‘Reaching a crisis point’: UC Berkeley humanities professors lower expectations for assigned readings
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Anonymous
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Faculty in the humanities are grappling with a changing educational landscape as debates arise regarding student preparation and nationwide headlines question students’ abilities to read longer texts.
Some faculty across the humanities report cutting down the amount of reading they assign to students, though others have found that students are keeping up with a standard workload the same way they would have years ago. Carlos Noreña, a UC Berkeley history professor specializing in ancient history,said the amount of reading he could comfortably assign while expecting students to read a “substantial” portion of it has dropped over the past 20 years at UC Berkeley. “We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” Noreña said. Noreña said while lectures are an important component of class, he assigns primary sources and critical writing to his students because the goal is to push them to read the material and develop their own views. When he first came to UC Berkeley in 2005, he would assign 100 pages per week for an upper division course, with the expectation that students would read 75 to 80 pages. For the course he plans to teach in the fall, Noreña said he plans to assign about 35 pages per week. English professor Grace Lavery, said while she noticed some students struggling with denser Charles Dickens novels, these issues weren’t new or necessarily problematic. “The reason is that the Dickens novels I teach are long and difficult,” Lavery said. “I imagine that if I had been teaching these novels in the same way back in the 1950s, I would have had exactly the same problems.” Lavery said she has not cut readings in recent years; in fact, the workloads for her classes have gotten “slightly heavier.” While she tries to maintain a reasonable amount of reading — for example, not assigning more than two critical essays on one primary text — Lavery said she took struggling with a novel as a sign of intellectual growth. Some faculty said they are increasingly excerpting longer works rather than having students read full books. Margaret Byrne Chair in American History Mark Brilliant said the earliest version of the History of California and the American West course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts. https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/reaching-a-crisis-point-uc-berkeley-humanities-professors-lower-expectations-for-assigned-readings/article_a1e6e366-9c0b-48a2-b662-5191a7120bf4.html |
Anonymous
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It really depends on the discipline. For studying literature, you should be reading full texts. The entire point is to study this work in its full form. Reading "excerpts" of Dickens or epic poems will produce shallow understanding of the texts.
History, however, can be covered a variety of ways. Older, denser texts on ancient history can be excerpted and anthologized. This method has long been used to teach undergraduate students. Those who have the interest to explore full texts can do so in graduate work. The history professor interviewed sounds ridiculous. I guarantee his students have been skimming large swaths of his assignments for decades. What he is likely really annoyed by is the inability to give students who truly do not learn the material the low grades they deserve without getting harassed. But that is another issue. |
Anonymous
| Excerpts are for squids. |
Anonymous
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If you’re good enough to get into college, you should be able to handle reading full texts.
We stopped reading excepts in elementary school. |
Anonymous
| 100 pages a week sounds like a freshman year course for STEM majors. Nortena seems to have never had particularly high standards. DD does history at an ivy and some of her classes give as much as 1,000 pages a week to read. |
Anonymous
1,000 pages a week is fiction. |
Anonymous
That isn’t the case anymore in many public schools. |
Anonymous
| We should all be sending our kids to UChicago, just saying, no one seems to have any standards any longer. The UChicago haters can whine all they want, only if their kids go to Oxbridge/Yale/MIT/Caltech will I care to listen. Shameful people. |
Anonymous
It’s a seminar class that meets twice a week. 2 200 page analyses or critical texts and a 100 page supplementary reading were very common. 1000 pages is not an insane amount for a humanities major, especially for schools where a significant amount are going into public policy or law adjacent fields. |
Anonymous
Isn’t the case in many schools, period. |
Anonymous
In college, I was assigned to read the Iliad twice over the course of a week, which comes to around that depending on the translation. |
Anonymous
I had a professor that expected you read every text 3 times, and had required 1000 word reflections for each read, for each text. He sometimes assigned 5+ texts. 1000 pages is nothing. |
Anonymous
DC'25 at an ivy for undergrad had 200-300 pages a week for intros, had 500+ pages a week for grad level courses. In grad school at a different ivy, also around 500-600 pages a week per class. |
Anonymous
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^that's 200-300 per week per class and 500-600 per week per class
total definitely over 1000 a week by upperclass coursework humanities |
Anonymous
You read a translation? I was required to learn the Homeric Greek and read the original. |