Is Reading Over for Gen Z Students?

Students are arriving at college woefully unprepared, professors say. Many lack the necessary endurance to read long passages, and some question the point of reading at all. Why is this happening? And what can be done about it?

Guest: Beth McMurtrie, senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education

Related Reading:

• Is This the End of Reading? Students are coming to college less able and less willing to read. Professors are stymied.
• Are You Assigning Too Much Reading? Or Just Too Much Boring Reading?
• The Loss of Things I Took for Granted: Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively. (Slate)

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.

Beth McMurtrie A lot of the faculty members I’ve talked to frequently say, I don’t know what’s going to happen to these students once they enter the working world. We’re not talking about, wow, they didn’t read Moby Dick. We’re talking about these fundamental critical reading and writing skills that students are really struggling to master, and maybe even don’t necessarily see the point of mastering through very little fault of their own.

Jack Stripling Something’s happening with college students in reading. Or maybe it’s better to say something’s not happening. College professors are used to assigning work that doesn’t get done that comes with the territory. But many now say that their students are coming to campus woefully unprepared. The class of Gen Z, born in the iPhone age is struggling to read and comprehend long passages. They may be distracted by a barrage of social media. Some of them, professors will tell you, don’t see the point of learning at all. Why is this happening? What does it say about what college is for? And is there anything we can do about it? My colleague Beth McMurtrie, a senior writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, has been wrestling with these issues. Today, we’ll talk about her reporting, which centers on a striking question: is this the end of reading? So, Beth, I guess we can get started here.

Beth McMurtrie Hi, Jack. How are you?

Jack Stripling Well, we’re going to start by talking about you. You’ve been at the Chronicle a long time, but I think it was around 2017 that you started specifically looking at teaching and maybe a good place to start before we get into the meat of this conversation, is to talk a little bit about what you’ve seen maybe change in the conversation around teaching and the conversation around students. Just just in your time on this beat.

Beth McMurtrie Yeah. It’s a fascinating beat to cover. I think a lot of people want to trace a lot of the changes that they have seen in students and in teaching and learning back to the pandemic. And certainly the pandemic was hugely influential in shaping how teaching is done, how students think about learning, how professors feel about their own roles in the classroom. A lot of what I started to report around in 2020 had to do with student disengagement. And, you know, there are pretty obvious reasons why students were not having a great time on zoom, and, and professors were struggling to connect with students on zoom. But those challenges, interestingly, continued well after the pandemic was over and students came back into the classroom and I started to report maybe around 2022 about how students were completely disengaged in class. They weren’t doing the work. They weren’t showing up, a lot of them. They weren’t speaking. They seemed really anxious. And professors are really struggling to figure out what was happening with the students in front of them.

Jack Stripling That’s really interesting. I wonder if you could tell me a little more about the problem itself, because when we talk about, you know, a big question like, is this the end of reading? I’m sort of wondering what we mean by that. How does this manifest itself really?

Beth McMurtrie A lot of what professors have been reporting in the past year or so is that students simply aren’t doing the reading for class, but it’s not a matter of them say, being lazy and just not feeling like they were doing the reading. It was, I think, two things…generally speaking, it was a lack of reading endurance, meaning that anything over five pages was just too much for them. They would tell their professors they felt exhausted or they lost focus, or they simply couldn’t read at length. And I think another challenge that they were seeing was they lacked critical reading skills. So you would hear from professors that students couldn’t understand the gist of an argument, that they couldn’t contrast and compare the points of a couple of different readings. They couldn’t synthesize what they were reading without maybe fundamentally changing the meaning. Sometimes their vocabulary was lacking, you know, they struggled to sound out words. They would get lost in long sentences. And this also ties into writing, too. They had a lot of very similar struggles with writing as well.

Jack Stripling Do we have a sense of why this might be happening? I know that’s a huge question that everybody’s surely grappling with.

