Rose Horowitch and the Obsession with Belief over Empiricism

The Atlantic has been referred to as “the worst magazine in America,” and after reading Rose Horwitch’s dishonest—and dangerous—piece, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” I have to say that Current Affairs went easy on them.

It’s been a while since there’s been a full-on screed here at Three Percent, but I’m infuriated that not only is this article  getting some level of social media traction (people I truly respect have sent this to me, or written about it, but I feel like they haven’t read it, which is another sort of thinkpiece some blowhard wannabe pundit can pick up on), but that it was published in the first place.

Let’s start with the premise: College professors have noticed that college students at “elite” universities have trouble finishing complete books because in high school they have “never been required to read an entire book.” They are “assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.” As a result, professors at Columbia have to trim their classes because these students can’t handle the reading load, and, presumably, culture is going down the shitter as a result. Horowitch: “To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.”

This argument is a perfect exemplar of today’s op-ed obsessed content economy: is it true? WHO KNOWS! But does it sound plausible? Does it give you something to rail against? FOR SURE. It’s Thanksgiving dinner fodder: “Kids sure are dumb these days. They can’t even read all of Crime and Punishment!” (“Generally, they only read ‘Crime'” is the most appropriate response.)

Let’s put aside the bad faith nature of Horowitch’s argument for a minute—and the question as to whether or not finishing War and Peace or The Iliad makes a discernible difference in one’s life, accomplishments, abilities—and just look at her research. Because, if you’re going to make a claim that “students can’t read books cover-to-cover anymore,” then you must have some watertight data about reading trends comparing say, students in each decade from the 1950s till today, or even over the past twenty years, perhaps with an emphasis on reading stamina (we’re not even talking about comprehension, just the “ability” to read a book from start to finish, from page one till FIN) as impacted by the pandemic.

Well, because this is the fucking Atlantic, you shouldn’t be surprised that data is not only negligible, the totality of it exists in one of the squishiest evidentiary statements I’ve ever seen in print:

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences.

“No comprehensive data,” “majority of,” “similar experiences” = must be true!

Holy shit this is such bad reasoning. I don’t even have to pull the “small sample size” card for this one . . . Although, I do want to point out that NOT A SINGLE STUDENT was interviewed for this piece. Instead, it’s all anecdotal stuff that professors would say at a cocktail party for laughs and so that everyone could commiserate over how “teaching is so much harder now, because students are dumber.” Ah yes, we’re martyrs for Great Literature! Fighting the good fight against . . . smartphones?

After an anecdote from the chair of Georgetown’s English department about how students have “trouble staying focused on even a sonnet”:

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in the reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing.

“Smartphones are distracting” is the weakest explanatory argument I can imagine for why college students don’t finish novels. Not only are smartphones distracting to everyone, young or old, book readers or not, but using this as the only proposed explanation for this “problem” (which, again, may not be even true—there is no data) in the face of many others is the sort of argumentative mistake I would ding in an essay from one of my freshman students. Maybe the texts being assigned are truly boring? (1000% I’m checking sports scores instead of reading a sonnet.) Maybe students are truly overburdened by assignments in STEM classes? Maybe they finish a dozen unassigned books a semester, just not War and Peace?

That last flippant comment for why students don’t read every line of The Iliad actually points to what I think Horowitch is truly concerned about: It’s not that students don’t read books cover to cover, it’s that they don’t read the right books.

This is actually evidenced in “The Atlantic Did Me Dirty” by Carrie M. Santos-Thomas, a high school teacher who was interviewed by Horowitch for this piece.

As Horowitch points out, I am just “one public-high school teacher in Illinois,” but while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system, my colleagues and I have developed professional toolboxes with endless other ways to inspire our students to read about justice, compassion, and redemption. [. . .]

Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. Frustratingly, despite the numerous examples I provided of students reading books cover-to-cover in my class, Horowitch opted to include only the unit that, like the original rhapsodes of the bronze age, I excerpt and abridge.

Here’s what Horowitch said about Santos-Thomas:

One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.)

Again, the logic of this paragraph—used to be structured around books, but now the Odyssey unit includes music and TED Talks—is so flimsy that, again, I would push back on a freshman who included this in a paper. (And that’s not to take shots at freshman; of the 33 freshman I’ve taught, “the majority” could write papers of “similar quality” to Horowitch’s “article.”)

I can’t let this rant hit its natural stopping point without pointing out the classism that’s both implicit in the article’s title (“oh the elite students can’t read! Clutching my pearls!”), and explicitly classist shit delineated below:

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.

Yeah, those kids at community colleges and “nonselective universities” (gross) might not even be literate, so of course they can’t finish a book. But what about the future leaders of our country graduating from places like Yale! Which, of course, is where Horowitch went to . . . quite recently in fact.

At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

To be specific, Horowitch got her BA in History in May 2023. You wouldn’t know it given the agist hand-wringing she’s trafficking in, but again, The Atlantic is the worst magazine in America. Too bad they’re so concerned about students flipping pages from beginning to end, and not about being able to publish actually researched journalism.