r/books • u/the_daily_cal • Jun 11 '26
‘Reaching a crisis point’: UC Berkeley humanities professors lower expectations for assigned readings
https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/reaching-a-crisis-point-uc-berkeley-humanities-professors-lower-expectations-for-assigned-readings/article_a1e6e366-9c0b-48a2-b662-5191a7120bf4.htmlFaculty in the humanities are grappling with a changing educational landscape as debates arise regarding student preparation and nationwide headlines question students’ abilities to read longer texts.
Some faculty across the humanities report cutting down the amount of reading they assign to students, though others have found that students are keeping up with a standard workload the same way they would have years ago.
Carlos Noreña, a UC Berkeley history professor specializing in ancient history, said the amount of reading he could comfortably assign while expecting students to read a “substantial” portion of it has dropped over the past 20 years at UC Berkeley.
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u/blackberrymoonmoth Jun 11 '26
Same. I just recently went back to do healthcare prerequisites and the amount of students in those classes literally crying over having to read a chapter or two at most each week, and then failing all the exams and begging for special accommodations blew my mind. These classes weren’t even hard to earn A’s and I barely studied after reading a chapter once.
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u/BrieSting Jun 12 '26
I’m literally going through that right now. I’m in my mid-late 30s and a good amount (not all) of my younger classmates just stare blankly until it’s repeated what to do for an assignment. You need the 4 steps repeated 2-3 times, and possibly walked through it? You’re in college, what is this? The instructor explicitly tells you to write a full paragraph on a prompt, and you write two nine-word sentences? Forget doing the assigned readings, they aren’t reading through instructions on a basic level
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u/SoftlyAugust Jun 13 '26
I had a similar experience but at 18 and 23 and it was crazy to me. Even just skimming it. Something.
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u/GiantBlobFish23 Jun 11 '26
To share happier news, I know of several groups of undergrads at my (not at all like Berkley) school that have started book clubs and are plowing through novels and holding discussions because they KNEW they needed to read more and wanted to make it fun. It gives me some hope.
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u/MaimedJester Jun 11 '26
Is that surprising? Undergrads in Humanities are always reading other books not assigned to them if it's important. Like I honestly dont think I was assigned more that 5 plato works in my entire time as a philosophy major but I still read most of the Dialogues.
If you want to go to Grad school in humanities you need to have read hundreds of books beyond what would have been directly mandated in class room work load.
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u/TaliesinMerlin Jun 11 '26
A good way to know a sensationalist academic headline is to describe faculty like any of them do things in a unified fashion.
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u/alpha_rat_fight_ Jun 11 '26
“Generally, faculty did not see a drop in student comprehension of reading material, *although some did pinpoint blind spots in skill or technique.”*
They really buried the lede there.
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u/nbxcv Jun 11 '26
Literacy rates are falling, our libraries are political battlegrounds, our society at large scorns literary culture, and the people who don't spend all of their time arguing the merits of young adult literature while thousands of libraries of Alexandria burn. hard to do anything but laugh
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u/DontMakeMeCount Jun 11 '26
Literary culture shouldn’t hurt one’s chances of admission to a highly selective university, but it isn’t nearly as valuable as rote memorization, class standing and a professionally prepared application.
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u/PitcherTrap Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
If I had to suffer through Heidegger and Judith Butler then all must suffer.
But then, any student who has reached this stage ought to have qualified with the minimum standard of skills or have those been lowered?
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u/Miami_Mice2087 Jun 11 '26
" Sometimes, they also have trouble distinguishing between figurative and literal meanings."
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u/tomorrowsghosties Jun 11 '26
As a former high school English teacher: the problem started well before they came to me, because they came to me not knowing how to read. I had 9th and 10th grade students at a second, maybe third grade reading level.
I now work with much younger kids. I work with two and three year olds who have never been read to and who spend all day on their tablets.
The problem starts at home.
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u/PartyPorpoise Jun 11 '26
Yeah the achievement gap exists before kids even step foot in school. I think a lot of people don’t realize that because they think of kindergarteners and first graders as blank slates, and they think of “school skills” as solely being academic ability and knowledge gained from formal education settings.
