{"id":354621,"date":"2026-06-10T13:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T13:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/354621\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T13:00:53","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T13:00:53","slug":"reaching-a-crisis-point-uc-berkeley-humanities-professors-lower-expectations-for-assigned-readings-academics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/354621\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Reaching a crisis point\u2019: UC Berkeley humanities professors lower expectations for assigned readings | Academics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Faculty in the humanities are grappling with a changing educational landscape as debates<\/a> arise regarding student preparation and nationwide headlines question students\u2019 abilities to read longer texts.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Carlos Nore\u00f1a, a UC Berkeley history professor specializing in ancient history,said the amount of reading he could comfortably assign while expecting students to read a \u201csubstantial\u201d portion of it has dropped over the past 20 years at UC Berkeley.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it\u2019s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,\u201d Nore\u00f1a said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nore\u00f1a 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For the course he plans to teach in the fall, Nore\u00f1a said he plans to assign about 35 pages per week.\u00a0<\/p>\n

English professor Grace Lavery, said while she noticed some students struggling with denser Charles Dickens novels, these issues weren\u2019t new or necessarily problematic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason is that the Dickens novels I teach are long and difficult,\u201d Lavery said. \u201cI 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lavery said she has not cut readings in recent years; in fact, the workloads for her classes have gotten \u201cslightly heavier.\u201d While she tries to maintain a reasonable amount of reading \u2014 for example, not assigning more than two critical essays on one primary text \u2014 Lavery said she took struggling with a novel as a sign of intellectual growth.<\/p>\n

Some faculty said they are increasingly excerpting longer works rather than having students read full books.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of this is to spare students the cost of purchasing books, but part of it is also acquiescing to my sense of \u2014 and complaints about \u2014 the amount of reading assigned, though those complaints, curiously, haven\u2019t gone away as I\u2019ve shrunk the number of pages assigned,\u201d Brilliant said in an email.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brilliant also noted that the number of books and pages he assigned have shrunk over the 22 years that he has taught at UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n

Fellow history professor Trevor Jackson said he assigned three full books for his world history survey course. While he didn\u2019t find that students struggled with them on a concerning or new level,\u00a0he noted a decline across the board in people reading entire texts, especially nonfiction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jackson also cut the amount of reading in his classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. After finding that shorter texts made in-class discussions more fruitful, there have been cases where he continued to cut reading \u2014 but not because students were struggling with it.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving an in-depth conversation about 10 pages is more pedagogically useful than having a shallow conversation about 100 pages,\u201d Jackson said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Generally, faculty did not see a drop in student comprehension of reading material, although some did pinpoint blind spots in skill or technique.\u00a0<\/p>\n

English lecturer John Shoptaw, who teaches poetry, said he has noticed his students come in not yet knowing how to hear and analyze the musicality of an Emily Dickinson poem.\u00a0Sometimes, they also have trouble distinguishing between figurative and literal meanings.<\/p>\n

Julia Fawcett, who teaches theater, dance and performance studies, said her students do well with identifying arguments in critical articles, but have more trouble with fictional texts that don\u2019t have a line of argument to follow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While not all faculty have strictly banned the use of AI in their humanities courses,\u00a0many of them found its presence to take away from the experience of reading and learning.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jackson said his students avoid using AI to write, but sometimes ask it to summarize texts while reading.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI found that very upsetting, because I\u2019ve read the AI summary of my own book, and it\u2019s all wrong,\u201d Jackson said. \u201cEven a good summary is still not grappling with the text.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Faculty in the humanities are grappling with a changing educational landscape as debates arise regarding student preparation and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[144574,144575,144579,144578,144576,143,145,144,144577,149],"class_list":["post-354621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-carlos-norea","tag-grace-lavery","tag-john-shoptaw","tag-julia-fawcett","tag-mark-brilliant","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-trevor-jackson","tag-uc-berkeley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}