Academics take reading for granted. We learned to read in first grade, and those skills have served us well ever since. Like fish in water, we hardly notice the transparent medium in which we swim.
Writing is a skill that we are continuously taught, a skill that is graded. But reading is different. When academics have trouble understanding texts—and we do—the problem is usually with texts and with our background knowledge, not the act of reading itself. And when we do have a reading problem, we tend to medicalize it as dyslexia, suggesting that proper reading is normal and natural—especially for advanced scholars. That tendency is not particular to higher education, however. After the elementary years, schools pay little attention to the mechanisms of reading. We read as if all texts, even the most complex, were Dick and Jane.
A quarter-century ago, the sociologist Howard S. Becker published a now classic discussion of the challenges of writing in graduate school. In Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article (University of Chicago Press, 1986), Becker demonstrated how academics should write. But the question of how academics should read is deeper, since, unlike writing, reading is considered a given. Although the words, syntax, and ideas are more complex, isn’t reading in graduate school fundamentally like reading in first grade?
It isn’t, of course. Not only is reading Foucault more intellectually challenging than reading Goodnight Moon (although the two have quite a bit in common, both emphasizing omnipresent surveillance), but the application of reading differs. For the most part, earlier reading is an attempt to grasp the meaning of a text so that one can repeat it to an authority, who then judges whether one “got” the ideas. At that level, reading is regurgitation.
In graduate school, reading and the ability to discuss and interpret that reading are simultaneously a means by which a student asserts an academic identity and the basis on which a student can produce new knowledge. And while assignments before graduate school are meant to be read in full, the wise graduate student must learn how to skim in order to manage impossible demands. It is the ability to not read everything—while still reading enough—that represents success in graduate school.
When students arrive at graduate school, they have been reading for nearly 20 years or longer, and they are good at it. But from their first day, they are thrown into a world in which reading has different, contradictory meanings. Becker observed a similar conflict when studying medical students for his canonical ethnography, Boys in White (University of Chicago Press, 1961). Becker recognized that although the students entered classrooms with the goal of learning all that the field of medicine could offer, and all that their instructors required, they soon found that goal impossible to meet. To survive, the successful students were forced to learn tricks of the trade. They learned to become real doctors, not imagined, ideal ones.
A similar process occurs in graduate school. Students who triumphed in college find themselves swimming in a sea of words with no shore in sight. Their task is complicated by the fact that reading contributes to the reputation game that is so essential to graduate education. Incoming students have only a hazy notion of how they stand in comparison with their peers. But they soon find that in the first years of graduate study, being able to discuss the assigned readings is central to that evaluation. One must be informed and engaged in order to be esteemed and rewarded.
Students feel that they must read what is assigned, that they must be able to understand what is assigned (as judged by faculty members), and that they must build upon what they have read. Many students experience this intellectual pressure in a new environment, away from their support systems.
As a consequence, learning to read properly becomes one of the most important hurdles faced by students in postgraduate education—as does, ironically, learning to not read, or to choose to read certain texts incompletely or not at all. Part of the challenge is that there is no end to the texts that one could read. How does one manage, given the assumption that a scholar must be fully versed in everything in order to make a claim about anything? Do we need to know everything to say something?
That essential skill of “not reading” flies in the face of how students believe that scholars operate, and challenges the very heart of their identities. Senior scholars are well aware that they often lack detailed knowledge about the citations that are sprinkled like salt over the papers published in their discipline. Often, academics rely upon the summary that an author provides at the start of a paper, giving a whole new meaning to “abstract knowledge.” We realize that when others cite (and mistake) our own research, the situation is no different. To new graduate students, however, this may come as a shock.
To understand the politics of reading in graduate school, we gathered focus groups of graduate students from half a dozen departments in the humanities and social sciences and asked what reading meant to them. The results were surprising, perhaps even to the students themselves, who struggle to do it all but settle for doing what they can. As one anthropology student explained, “What I heard and what I continue to hear is that you have to learn how not to read everything. And I don’t do that. I need to turn every page and look at it. If I don’t, I don’t feel I’ve done my due diligence. But I know other people whose strategy is to find ways to skim, and they learn that in grad school because of the reading load.” So how does this student manage? Believing that he needs to read articles or chapters in total, he avoids the problem by not reading some of the assignments, choosing what to avoid in full and what to avoid in part.
Other students chain themselves to the page. One graduate student in philosophy admitted with chagrin, “I never really learned the skill of skimming. It’s very easy to get lost if I don’t look very closely. So the end result is I spend a lot of my day reading. ... Doing that thoroughly does take quite a lot of time.” Sometimes groups of students decide to divide the workload, so that each student is responsible for reading a chapter or article and then writing a memorandum to share. But that technique has its own problems. One graduate student in sociology explained that although she had been invited to be in a study group in which participants would divide up the reading, she felt unable to let others read for her. She needed her own interpretation of the text, not that of a fellow student.
Students do eventually learn how to skim, but the process is both difficult and distasteful. It requires a new way to think about the relationship between the self and the text, between identity and knowledge. It requires learning to read again, rethinking the sources of academic success that allowed them to reach this point. And this happens in an environment in which reputations are always in play. Students know that faculty members judge them, not only on their own terms but also in comparison to their cohort. As a result, reading becomes a game of self-presentation.
The survivalist reading practiced in graduate school challenges the very meaning of being a student, as students understand the matter. What they imagined graduate school to be is quite different from the sometimes startling and troubling reality. Just like overwhelmed medical students, these young men and women see their idealism wane as they realize that the knowledge they are capable of acquiring is limited. To come to terms with how reading must be done in that world is part of what graduate training is all about. In this chill realism, however, there is a message: Skills are always approximate, but an identity is forever.