Beth McMurtrie Yeah, I think there are a lot of things going on here. I think the rise of social media has really changed the way we think about text and about reading. I think about this particular professor I spoke to who is an English professor, and he said, you know, he always would ask his students to tell a narrative about their own interaction with reading, their own reading history. And not that long ago they would talk about, you know, reading for pleasure or having their parents read to them at bedtime, you know, Harry Potter books and things like that. And in the last few years, they talk about things like reading on TikTok, reading on Instagram, texts, you know, so the way in which we’ve read has sort of shrunk and fundamentally changed. I think also during the pandemic, what we saw was a lot more leniency in the homework given and the grading done. So there were reasons for this leniency. I mean, the pandemic was a tough time, and a lot of high school teachers wanted to make sure that their students could kind of get through high school. They had a lot probably going on at home. Again, zoom school is pretty tough. What that did, though, unfortunately, is I think it gave students maybe a false sense of what they needed to do for school. Their expectations of themselves were lowered, how much homework they’re expected to do diminished, how much reading they’re expected to do diminished, and that really influenced and shaped their views coming into college.

Jack Stripling You did talk to some students about this, right? And I thought they were pretty candid with you.

Beth McMurtrie Yeah, I talked to a bunch of students, and one of the things that I hear from a lot of students was how much the pandemic shaped how they view school. I talked to this one student, Melissa Rich, who had said that when she was in high school, she had always been a very good student. She always did the work, she always participated in class. And then when the pandemic hit, she was a freshman in high school. And so, you know, second semester of ninth grade, things shut down. She was online all of 10th grade and came back in 11th grade. But in 10th grade, you know, they were just giving her worksheets, right? The cameras were off. Everybody was multitasking. They really didn’t expect a whole lot of her. And then as a result, she really just lost her motivation to do the work. I also heard students and this is.. I find this fascinating. Students are very frank about cheating. They don’t see it as a moral issue. They see it as ‘if you’re going to give me busywork, I’m not going to put much effort into it, because I don’t believe you’re even going to look at it.’ And it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And so one student I talked to said he pretty much just watched Netflix and cheated his way through the rest of high school. But at the same time, the same student was also talking about how he really feels like he struggles in college now with connecting with other human beings. And if he didn’t have his baseball team in college, if he didn’t have his coach and his teammates to basically be outside with every day and function as a team, he wasn’t going to get that motivation from his classes. He wasn’t going to get that motivation from his professors because they too seemed very disconnected. So it to me, it’s this fascinating brew of challenges that are happening both in students own minds, in their own lives, and then also they come to these college campuses where the professors are struggling and the set up the traditional ways in which classrooms are set up don’t necessarily meet students where they are

Jack Stripling - Interesting

Beth McMurtrie I also think and again, I’m not an expert on K-12, but I think too, sort of the rise of testing culture and the way reading is taught in high school when it comes to like AP courses or teaching to the test, a lot of professors would tell me that, for example, students would treat reading as a scavenger hunt. You know, you maybe.. you were given a paragraph or an excerpt of a novel, and you’re expected to kind of discern what the main point was or the writing style of that passage. It doesn’t really encourage long reading, deep reading, reading for pleasure. That’s the other thing. Reading for pleasure has gone way down. That’s made things challenging. I also think higher education itself has sort of had to look at its own practices when it comes to reading. A lot of academic texts are pretty boring, particularly for this generation of students. They don’t necessarily see the value in reading, you know, a 20 page academic article, and they may choose not to do it. They may choose to load it up into ChatGPT and get a summary. And so students, I think, are expecting more relevance in their schoolwork, and they may sort of turn against it if they feel like it’s, it’s boring. It’s not something the professor’s going to talk about in class or they have better things to do.

