Anna Lucci ‘28
Staff Writer
A Response to “There’s A Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore” By Jonathan Malesic; Professor of Writing at Southern Methodist University
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/opinion/college-university-students-reading.html
It was Friday morning, October 25th, when I ran across a gem. That gem was Jonathan Malesic’s “There’s A Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore” featured as an online exclusive in the opinion section of the October 25th edition of the New York Times. Equally frightening, and equally inspiring, his article called forth a sense of duty. It was my duty then and there, on behalf of all college students everywhere (wink-wink), to read the article thoroughly, and decide whether or not I agree with Malesic’s thesis. And as it turns out, whilst I agree that Malesic contributes greatly to the evident counterculture of reading, I cannot agree with him entirely, because in my opinion money is not a good enough reason to market man, or insist they ignore the merits of reading good and bad writing, in fact in my opinion falling disastrously into modern media mechanisms to escape the impending dread of reading is allowing unhealthy cultural practice, to impede individual intelligence.
And the worst part is, is that the world around us millennials has gotten so bad, that we allow ourselves to be consumed by the “A Day in My Life”, “What’s in My Bag”, “Vogue Beauty Secrets”, and podcast hybrids of religious zealotry, fashion and girlhood. It is not a “good” enough reason to simply concede to cultural stigma, or simply accept that the way things are are the way things should be. Frankly, the job of educators (much to many student’s dismay) is to go against the status quo, and advocate a priori pedagogy. For as the reality of Artificial Intelligence sets in, and followers are gained, and likes are granted, and posts are universalized, we cannot accept without question that what we are into is what is best for us. The “sheep” argument is so tired, however I think in response to Malesic’s article it is well-taken. Although, it is worth mentioning that Jonathan Malesic is a professor, and therefore not a college student, and therefore passing judgment on why we students are not reading is not necessarily a judgment call he can make based on the number of books on his syllabus declining over the past 13 years.
When students stopped writing on paper, and script died for the sake of efficiency no one so much as blinked an eye, because it did not mean the downfall of the centuries-long intellectual revolution, but now that every aspect of millennial life is digitized and every person with an opinion is literally in-our-face-all-the-time, it is difficult to know if the opinions you have are your own, or if they were plagiarized by virtue of the screen in front of you. In regard to us millennials, Malesic writes, “For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes”. Going on to enlist an example wherein Malesic says “Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide. Unfortunately, “vibe-culture” is obliterating “intellectualism”, and Malesic would argue has gone so far as to replace it completely. However, I feel it is important to spend my last 277 words explaining the merits of reading simply. You cannot be original without teaching yourself how to comprehend written material and turn it into ideas.
Our generation, says every world leader, is expected to do world-saving things-and we can only save the world if we are able to understand it. To be blunt, there is nothing original to learn from A.I.: everything is copied, pasted, paraphrased, or re-punctuated, and money is not a good enough reason to relinquish the task of global problem solving to those few souls who had strict parents growing up. Binging Tik-Tok videos requires exactly zero brain power, and our generation craves that because we have noise as loud as nuclear missiles, bomb threats and school shootings circumventing us constantly. However, choosing to turn on your phone is easy, choosing to pick up Plato’s Republic is hard, but one better prepares you for a life involved in public policy, democracy and global citizenry, and the other prepares you for a certain early-onset vegetative state.
Lastly, Malesic discusses marketability in depth, among collegiate athletes, and collegiate sponsorships in general. And I feel it is important to note, being a proud member of a Division I college, that the effort of everyone to comprehend must be commended, not made more difficult. There must be a new precedent set that prioritizes reading so that humanity doesn’t hollow out, so that we grimly do not become Barbies and Kens that are beautiful, capitalized upon but silent, and puppets of a generation sans books. It is my belief that with the knowledge that resides in the literature we have access to collectively, we can right this ship, before the Titanic sinks. We must allocate the time necessary to comprehension and application within the contexts of college campuses, and glamorize knowing how to attack a future braced with the knowledge of literature.
Response article courtesy of The New York Times
Featured image courtesy of Unsplash
Web Edited by Zexuan Qu ’28
Leave a Reply