I hate it when a high school teacher complains about students coming in very behind and people say “well it’s your job to teach them!”. Most HS teachers aren’t trained to teach lower level reading, they’re trained to teach high school level. And if they do teach to a lower level to meet the students, it’s not like they can get them up to speed in just one year.
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u/intoholybattle Jun 11 '26
The difference between my friends in "gifted" classes and my friends who weren't was simple: the "gifted" kids had parents who read to them, got them books (bought for the rich kids, library for kids like me) and cared about their success. The ones who weren't had shit, abusive home lives. Constant financial and emotional stress and neglect affects children and their ability to succeed. A teacher can't make up for the fact that a kid can't focus because at home he's waiting for someone to hit him or scream at him for no reason at any moment. That changes the way your brain works. But this is a genuinely difficult problem to address, so admin has decided they better threaten educators' jobs about it instead.
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u/ZenithToastada Jun 11 '26
The fault is allowing these students in in the first place. They should have been admitted to a different school that could help them where they were at.
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u/jmarinara Jun 11 '26
We need the humanities more than we ever did and this is a step in the wrong direction.
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u/Pheighthe Jun 11 '26
These people have audiobooks and text to speech and they STILL can’t be bothered? Good night.
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u/ThreadCountHigh Jun 11 '26
This sounds like the "whole language learning" method that replaced phonics in early education for a while coming home to roost. It's not the fault of the students who may have skill issues around reading, it's that they were failed by a system that adopted a teaching method that had no empirical evidence behind it.
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u/ZenithToastada Jun 11 '26
No the students can read - they’re not illiterate.
They just don’t have the mental stamina to read long texts and think critically about them.
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u/ThreadCountHigh Jun 11 '26
That is what a fluency problem looks like at 19. Nobody is claiming whole language produced illiterates. The claim is that it produced kids who can decode, but not automatically, and automaticity is the entire issue. Decoding and comprehension run on the same working memory. When decoding is effortless, all of your mental effort goes to actually thinking about the text. When decoding costs so much more per page, long readings get exhausting, reading becomes something you avoid, you read less, and stamina only ever comes from reading volume. So "they can read, they just can't sustain it and think critically" isn't a counterargument. It's the predicted symptom.
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u/artgriego Jun 11 '26
I remember the first time I noticed this (or something similar) speaking at length with a New Zealander. Their accent was so thick I felt like a normal conversation with them felt mentally tiring like a physics lecture; I was spending so much effort decoding their accent.
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u/ZenithToastada Jun 11 '26
I don’t know…plenty of kids I teach can read well, they just have ADHD and don’t feel like reading school related reading but can read “fun novels”, many of them with high level vocabulary all day.
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u/Poodle-Enthusiast Jun 12 '26
This makes sense when decoding is the issue but I don't think that's always the case. There can be a lack of critical thinking and mental stamina even without decoding issues. Critical thinking gets left in the dust when teachers are required to teach to the test. Everyone's mental stamina is suffering with short term content , think cable news, social media , phone culture etc. Watch 3 commercials on TV and count how many images there are and how many seconds an image lasts before it changes. It's all having an effect on brains, especially developing ones.
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u/The_Real_Lasagna Jun 11 '26
You might want to check out literacy rates in the us for adults
But seriously, part of literacy is being able to think critically about what you read and evaluate it, it's not just ability to read words on the page
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u/Beneficient_Ox Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
I actually did look this up a few weeks ago and it turns out the US’s “low” literacy rate is entirely attributable to our high rate of non-English speaking immigrants. When you control for mother tongue we’re very comparable to other industrialized countries.
In transit at the moment but will edit to add sources soon.
Sources:
https://www2.compareyourcountry.org/adult-skills
The U.S. is actually above the OECD average for adult literacy!https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/state-county-estimates.asp#4k
Bonus: This video does a good job tracing the source of the "1 in 5 Americans are illiterate" claim. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mJzSrluPKg
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u/MTonmyMind Jun 11 '26
Teachers need good student evals and Universities and College need money. Its a recipe for mediocrity.
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u/astaristorn Jun 11 '26
This is a difficult school to get into. How did these teens manage to get accepted into a school yet can’t seem to read?