Jack Stripling Don’t we all? Yeah. I’m, I’m listening to what you’re saying, and I’m thinking there’s a lot new here. You know, there’s, there’s a lot post-2020 here. Yeah. And then I’m also hearing professors probably who had me as students thinking, these kids don’t do the work. They’re not into it. I can’t get them motivated. These feel like sort of classic problems. And so I wonder if you’ve rendered an opinion one way or the other on whether what we’re dealing with here is truly a new phenomenon or a remix of an old theme.

Beth McMurtrie So I had gone into it thinking it was not something new. It was just one of those ‘kids today’ sort of arguments. But then I read this piece by Adam Kotsko, who’s an assistant professor who teaches in a great books program at North Central College. He had written a piece for Slate, basically laying out an argument that there have been fundamental changes in the ways in which students are reading. Yes, they are reading less than they used to, but also their ability to read. Their ability to read at length and their ability to read critically has really changed. And some of it is what we just talked about with sort of the way social media is changing our relationship to reading and our lack of reading endurance. He also talked about something I hadn’t known about, which is the way in which reading is taught going all the way back to elementary school. Phonics really fell out of favor maybe 20 years ago or so in a lot of school districts, in a lot of states, and students weren’t taught to read in the way you and I were taught to read. And people are now spinning that forward to saying, maybe this is why some students struggle with reading. They see a word and they don’t know how to pronounce it out. They don’t know how to figure it out, and they freeze. When you don’t read for pleasure. It’s like not exercising, right? Like you struggle to really get absorbed in a text. You struggle to understand different points of view in a given novel or nonfiction piece. And that’s the thing that Kotsko had noticed in his students that they they simply couldn’t read critically. And it really kind of alarmed him because he was arguing that there are these multifaceted problems. You can’t just sort of take cell phones out of schools and expect students to read. You actually have to start thinking fundamentally about us as a society and as a culture, and our relationship to reading and the way that we teach children to read.

Jack Stripling Yeah. I mean, it seems like we’re talking already just sort of about the human experience changing here, which has a lot of gravity to it. I wonder if that’s why the piece in Slate, it seemed like that went gangbusters. I don’t have an inside scoop on it, but I’ve seen people continue to talk about it and continue to tweet about this issue. Why do you think that that was sort of a seminal moment in this conversation?

Beth McMurtrie First of all, I think all of us can relate to this problem of distraction, right? All of us have seen our ability to pick up something as simple as the newspaper or a magazine and sit down and read for pleasure, read for information, read for entertainment. Really go away. Right? Adults may have the ability to sit down and sort of force themselves to put their phone in the next room or whatever, but even then, it’s a real struggle. So I think on that level it resonated. The other reason why I think it resonated, and the story that I ended up writing really resonated, is because teaching is still a very private act. People don’t like to talk about their teaching challenges. It’s embarrassing if you go into your classroom and you try to start a discussion and nobody is talking, you feel like a failure. You feel like, what is wrong with me? Why can’t I get these kids talking? Why can’t I get them to read the 20 page article that I assigned a week ago? And then you either blame yourself or sometimes you do the whole ‘kids today’ thing and you blame them and you think that they’re lazy or stressed out. When you start to see it as a structural problem, a societal problem, an institutional problem– that’s when the light bulb goes on and you actually feel a little bit relieved and you realize many, many, many people are sharing the same concern and same challenges you are.

Jack Stripling I wonder whether the students themselves understand this. I guess if you grew up in this distracted age and none of your friends have powered through a novel, you might not see this as particularly abnormal. But I wonder, do they understand what’s happening?

Beth McMurtrie This generation of students is really, really self-aware, and they’re actually really self-critical. I mean, they’re very cynical too. And again, like I said, they expect their professors to give them good reasons as to why they should read X, Y, or Z, but they are keenly aware that they lack reading endurance. They’re very critical about their ability to stay focused. There’s this interesting to me, like perfectionist streak that runs through a lot of students, and I think maybe it comes from feeling like you’re always being watched on social media. But one of the things that professors told me is that in the old days, that quote unquote “old days,” ten years ago, 15 years ago, if a student was given a reading that was pretty hard. You know, a lot of college readings are pretty hard. And they had to do a writing assignment, they’d give it a shot. And, you know, as one professor said, you’d half ass it. You know, you turn something in. Now, what professors see is that students just freeze up, right? They panic. They think that they can’t do it. And so then they don’t do it. And this tells me that the students are both aware of their own shortcomings, but then feel like it is a personal failing, and they just kind of avoid the work altogether. They’re not willing to or not able to kind of wing it and to say, well, what the heck, I’ll give it a try.

