One of the rites of passage of middle and high school used to be reading books assigned by a teacher.

I remember being pleasantly surprised by some of those compulsory reads and absolutely hating some others.

Sorry, John Steinbeck, the Grapes of Wrath really is a brilliant book, but 15-year-old me was not quite in that headspace.

But in recent years, reading lists at a lot of schools have been culled to the point that it's possible to earn a high school diploma without ever having made your way through a single full-length novel,

let alone a handful each semester, which means there are students attending some of the very

best universities in this country who are not prepared to take on what used to be considered

college-level reading. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. To be clear, this is not a

case of students who lack basic literacy skills and might need some remedial help to catch up to

their peers. These are the students whose grades and test scores earned them admission to

highly coveted schools, only to report to their professors that they can't possibly slog through an

entire narrative as required by the class. Educators were stunned as they encountered the first

students to object to this amount of reading. But now, as my guest has learned, some of them are

responding by asking less of students. Rose Horowitz is assistant editor at The Atlantic, which published her article,

the elite college students who can't read books. Rose, welcome to think. Chris, thank you so much

for having me. I'm excited to talk about the article. You open the article by introducing us to Nicholas

Dames, who's been teaching a course required of all Columbia University students for more

than 25 years. It's called Literature Humanities, which is what kind of a fancy way of saying,

survey of great books? Yes, so he's been teaching it on and off since 1998. But for the last 10 years or

so, he has found growing numbers of his students gobsmacked by the reading list.

This is something beyond just welcome to the rigors of an Ivy League education, I take it.

Yes. So something that was really interesting about talking to Nick Dames was that he's a historian of the novel. And so, you know, he knows that people

are always worried about, you know, young people's reading and, you know, whether young people are

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