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Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

College professors face an emerging challenge: We know students are no longer reading entire books

A survey of 1,250 high school English teachers showed that they assigned an average of 2.81 books to read each year. Malte Mueller/fStop via Getty Images

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.

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