Jack Stripling So can you tell us why students might feel like they have no margin for error, why they are such perfectionists?

Beth McMurtrie Well, I think it’s this margin for error, or the lack of margin for error really comes from this idea that college is so expensive and so competitive that they can’t afford to fail. I’ve heard stories from professors about students arguing that they can’t afford an A-minus, and that they need an A. I’ve heard stories from students who talk about if they failed a class, they would basically have to take out more loans to continue on through college. And there’s also a sense of competitiveness among their classmates. Right? You’re all fighting for a shrinking piece of the pie, so you have to be the best. Meaning you have to have the highest GPA, the longest resume, the most number of extracurriculars in order to get one of a shrinking number of well-paying, white collar jobs out there.

Jack Stripling I’m talking with Beth McMurtrie about college students struggling to read.

We’ll be back in a minute.

Jack Stripling - Well, I am curious to kind of get into the classroom a little bit and talk about how this plays out, and maybe we can talk about one of the professors that you talked to for this piece, Theresa MacPhail. Tell me a little bit about her story, how you came to know her and sort of her evolution. I found that pretty fascinating.

Beth McMurtrie Yeah. So MacPhail is an associate professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. She teaches courses like global health and medical humanities. And she had written something for us in 2019 that basically talked about the challenges of getting students to read. And she had a pretty frank assessment that a lot of students don’t do the reading. And she had some fairly optimistic solutions as to how she could get her students to read, you know, shorter readings, more lively readings, a mix of multimedia. And so it basically ended on a positive note. I reached out to her because I was really curious where she stands today five years later, especially after what I’d been hearing about all of the reading challenges. Well, it turns out that she is struggling just as much as every other professor out there. She can’t get students to do the reading anymore. She said approximately 70% of her students show up to class not having read, and nothing is working. Right? She basically came out and said, I don’t know what’s going on. My students are even worse off than they were when I wrote that piece. Nothing I’m drawing is really working.

Jack Stripling So she had sort of celebrated herself as somebody who had cracked the code a few years ago. Right?

Beth McMurtrie Exactly, exactly. She was clear eyed. She was realistic about what students were willing and able to do, and she adjusted accordingly. This time, she said, I know they were told to meet students where they are, but if I meet them any farther down, I’m not sure what I’m doing other than being a cruise director organizing a game of shuffleboard, because if students do not do the reading, then she can’t do the teaching. And so I said, well, what is that like? What does that mean? And she said, well, first of all….and she said, this is true for all of her colleagues. You have to assume 70% of students won’t do the reading. So if you create any class activities, any discussions around the readings, she said, you are going to have a dead class. It is going to be absolutely miserable, absolutely painful. So what she does instead is she goes through the readings in class. But what that means is you can’t advance beyond what you’re reading. You’re just reading the readings in class with students. It’s really frustrating, she said. You know, she doesn’t know a single professor who would assign an entire novel anymore, even the English professors. She does not think, interestingly, that her students are lazy because I asked her, well, have you talked to students about this? And she said, yeah, I asked them about this a lot. Part of it is that they’re on a STEM campus and so they prioritize their STEM classes. Interestingly, some of the STEM professors are starting to see this. But also it gets back to that whole issue we were talking about where if a student feels overwhelmed by all the work they have to do, they just freeze and they don’t do it. And she would talk to students and say, you know, you didn’t turn anything in. Do you realize you’re going to get a zero? Just try next time. Maybe you’ll get a 50, but a 50 is better than a zero.