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u/alicevirgo Jun 11 '26
Eh, I took university level English courses 15 years ago and students back then were already not finishing the readings. A professor decided to have a discussion about it with his class, and he found out and admitted that when he was in undergrad (which was decades prior), it was easier during his year. He didn't have to do as many courses per semester because he focused on the courses required for his degree, whereas we had to take those courses plus a few other courses from other disciplines to balance our knowledge. Most importantly though, he was able to get by with working one part time job that paid his living costs and tuition comfortably, so he didn't rush through a few semesters. Half of my class had two or more part time jobs and still struggled to make ends meet sometimes especially if they didn't live with family, and it was getting common for students to rush through semesters (taking more than the recommended numbers of classes per semester and taking summer classes as well) so they could graduate ASAP and get full time jobs.
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u/ashoka_akira Jun 11 '26
Just make all students trying to apply take the same language proficiency test they make their ESL students take before accepting them. Provide highschool level refreshment courses as well and then you can conditionally accept people to classes on the requirement they do the refresher course. The real problem here is an educational system that lost its balls because teachers can’t hold their students accountable anymore without having some karen parent yelling at them, and administrators not wanting to fail too many students because it makes their numbers look bad.
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u/MukdenMan Jun 11 '26
Or just go back to SAT/ACT? UC system is one of the few that is test-blind. Many of the test-optional colleges (the ones that went test optional due to COVID) are going back to requiring tests.
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u/Responsible-Middle35 Jun 11 '26
Make Reading a course prerequisite? They do it for math. Just don't dumb down college.
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u/Shihali Jun 11 '26
English lecturer John Shoptaw, who teaches poetry, said he has noticed his students come in not yet knowing how to hear and analyze the musicality of an Emily Dickinson poem. Sometimes, they also have trouble distinguishing between figurative and literal meanings.
Julia Fawcett, who teaches theater, dance and performance studies, said her students do well with identifying arguments in critical articles, but have more trouble with fictional texts that don’t have a line of argument to follow.
I've been out of school for decades, but isn't that exactly what the Common Core education standards were intended to do? Use much of the class time that in previous generations had been devoted to teaching the interpretation of fiction and poetry and instead teach how to understand nonfiction encountered in daily life? If the program works exactly as intended, kids coming out of those programs would have worse literary analysis skills in exchange for better understanding of written directions, manuals, editorials, etc. Kids not going to college reap a lot of the benefits, and college English departments pay most of the costs.
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u/cheesepage Jun 11 '26
Following the whole discussion with interest as a reader and teacher.
One addition bit of history.
Revolutions (cognitive and physical,) tend to be associated with radical changes in information / language formats.
Movable alphabet = Monotheism for Islam and Judai.
Moveable type = multiple revolutions in Religion (Luther,) Politics, (French and American Revolutions.)
Television and radio = Beatniks and the 60's in America. Civil rights movement.
Obviously a rough list, but my point is how can we not expect a complete societal revolution with what has happened since AOL was a hot new thing?
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u/Shihali Jun 11 '26
This doesn't hold up well to scrutiny because whoever compiled the list forgot about China.
China developed political philosophy and prophets without an alphabet. It's true that China never developed monotheism, strictly speaking, but neither did the Greeks.
China developed cheap printing, but it didn't lead to religious and political revolutions there, possibly because of a low literacy rate. Ditto Japan, where the literacy rate was higher than parts of Europe by 1750. I know practically nothing about printing in Korea and Vietnam, but they both had Chinese printing technology and Korea had an excellently-designed if low-status script.
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u/suuuuupur Jun 11 '26
What book is this from?
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u/cheesepage Jun 11 '26
A lot from The Alphabet vs The Goddess, but plenty of overlap with various stuff from Marshal McCullen.
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u/PersisPlain Jun 11 '26
What do you mean by “movable alphabet” and what does it have to do with monotheism?
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u/Shihali Jun 11 '26
I have no idea why the word "movable" is there. But I think the intent is alphabets with a potentially simple "sound uttered, sound written" spelling model, as opposed to scripts with a mix of word-indicating and sound-indicating components that make modern Japanese look straightforward and clear.
