Enrolling in college is synonymous with signing up for four years of poring over books, textbooks, photocopied essays and online readings. But with ever-increasing forms of electronic entertainment ranging from YouTube videos and social networking to Hulu and time-wasting games, is leisure reading disappearing as a traditional pastime? —by Emilia Luna
Lee Edelman
The disappearance of leisure reading is the disappearance of our intellectual foundations
Lee Edelman, a professor of English and the chair of the English Department, attributes the slow but sure disappearance of leisure reading to the current younger generation's tendency to put reading for pleasure aside in favor of resume-boosting activities.
"Since much of the scheduling of young people's lives is organized to produce the best profile for college admissions committees," he said, "reading too often gets shunted aside in favor of more highly visible activities involving citizenship, sports and clubs."
In addition, the advent of social media has become an obstacle to students who might have dedicated more time to leisure reading in the absence of so many distractions, Edelman said.
"With the explosion of online media, social networking and video technologies, making the time to read — or, better, the time to think while you're reading something slowly — becomes increasingly difficult," he said.
Perusing the vastly under-read classics is important, whether for coursework or pleasure, but what matters more than the book's title and author is what the reader gets out of it, he said.
"We are always disadvantaged by not having read the works that have shaped the world we live in, whether those are the canonical works of major authors from our own culture or the more recently recovered texts of persons whose audiences were more limited," Edelman said. "What matters is not the fame of the author but the degree to which the work itself becomes an occasion for genuine thought."
Reading important literature is how people gain access to knowledge and build their intellectual foundations, Edelman explained. The dwindling popularity of these texts has much more severe implications than does the shift from paper to screens.
Edelman believes that Tufts should do more to encourage students to read a broad range of literature outside of class reading, as reading great works should be a priority not only in college but throughout the course of a one's life.
Maryanne Wolf
How — not what — is what's important
Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development and director and founder of the Center for Reading and Learning Research at Tufts, is not worried about what people read but about how they read.
"If you are reading to enter this cognitive space in which you are literally going into a realm where your thoughts are meeting the author's, and they are going somewhere new, that takes a lot of contemplative, deliberative processes — the deep reading processes," Wolf said.
According to Wolf, the amount of time students spend on academics, extracurricular activities and social engagements have always left them with little leisure time and have directly affected students' reading habits. Now, the added virtual requirement to engage with social media websites has left students with even less time to relax — or read deeply.
"The sheer amount of time that you would ordinarily sequester yourself, being away from the world and into your own thoughts, has changed a great deal by the social pressure of social digital media," Wolf said.
The use of e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and Google is replacing the traditional act of leisure reading, she said.
Liberal arts curricula do work to educate students in a variety of subjects and encourage them to read broadly, Wolf said, but students' ability to become cultivated also depends on their willingness to continue to read and educate themselves beyond the classroom.
"The way the requirements were set up was to facilitate everyone to be reasonably familiar with the great works of history, philosophy, literature, the arts and sciences," she said. "We want liberal arts minds, and [the fact that] leisure time and reading are vanishing affects that mind."
James Glaser
Leisure reading resumes post-graduation
James Glaser, dean of academic affairs for arts and sciences, said that college students' tendency not to do much leisure reading during their university years is an aberration from their normal reading habits rather than a solidification of them.
"My expectation is that while students are here, they have a lot to read to make it through their classes," he said. "But what I hope happens is that we plant seeds while students are in their undergraduate experiences and that those seeds grow over the course of their lifespan."
"Students are studying really hard during the week, reading their text messages and going to parties on weekends because it is part of the college experience," he added, "but I do hope that this will lead to a lifetime of pleasures of reading, learning, growing and attaining oneself."
The divide between academic and leisure reading is not a rigid one, Glaser said.
"If we have done our job well, and you develop the habit of reading," he said, "as you get older and your life patterns change, you will read and take advantage of it."
Additionally, he said, technology — rather than deterring students from reading — actually supports and supplements traditional methods of learning in a positive way.
"We are enhancing learning by using different vehicles like film," he said. "With that said, there isn't quite anything like a skillful lecture."
A liberal arts curriculum, Glaser said, requires that students acquaint themselves with the foundations of a number of academic areas but also grants them the freedom to choose what they read.
"We put into place requirements and guides to make sure you make sensible choices and that you come out of here with exposure to a lot of things on the breadth side and with a certain depth of knowledge in at least one discipline," he said. "I hope one of the choices they make is to expose themselves not only to the great works of Western culture but of world civilization."
Elizabeth Ammons
Whether and what to read is a personal decision
Elizabeth Ammons, a professor of English, believes that the importance of reading in modern-day society is a highly personal matter.
"For many people, reading is important psychologically and even spiritually," she said. "For many people it satisfies something that other media cannot, but that is not true for everybody."
The act of reading is changing as the world changes, she said, but that does not mean it has lost its value — nor does it mean it is going anywhere.
"Reading is one of the important ways that we gather knowledge, information and truth, challenge our own thoughts and learn about ideas," she said. "I do think it impoverishes a liberal arts education if it does not guarantee some amount of reading."
While the selection of media at people's fingertips has widened and many texts have moved online, the act of reading is still essential, Ammons said.
"You can't Tweet or look at your e-mail or do Facebook without reading," she said. "The venues have changed, and the way people get information and tell their stories is not necessarily sitting in a solitary way, reading silently to themselves."
Ultimately, what matters to Ammons is that people still read, not that they still read what past generations were reading.
"We can't do it all," she said. "For a given person it might be important to read Aristotle, and that is fine, but if you go your whole life without reading Aristotle, that is fine by me, too."