Jack Stripling So is the solution just asking less and less of students?

Beth McMurtrie Uh….That is what professors are doing right now, right? They’re asking less and less of students. They’re shortening the readings, they’re reading in class. I think there are a whole bunch of strategies that professors are trying with limited success. Right? I think one of the interesting conversations that’s come out of this story, and come out of the conversations I’ve had with individual professors, is it goes back to the fact that students don’t know how to read critically because they haven’t had experience, and they were never taught it. And it sounds really weird to say, well, students weren’t taught to read, but the truth is, it takes a certain level of skill to read a dense text, to read a long text, to read a text that might have an abstract and footnotes and charts and graphs and whatever else you’re throwing at students. And so one of the things that more professors are starting to do with some success is use things like reading guides, or actually teach students the skills that they don’t have..that they didn’t come into college with. Which again, means you’re giving something up, right? You’re not teaching as much content. You’re teaching more skills.

Jack Stripling It’s remediation. Right?

Beth McMurtrie Yeah, it is, it is. But what’s the alternative?

Jack Stripling Well, I have to ask because I can sort of hear the political conversation in my head here, and I can hear listeners thinking, these snowflakes watch so much Netflix that they can’t be bothered with reading where, you know, and and I wonder if you heard that sentiment at all in people you talk to.

Beth McMurtrie Yeah. From some professors, I heard an intense frustration toward their students. And to me that actually says, you’ve got like double burnout going on. The students are burnt out and the professors are burnt out, because as soon as you start seeing the students as adversaries, I think you’ve kind of lost the game. I will say that interestingly, when it comes to like…you use the word “snowflake,” which has had very political dimensions. I think there is a political dimension to this story, and that is that for decades now, both Republicans and Democrats have talked about college as a means to an end. Right? They don’t talk about college as a place to explore and learn and grow. They don’t talk about college as a place necessarily, to learn how to become a citizen of the world, and to learn how to debate those who think differently than you. They talk about it as a place to get some skills where you can get a job. And I think this creates a very transactional mindset in students. This is one of the things underlying that question that a lot of students have of, you know, why do I have to read this? Or why do we even have to take this class in the humanities or the social sciences? And it goes toward this feeling of if it doesn’t have immediate practical value, then it doesn’t have value. And so that is a message that both political parties have been preaching for decades. And I think this is one dimension of the result that we’re seeing with this generation of students, combined with, of course, an extremely high price tag. So when a student comes to college and says, okay, I’m paying $70,000 and I have to take this world religions class, and you can’t tell me how it applies, how it’s relevant to my going into the workplace and getting a job. You know, that is the reality that a lot of professors are facing today in their classroom, that mental calculation that students are making before they even set foot in your class.

Jack Stripling That is a fascinating downstream effect, because I think that if we think about this over time, what you’re referencing is political conversations that seem to me to center around things like majors and programs. Even Barack Obama said some pretty denigrating things about the career prospects for art history majors. So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that at some point that messaging would be absorbed by the students themselves and leave this sort of talk radio sphere where it has tended to play out. I mean, it sounds like that’s what you’re sort of hearing from students.

Beth McMurtrie Yes, absolutely. And it’s pretty alarming because I think it also creates this real tension in them as well, psychologically. And I think it also leads to that disengagement, anxiety, stress that they feel like there’s no room for error. They can’t get anything less than an A. Everything has to be extremely efficient and high functioning, and they have to do very well and they can’t make any mistakes. And that is true both for the kid who’s trying to get out of his blue collar neighborhood and get a white collar job, as well as it goes to the student at the Ivy League institution that needs to make sure that they get that great job on Wall Street. It’s pretty pervasive. It’s really unfortunate because we all have imagination. We all have curiosity. We all have this desire to feel like we can make a difference in the world. And these students have it too. They just have been told that there’s no room for that in their education. It’s ahh, it’s kind of heartbreaking talking to some of these students.