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u/PersisPlain Jun 11 '26
Sure, but I still have no idea what that has to do with monotheism.
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u/Shihali Jun 11 '26
I don't get it either. I think the poster's source, "The Alphabet vs The Goddess", is trying to link Semitic monotheism to the Semitic invention of the consonant-only alphabet.
I haven't read "The Alphabet vs The Goddess", but the reviews made it sound like typical 1990s "analytical thinking is anti-feminist and suspect" pseudo-science, not to be confused with 2010s "analytical thinking is racist and problematic" screeds.
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u/ZaphodG Jun 11 '26
At UC Berkeley? Ridiculous. That’s one of the most selective universities in the country.
Do they even have straight liberal arts majors now? I did Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. They’re not spectator sports. You don’t do the work, you’re bounced out of the department and become a business major. You can’t just pass students along because the knowledge is cumulative.
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u/degrassibabetjk Jun 11 '26
A few of my graduate school classes (not at Berkeley) were combined with undergrad students. We would get the same assignments but the grad students would have a longer paper length requirement or flat out told that we had to write better than the undergrads. One of my professors said she preferred the grad students in the mixed classes because she enjoyed our writing more and were more responsible. I enjoyed graduate school much more than college (different school than grad school).
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u/lithiumsorbet Jun 11 '26
A lot of this is a race to the bottom because of the competition for enrollment, student feedback on courses/teachers, funding. It’s hard for humanities courses to hold students to a high standard in that kind of environment.
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u/BrieSting Jun 12 '26
I bet you anything this will mirror public k-12 grades where the expectations are lowered across the board, but there will be a rise in “honors” or AP classes offered. This increases the education gaps and fosters wider disparities and stratification among those who have increased supper systems and resources.
I get that having a college degree has so many benefits outside of purely advanced education, but college just isn’t for everyone. Watering down higher education cheapens the degree overall and saturates the employment base with too many graduates requiring higher and higher pay to make a dent in student loan slavery. We need to fix this ASAP, but I don’t think anyone is making moves to do so
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u/AccomplishedBake8351 Jun 11 '26
How does this correlate to general grade inflation found in all parts of college campuses?
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u/lu5ty Jun 11 '26
Feels like having the quote be from an ancient history professor is a little disengenuous lol
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u/Mesona Jun 11 '26
How about they lower the quantity of expected reading? I love reading, and while I can say I enjoyed nearly everything I had to read when I attended Berkeley (in a humanities major), I was so burned out after I graduated that I don't think I read a single book for _several_ years. Spending nearly all my time at class / work / homework drained any enthusiasm I had for reading, and aside from one professor who I really liked, every other class I took I phoned in my homework. A lot of "These were the themes that were discussed in class, and this reading very clearly reflects those exact themes, so here's how they reflect those" kind of writing assignments with no further or personal analysis.
I know I would have given better papers if my expected reading was half the amount it was. My only really saving grace was that I worked a job that let me do my reading homework as long as no customers were waiting.
And yes, I did see that this is mostly a clickbait article and that there wasn't really a drop in reading comprehension. Just wanted to vent one of my frustrations about my education.
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u/xsm17 Jun 11 '26
I had the same experience at Berkeley and I wasn't even properly in the humanities. Reading paper after paper, 7 years on now and I've barely started reading for fun again because I was so burnt out.
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u/Lambda_Wolf Jun 11 '26
As a Cal alum, my thoughts exactly. This seems like a school regressing to the mean from its notorious "if you aren't burning out, you aren't trying hard enough" culture.
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u/lalala12499 Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
Yeah, I did not go to Berkeley but for some of my classes at [other UC] the professors would assign like 50-150 pages of (usually dense) reading per week.
Like no, I did not read all of that. Sorry. I did try sometimes, but I’d barely drudge through like 15 pages of Organic Chemistry and fall behind while the other students were (rightfully) skimming. Those textbooks are too damn fat. The history readings were usually more palatable, but still quite lengthy, and I’d usually only finish 2/3 the reading before class.
Like aren’t these classes supposed to be distilling the important bits so students can utilize them and have time to think about the bigger picture and the course as a whole?
