In a time when college students are increasingly distracted by digital reels and clips, a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland has bucked the trend by assigning full-length novels and challenging texts to his American literature class, with surprising success. Writing in the February 2026 issue of The Atlantic, the educator, who has taught English since 2007, described his fall semester experience with 32 mostly science-major students, many of whom arrived unprepared for deep reading but ultimately engaged deeply with works like Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
The professor, reflecting on broader trends in education, noted that over the past 15 years, high school English teachers have dramatically reduced reading assignments. According to a recent survey cited in the article, these teachers are now assigning fewer than three books per year to their students. This shift aligns with a national concern about declining literacy: One-third of high-school seniors tested in 2024 were found to lack basic reading skills, as reported by testing organizations.
His colleague Rose Horowitch, also quoted in the piece, highlighted the issue: “Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.” The professor shared his initial doubts entering the classroom last fall, amid anecdotes and statistics about eroding attention spans fueled by smartphones, computers, and the rise of artificial intelligence tools that students use to outsource their work.
Despite these challenges, the course—a survey spanning American literature from 1660 to the present—proved transformative. Instead of relying on excerpts, the professor structured the class to spend several days or even weeks on single authors, reading entire novels, nonfiction works, and long poems. Key texts included Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, and Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” By the semester's end, as students reached the final sentence of Morrison’s novel, the professor admitted he had underestimated their potential.
I am now convinced that I was wrong to listen to the ostensible wisdom of the day—and that teachers of literature are wrong to give up assigning the books we loved ourselves. There may be plenty of good reasons to despair over the present. The literature classroom should not be one of them.
The class format emphasized sustained engagement, requiring students to dedicate significant time to reading without the constant pull of monetized distractions. To verify their efforts, the professor had them identify obscure passages from memory during quizzes, without notes or devices. What emerged, he observed, was a reclamation of time: Students experienced life unmediated by screens, echoing themes in American literature itself, such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which critiques modern distractions.
To adapt to shorter attention spans and prevent reliance on AI, the professor replaced traditional take-home essays with in-class “flash essays”—timed writing prompts given on the spot. These assignments, lasting about an hour, forced students to write without preparation, embracing uncertainty. One prompt asked them to “Write about a moment in an Emily Dickinson poem that you don’t understand.” Another required describing a morning routine “in the style of Faulkner.”
A student approached the professor after the first such essay, expressing frustration at writing “into the complete unknown, rather than with a plan in mind.” The professor responded that this discomfort was intentional, drawing on W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, where the protagonist grapples with language as “at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance.” The goal was to foster “negative capability,” a term from John Keats describing the ability to endure uncertainty.
The professor’s approach stemmed partly from his own experiences. He recalled reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as an undergraduate on a warm spring night in 2002, propped against library steps until dawn. Earlier, at age 13, a teacher introduced him to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, texts that initially overwhelmed him with their density—pages on Paris’s sewer system bored him, yet moments like Eponine’s death moved him to tears.
This iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what the professor believes literature classes should cultivate. He criticized the educational bromide of “meeting students where they are,” advocating instead for Walt Whitman’s idea: “Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up.” In his class, initial resistance to Thoreau’s musings on 19th-century New England real estate gave way to appreciation for the author’s distractions as a call to awakeness: “We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep half our life.”
Broader context underscores the stakes. A November 2024 Atlantic article on elite college students unable to read books highlighted similar issues, while Idrees Kahloon warned in another piece that “America is sliding toward illiteracy.” The professor acknowledged university challenges—constrained resources, hobbled research missions, and threats to academic freedom—but argued that narratives of reading’s “end” are self-inflicted, a form of collective depression.
Defenses of humanities, as outlined, emphasize empathy from imagining other lives, refreshed language from poems, and personal expression through imitation. Poet Adrienne Rich, teaching in New York’s City College system, put it this way: “What interests me in teaching is less the emergence of the occasional genius than the overall finding of language by those who did not have it and by those who have been used and abused to the extent that they lacked it.” Even skeptics might see books as escape or “vice,” per critic Adam Kirsch.
Yet the professor contended that justifying literature solely by its benefits misses the point. Reading Moby-Dick isn’t about transferable skills or efficiency; it’s a singular practice with intrinsic value. His students dove into Faulkner’s Bundren family saga not for utility, but because he vouched for its worth: “I said that time was precious, and that we needed to take some of it back for ourselves. So we did.”
Reactions to the article, published online at theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/youth-reading-books-professors/685825/, have sparked discussions among educators. While some praise the return to rigorous reading, others note practical barriers in underfunded schools. A summary from the site itself states: “College kids aren’t reading novels—but that’s because not enough teachers are asking them to.”
Looking ahead, the professor’s experiment suggests a path forward amid tech’s encroachment. As AI and short-form content proliferate, advocates call for faculty to “double down on the cure” rather than compromise. Whether this model spreads to other campuses remains to be seen, but for now, it offers hope that whole books can still captivate a generation raised on snippets.
In Cleveland’s academic circles, the fall 2023 semester at Case Western—though the article references 2024 testing data—stands as a quiet rebuttal to despair. Students who once scrolled through distractions found themselves en route with the Bundrens, pondering Thoreau’s ice-cracking sounds, and emerging with voices honed in the dark of uncertainty.