Jack Stripling Yeah, it sounds like a very sad phenomenon. I’m not naive enough to think that we all just loved learning when we were all in college, or folks who were fortunate enough to do that. But at the same time, I certainly remember getting, you know, lost in a book in grad school, getting lost in a provocative lecture. I guess that doesn’t really pay the bills. And I wonder whether you think there’s.. are you picking up on sort of a bittersweetness in this conversation when you talk to people?

Beth McMurtrie Yeah, I do, I mean, I’ve heard students and professors alike say that this generation knows that they’re never going to be able to afford to buy a house, right? A lot of students today said they don’t want to have kids because of the climate collapse. So they already feel like the system and society is set up against them, and yet they’re still going to college. Part of it is out of hope, and part of it is out of necessity. They still are a very hopeful generation. You know, when I talked to MacPhail about what is kind of great about this group of students and she said that, you know, they are very creative, they are very inclusive, and they care very much about each other and about the world. And when you can tap into that, then great things happen. And I think, you know, when we were talking earlier about ways forward, again, this isn’t on an individual level, but when professors can convey to students that the subject matter is exciting, that it answers some of the deep questions that they might have about life and about the world around them, when their opinion matters and when the professor themselves is excited about what they’re teaching, and they know students by name that can actually make a difference in. The students actually do get excited and they want to do the work. The problem is, lining up all of that criteria in a class is challenging, and it doesn’t often happen. And I often ask students, you know, what classes did you like and what classes did you not like? And oftentimes it came down to ‘the professor knew my name,’’they wanted to hear what I had to say, ‘classes were discussion based,’ ‘the readings or podcasts or videos were relevant to the things that I care about.’ And those were the classes that you and I both remember that were exciting to them and have always, I think, been exciting to students. The problem is those dynamics are just not happening as frequently as they used to.

Jack Stripling I mean, I’m sure professors want to say and it goes back to what you said about the shame factor. I’m sure professors want to say if I was just a more dynamic teacher, I could reach these students. And, you know, maybe learning their names is a good start. I can totally understand that. But it does sound like you’re talking about a confluence of forces that have brought us to a different territory. That kind of mythical idea, the Dead Poets Society teacher, you know, who ignites something in students is up against a series of forces that are unlike anything we’ve seen, and that good teaching might not be enough. Is that something that you feel from your reporting?

Beth McMurtrie I don’t know if good teaching is enough, but I don’t think there’s enough good teaching, and I don’t necessarily lay it at the feet of the professors. I mean, professors in graduate school are not taught how to teach. They get maybe one semester of training, and then they’re thrown into the deep end of the pool. And 70% of faculty members now are adjuncts. So they are in a financially precarious situation. Some of those core general education courses where you might be able to spark students imagination, a lot of those are taught by adjuncts, and there are a lot of them are taught in large rooms, large lecture halls, because more students are being packed into these places. And you also now are more likely to have a room full of students who may be working 20 hours or more a week and they might be coming to class exhausted. So if there’s bad teaching, it’s in part because of all of those things. And faculty members are also just really burnt out, too. They’re really, really burnt out. The pandemic was really rough. We haven’t even talked about ChatGPT, which is an existential crisis in the minds of a lot of faculty members.

Jack Stripling But it does sound like you’re describing almost like an environmentally caused disease, like it would be very hard to isolate the one thing we could change..it is almost too many variables to even contemplate that. Right? So it lays out for me a sort of dystopian future where maybe people are trying to get kids through college, get them educated at some high level, you know, create an educated citizenry without the tools that we have come to think are part of a college education, including reading. Right. And I wonder what you think college is like if people don’t read anymore. Can we have college without reading?