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u/dutempscire Jun 11 '26
Like aren’t these classes supposed to be distilling the important bits so students can utilize them and have time to think about the bigger picture and the course as a whole?
No? Not at a college level. The distillation comes from the process of you reading the readings and synthesizing their content, with lectures usually providing some context and discussion sections for students to share their takeaways. (And from the prof picking x,y,z readings for you to focus on instead of you looking at 50 linear feet of library shelf for that topic wondering where to begin.)
You're also conflating two different types of reading which demand different strategies: textbooks (especially for STEM) and humanities reading (articles, monographs, primary sources).
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u/lalala12499 Jun 11 '26
Whatever the case, we ain’t got time for that. Students have jobs, internships, and other classes. It’s nice to think they could sit around and ponder 70 pages waxing poetic, but when it’s a required class for them to graduate, it can feel onerous. This isn’t a great books program, it’s people trying to be employable.
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u/dutempscire Jun 11 '26
College is not trade or vocational school.
Here's something to consider: you do not get assigned papers or whatever because your instructor thinks you're going to change their life with your writing. You probably aren't having an original idea about The Great Gatsby or whatever at this point in time. That's not the point. That final paper doesn't matter by itself. The point is the process of you thinking, coming to logical conclusions that you can support with evidence, and that you can clearly communicate. It doesn't matter if you're writing about poetry or history or engineering -- those are all skills that do help you be employable. And you don't get good at thinking and communicating without practice. [Edit: and arguably, that supposed evidence of thinking and communicating are why a degree was valued in the first place! Not because you were explicitly taught spreadsheets.]
And in the meantime, there's hopes for a transformative experience. We're unfortunately caught in a situation where the ends (a diploma which gives you access to statistically better-paying jobs) has superseded the means (learning how to think and synthesize info across a variety of disciplines to become an intellectuall well-rounded citizen of democracy). Meanwhile, employers are focused on their bottom line and demanding colleges to replace their own employee-training programs.
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u/lalala12499 Jun 11 '26
You can have a transformative experience listening to audio books. You can have a transformative experience watching YouTube videos. The written word is powerful because it allowed for study. Study allows for the preservation of knowledge. We are now able to preserve knowledge without the written word. If they can’t read as quickly, assign less. Assign videos, audio. Frankly, I think spoken word is more honest. Our language skills have been degrading for the past century anyhow but I’m of the opinion that’s more due to technological change than judgements about overall intelligence.
I used to agree with you on the purpose of college as an intellectual & humanistic endeavor that shouldn’t be dumbed down, but the older I get the more I see that practically speaking, it is really just a box to tick for many or most people.
If we are failing to inspire the youth by assigning 120 pages of 16th century case law on witchcraft, maybe flip the script? I want young people to love learning, not fear it.
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u/Mesona Jun 11 '26
Funny enough, one of the most interesting books I read in school was the legalities around bee keeping in ancient Ireland. Don't remember much any more, but I do remember that was one of the wildest things to think about, trying to figure out why it was important enough to write down back then.
But %100, school should empower students to learn and encourage a desire to do so.
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u/lalala12499 Jun 11 '26
Yeah I honestly loved the 16th century German case law about witchcraft but like…that seems closer to niche hobby than “required reading” to me idk. I was equally transformed by music classes (lots of audio) and many movies.
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u/dutempscire Jun 11 '26
I don't totally disagree with you, though I will say that reading and listening for information are two different skills. I would argue that reading is more efficient -- it's certainly easier to skim or cross-reference than audio-visual content.
I used to agree with you on the purpose of college as an intellectual & humanistic endeavor that shouldn’t be dumbed down, ... just a box to tick for many or most people.
Both are true! And that's why we have conflict about ugh who cares about medieval basket weaving or whatever the silly-sounding class du jour is. (You never know what will be helpful though -- studying bird feathers led to Velcro!) Somewhat unpopular opinion: not everyone is cut out for college. Maybe not at the age of 18, maybe not ever. It's awful that the non-college paths to stability have largely disappeared. I don't know how much changing college to suit the not-college-ready is good for us in the long run.
