all, of this work.

But it’s inconceivable to me that many readers today will make it through just one of his novels, let alone all of it.

It should also be said courses in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) have made the appeal of humanities course offering mass immersion in reading less lucrative.

That high school classmate of mine, for instance? He entered the armed forces, where he learned computer sciences—and ended up making considerably more money, after he left the military, than fellow high school graduates who took the time to make it through one long book after another.

(The image accompanying this post, if you haven't guessed it from the guy with the long hair, is a relic from a bygone era, in more ways than one. It shows a Shimer College student reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty under a tree on the school's original campus in Mount Carroll, IL. The photograph was published in the school's 1973-1974 catalog. I hope that this seminal work of political science, at any rate, continues to be read in its entirety, but I’m not betting on it.)

Quote of the Day (Sean Decatur, on Separating the Sciences From the Humanities)

“In contemporary discourse around education policy and curricula, some feel an irresistible urge to separate the sciences from the humanities, even giving science, technology, engineering, and mathematics its own acronym (STEM) and in many cases placing this clustering in opposition to the ‘liberal arts.’ This is ahistorical—the core of scientific thinking has been an essential part of the liberal arts in their original, ancient forms (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and logic were all considered essential education for free citizens). But, beyond this, separating STEM disciplines from the liberal arts denies the fundamental reality that the effective practice of science depends on the effective communication of scientific ideas, which in turn depends on the skills shaped by the study of the humanities and arts. And in turn the work of a citizen (the ultimate outcome of a liberal arts education) requires comfort and facility with scientific concepts in order to understand the world around us.”— Sean Decatur, President, American Museum of Natural History, “Finding Common Ground for Lifelong Learning,” The Key Reporter, Fall 2023

This Day in Literary History (C.P. Snow Decries “2 Cultures”)

May 7, 1959—Physicist, bureaucrat and novelist, C.P. Snow gave rise to an enduring bit of intellectual shorthand about the knowledge and attitudes separating the sciences and the humanities with his lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.”

Snow is a figure from an age and environment utterly alien to 21st-century American culture. We’re used to novelists who spend years—decades, even—on a single work of elephantine proportions, meant to corral the Great American Novelist. Think Harold Brodkey. Think Norman Mailer with Harlot’s Ghost, a 1,000-plus-page behemoth ending with the most frightening phrase in the English language: “To Be Continued.”

In contrast, Snow was the kind of workhorse who leaves an astonishing amount of work that leaves one envious, especially when considering his very active life in politics. Unfortunately, little of his fiction is read or remembered years after his death.

Twenty years ago, inspired by a “Masterpiece Theatre” mini-series, I spent much of several months on my way to work listening to audiotapes of Snow’s entire 11-novel Strangers and Brothers sequence. After so much time, it’s hard to recall much of this staggering narrative of his alter ego, Lewis Eliot, from youth to late middle age. Two of the novels, however, I would recommend: The Masters, an unusually insightful dissection of academic politics, and The Light and the Dark, a poignant character study of Eliot’s manic-depressive intellectual friend Roy Calvert.

Ironically, it’s not so much entire novels as a pair of phrases he popularized that have lingered in the collective intellectual consciousness. One was “corridors of power,” taken from the title of a 1964 novel. The other, the subject of today’s post, is “the two cultures,” a seemingly rarefied topic that sparked a surprisingly personal controversy in Snow’s lifetime and that continues to be debated to this day by academics.

What surprises me about this lecture is not so much the stark distinction between science and the humanities but the perhaps overly optimistic faith of Snow in science and development as positive goods. Though a member of the Labour Party (he served briefly in Harold Wilson’s cabinet as parliamentary secretary to the minister of technology), he sounds here, in hailing industrialization as the engine of upward mobility, like nobody so much as the American Federalist Alexander Hamilton, another boy from humble circumstances who rose, by dint of education, to the top of his circle.

A society that stifles such promise—as, Snow believed, the Britain of his time was doing, by steering bright students with an aptitude toward the sciences into the humanities instead—wills itself to irreversible decline and fall. Here, for instance, he likens Britain to an earlier seaside power—and as I read it, I couldn’t help seeing parallels to a republic far closer to home:

“Like us, [the Venetians] had once been fabulously lucky. They had become rich, as we did, by accident… They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flow against them. Many of them gave their minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had crystallised. They were fond of the pattern, just as we are fond of ours. They never found the will to break it."

In one sense, Snow was far from being a soothsayer. The gap between rich and poor would provide another battleground for the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and whichever superpower was most convincing about its ability to bridge this gap would win the Cold War, he believed.

And then, this kicker: “This disparity between the rich and the poor has been noticed . . . most acutely and not unnaturally, by the poor,” Snow explains, adding: “It won’t last for long. Whatever else in the world we know survives to the year 2000, that won’t.”

As we know now, he couldn’t be more painfully, sadly wrong about this.

Ironically enough, reading his description of who would lead the Third World out of hopelessness, the technocrat who comes to mind is Robert McNamara. Yes, the same man who, after misleading the American public about his feelings about the Vietnam War he led, was hustled out of his old job by Lyndon Johnson and into 13 years at the World Bank. There, with his customary energy and bullying, he preached with evangelical fervor the necessity of saving Africans from want—all the while saddling them with massive debt and pursuing construction policies that imperiled the environment.

In the course of his lecture, Snow shifted from a fairly evenhanded discussion of the two sides’ shared responsibility for these intellectual divisions to a more partisan one in favor of scientists, whom he hailed for having “the future in their bones.” At least one humanist, F.R. Leavis, launched such an ad hominem attack on the quality of Snow’s novels that his publisher nervously asked Trilling if he wanted any changes in the work before publication. Fortunately, Snow did not answer in kind.