Beth McMurtrie I wouldn’t think so. And I know that a lot of the faculty members I’ve talked to frequently say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to these students once they enter the working world.’ We’re not talking about, wow, they didn’t read Moby Dick. They’re not going to be able to function where they’re talking about these fundamental critical reading and writing skills that students are really struggling to master, and maybe even don’t necessarily see the point of mastering through very little fault of their own. Right. So what this is going to mean for future workers and for our economy, I think, is still an open question. On a more hopeful note, I think there are some people who are trying to take a really long view about reading. A couple of professors I’ve talked to interestingly mentioned Plato’s Phaedrus, which is a Greek dialog, and I am not up on my Greek dialog, so I’ll try to.

Jack Stripling I’m impressed with the name drop. So from sage.

Beth McMurtrie I wrote it down before we started talking. So in Plato’s Phaedrus is the dialog between Socrates and Phaedrus, and at one point they talk about the invention of writing. And keep in mind this was written 2500 years ago. And one person says, ‘well, the invention of writing was fantastic because it is a tool for remembering.’ And the other person says, ‘no, it’s a tool for forgetting, because if you can write something down, you don’t have to remember it.’ And they were pointing out the shift from an oral tradition to a written tradition. And the point of that was to say that any time there is a major revolution or say like a major technological revolution, we tend to mourn what is being lost, and we don’t yet know what is to come. I mean, nobody today would mourn the loss of the oral tradition, right? Everybody today is mourning the loss of reading. But again, if you go back to this idea that we are innately imaginative and creative and curious people, then the challenge becomes, how do you tap into that and develop that? If people are not willing or able to read at length, are there other means of doing that? And that’s the question that I think these kind-of big thinkers are thinking about, you know, the people who run the great books programs, the people who are really thinking critically about the liberal arts. If students aren’t reading at length. I mean, you can teach them certain reading skills. But if we’re losing that interest and ability to read at length, what other ways can we tap into that creativity, that imagination, that connection to past thinkers? And that is the big question, I think, facing academia.

Jack Stripling You know, I don’t think the story has to have a happy ending so I’m not going to force you to make one for me. But I do wonder, with the benefit of having talked to both the students and the professors. Is there a future in which you see this working out? Because when I hear this, I think I’m in The Matrix. You know, like, I think that people are walking through the world without the benefit of having had the relationships with literature that you and I got to have. And I worry about that. But I wonder whether you have talked to people who look at this, maybe with a glass half full view.

Beth McMurtrie Well, I had an interesting conversation with somebody like that. Stuart Patterson, he’s the chair of the Great Book School at North Central College, and he’s a colleague of Adam Kotsko’s. And he said he’s not necessarily an optimist, but he’s sort of not worried either, about what is to come, because he assumes that there will be a way forward. I think one of the more immediate ways forward has to do with multimedia, and that’s something that people are trying in their courses using YouTube and podcasting and other forms of expression. And students love that stuff. I mean, I read a survey recently where like something like 45% of Gen Z students consider themselves creators, and that’s kind of phenomenal, right? You’re a creator. Like, what could be more awesome than that? You’re not a passive receiver. So if you think that podcasts and YouTube lectures or discussion based learning can, if not supplant at least supplement enough basic reading that you could get that depth of thought and critical analysis, then that is the optimistic view. I’m agnostic, I don’t know. I feel like we’re right in the middle of something. How would I know? Or how would any of us know what the future is?

Jack Stripling Well, the irony is not lost on me that you and I have been writing and reporting for decades, and we’re here talking on a podcast that we’re just getting started, so.

Beth McMurtrie Right. And it’s been engaging and interesting in ways that maybe just reading an article isn’t. Right?

Jack Stripling Certainly for me, that’s my hope. Beth, you’re awesome. Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate the conversation. I want to keep having the conversation because I just think it’s so interesting. And as you say, the story isn’t over, right?

Beth McMurtrie Exactly. More to come.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Special thanks to our colleagues, Brock Read, Laura Krantz, Sarah Brown, Claire Wallace, Ron Coddington, Josh Hatch, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.