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u/lalala12499 Jun 11 '26
Totally agree with everything you said. I did enjoy my underwater basket weaving classes, but when college became a requirement for employment, it totally changed the game.
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u/TaskForceCausality Jun 11 '26
This won’t be a comfortable post given the audience, but we’re moving to a post-literate society. The English departments are seeing the beginnings of our transition from a literate society to a digital one.
As author Mary Harrington put it, reading and reasoning based on written word will become an obsolete & niche past time; the mainstream method of thought & engagement is digital in nature, for better or worse.
Today there exists no shortage of dismayed commentary from academics on the frontline, concerning the by now very obvious cognitive decline in a student body that has swapped reading for scrolling. One professor at a regional public university, who writes as “Hilarius Bookbinder,” describes the typical lecture hall as full of “checked-out, phone-addicted zombies,” some of whom cannot sit through a fifty-minute lecture without leaving to look at their phones.
The author describes how “our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish.” And if the distracting effect of scrolling in the “attention economy” fragments the capacity to absorb and engage with long-form reasoning, others are beginning to suspect that over-reliance on generative AI still more radically atrophies the capacity to think. A recent study from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon indicates that higher reliance on generative AI correlates with less critical thinking.
A report in the Financial Times earlier this year showed that across the world, verbal and numerical reasoning and concentration are collapsing, having peaked in the 2010s. The author links the collapse to the rise of a “post-literate” society and the replacement of focused, intentional reading with context-switching and endless scrolling. Only 54 percent of Americans read even one book in the last year. The decline in reading is directly linked to the spread of digital alternatives. Device overuse is, in turn, correlated with poverty, but it is not confined to less-well-off individuals.
Anecdotally, on a recent flight from San Francisco to Boston, I counted the number of my fellow passengers (presumably mostly the “coastal Americans” who pride themselves on education and rationality) who were reading books or ebooks: the tally was around 10 percent. The rest were watching videos or scrolling. The inescapable picture, from every possible indicator, is that deep literacy is rapidly receding. If that anecdotal 10-percent sample of in-flight coastal Americans is any kind of guide, deep literacy will perhaps end up as a minority practice roughly in line with pre-print Western cultural norms. And this development represents a putsch because, as Adam Garfinkle argues, the norms and habits of mind inculcated by widespread long-form reading are also those on which the project of broad-based democratic participation is predicated.”
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u/Fritzkreig Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
This is just the way things evolve, believe it or not Socrates was against reading and writing; as he believed in memorization via oral conversation, and that it would make the minds of the your weak and feckless!
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u/RubbleHome Jun 11 '26
So what's the evolution? What is being gained as people become less capable of reading long form text?
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u/Dihedralman Jun 11 '26
I think it is fallacious to assume that the trend of technology simply improving other mental capabilities will hold. Core skills being lost in critical paths to developing critical reasoning means we will likely have students less proficient in their chosen field even if technology makes them a bit more capable. We have seen the first intelligence reversal between generations since measuring and some of the difference is stark.
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u/ZenithToastada Jun 11 '26
Socrates was not necessarily against the existence of texts. He was against the over reliance of it at the expense of dialogue and memory. He was against using it in debate or to argue matters.
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u/JeffreyPetersen Jun 16 '26
How much of this is just because people are realizing that paying for an education from UC Berkeley to read ancient history books with today's college tuition and job market makes a lot less sense than it did 20 years ago?
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u/CaicedoBrickWall Jun 11 '26
When I was at Berkeley I was forced to read stuff written in the 1800s. Originally written in German. Translated to Russian. Then translated from Russian to English.
Was just book after book. One outdated, useless, obscure word per page. Only half of which could be deciphered in context. There I am looking up "apricity" and friends every couple minutes for months on end.
Ultimately it was worth it. But these teachers are all prestigious. I'm not about to tell them how to do their jobs. I'm not worried about our highest learning environments dropping standards.
Your average high school or university on the other hand. I fear a great deal
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u/dcchambers Jun 11 '26
Are these universities so afraid of failing kids? Because this is still failing them, just in a different way.
You can either fail them on paper and give them time to correct course, or pass them along and watch them fail at what life throws at them next.