C’mon, Professors, Assign the Hard Reading
Walt Hunter
College students are reading less because teachers assign fewer challenging books. When professors require whole novels, students rise to the challenge and improve. Teachers should keep assigning hard reading to help students grow and learn empathy.
19 Feb 2026
My most vivid memory of reading an entire novel in college was picking up Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. On an unseasonably warm spring night in 2002, I propped myself against the steps of the library, opened the book, and stayed there until the early morning.
Adults underestimate the power of simply telling a young person to read a book and vouching for it ourselves.
The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they are,” a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up.
If we want students to keep reading books, faculty have the most important role to play—regardless of whatever new devices or platforms emerge to capture students’ attention. The reaction to declining reading skills, poor comprehension, and fragmented attention spans should not be to negotiate or compromise, but to double down on the cure.