In 2024, an essay in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch tapped into anxieties already circulating across elite higher education with its provocative title: “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” The article alleged, among other claims, that students at Ivy League and other elite universities increasingly struggled to complete full books. Professors at Princeton, Georgetown, and Columbia described undergraduates overwhelmed by reading lists that once would have seemed unremarkable. One professor reported students “bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester”. Another observed that students struggled to sustain attention through even a 14-line sonnet.

At Oxford, the premise initially sounds absurd. It is difficult to think of a university more entangled with the idea of reading. The institution remains organised around libraries, primary texts, and tutorial reading lists that have become semi-mythological in undergraduate culture. Even maths students do not simply study maths; according to their Bod cards, they “read for” a degree. Entire pedagogies here rest on assumptions that students will disappear into novels, criticism, and archives before resurfacing with an essay and an original argument.

Yet, the real concern underlying Horowitch’s article was never simply whether students still technically read books. The students she described were perfectly capable readers in the conventional sense. They could decode texts, absorb information, and write essays. The anxiety centred instead on reading stamina: the capacity to sustain concentration through long arguments, difficult prose, ambiguity, and slow accumulation of meaning. Reading, in this account, had become increasingly fragmented – broken into excerpts, summaries, strategically selected passages, and material skimmed for argumentative utility rather than experienced in full. 

At the same time, complaints about declining student reading stretch back generations. Every academic era seems convinced that the current cohort reads less attentively than the last. Horowitch’s article occasionally drifts toward a familiar genre of civilisational panic disguised as pedagogy. The issue, then, may be less about whether students still want to read deeply than whether universities structurally permit it. 

There is reason to think these concerns extend beyond anecdotes. Research on reading habits suggests that long-form reading has declined over the past two decades, with a study finding that about 55% of surveyed professors said they had cut reading assignments (often because students weren’t completing them). Scholars studying university reading habits increasingly describe students becoming more selective and strategic: reading not necessarily to dwell on a text but to extract enough material to survive assessment.

The explanation offered by many educators is not that students have become less intelligent or less motivated. Rather, educational structures themselves have changed. School curricula increasingly favour shorter informational texts. Universities compress enormous quantities of material into tightly scheduled semesters. Students balance multiple classes simultaneously alongside internships, networking, and extracurriculars. 

This is particularly visible when talking to visiting students at Oxford from elite American universities. Natasha Wipfler-Kim, a third-year visiting student from Princeton University studying English at Worcester College, described Princeton reading as broad but scattered. “Everything’s kind of distributed a lot more”, she said. Princeton’s Humanities Sequence (HUM), which assigns enormous quantities of reading across a single semester. A sample reading list for a twelve-week term contains roughly 30 books. Natasha described being expected to read multiple books a week, including Plato’s Republic, in a day. “The expectation”, she said, “was that it just wasn’t really possible”.

That impossibility changes how students read. When confronted with several books a week alongside work for four or five other classes, the goal becomes coverage rather than immersion. Students cannot afford to remain inside every text equally. Skimming becomes less a failure than a structural necessity. Describing how she dislikes skimming because it forces students into constant calculations about what can be abandoned, Natasha said: “I hate the point at which you’re reading, and then you have to decide that it’s time to skim.”

Horowitch’s article occasionally blurred two related but separate phenomena: students reading less deeply and universities assigning reading in ways that all but guarantee superficial engagement. 

This is where Oxford becomes interesting.

Unlike most American universities, Oxford does not primarily organise learning around lectures, seminars, and continuous classroom participation. The tutorial system places extraordinary weight on solitary reading and independent interpretation. Students are expected to encounter texts alone first, formulate arguments independently, and then defend those ideas in the unnervingly personal setting of a tutorial. In contrast to large seminars at American universities, there is little room to disappear into anonymity.

As Clara Shapiro, a third-year visiting student from Harvard University, also studying English at Worcester, put it: “Since it’s a one-on-one system, if you haven’t read [the text] closely, your tutor will definitely notice that.” At Harvard, she explained, there are reading checks and classroom discussion, but also a tacit recognition that enormous quantities of reading will inevitably “slip through the cracks”. Oxford, by contrast, still largely assumes that students will at least thoroughly read the primary text, even if certain secondary criticism is strategically abandoned. Oxford, therefore, occupies an unusual position on the spectrum between close reading and strategic extraction. Tutorials demand immersion and detailed engagement with core texts; at the same time, the sheer scale of many reading lists makes selective reading unavoidable. Students are often expected to read deeply and strategically at once.

Oxford’s workload can also be brutal, but its brutality operates differently. As opposed to taking five or six classes, students often study only one or two papers at a time. The reading remains immense. One undergraduate syllabus requires students to read Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (plus a chapter from John Stuart Mill) in a week. But, the structure more plausibly permits immersion.

“There’s just a lot more time [at Oxford]”, Natasha observed. “The day is, for the most part, quite open, so you can kind of make it happen”. Oxford therefore preserves institutional conditions in which deep reading remains possible more successfully than many universities do. But possibility is not the same thing as guarantee.

The mythology surrounding Oxford reading culture can obscure how tactical students become. Undergraduates quickly learn that no human being can read every item on every reading list with equal care. The result is not necessarily a rejection of close reading but a division of labour within reading itself: some texts receive sustained attention because tutorials require it, while others are approached strategically for arguments, context, or scholarly positioning.

Thomas Bainbridge, an English student and JCR President at Somerville College, described the difficulty of sustaining uninterrupted concentration alongside administrative responsibilities. As JCR President, he balances committee meetings, conversations with college staff, and student welfare responsibilities alongside degree work. Reflecting on his ability to sit with a book, he said: “You just don’t have a lot of time to sit for hours without being disturbed. You will get something that you need to do, like responding to an email or attending a meeting.” He continued: “You don’t have time to get immersed in something, which I do think matters quite a lot.”

Nor are these pressures uniquely American anymore. Oxford humanities students increasingly face the same imperative to convert a non-vocational degree into employability through internships, networking, committee positions, and extracurricular distinction. Thomas highlights how the amount of work required to pivot into other industries can be enormous. Increased time spent outside the library is therefore more a natural response to economic pressure and career anxiety, rather than evidence of intellectual decline. 

Strategic reading, then, is not unique to Oxford, nor is it necessarily evidence of cultural collapse. In many ways, it represents a rational adaptation to reading lists that are designed to be impossible to complete. One can simultaneously believe that deep reading matters and acknowledge that no student consistently reads every assigned text in full. Oxford reading culture often depends precisely on holding two positions simultaneously: that certain texts demand close, immersive reading, and that no student can realistically approach every assigned work that way.

More interesting is the extent to which Oxford still pressures students towards close engagement despite these evasions. Tutorials have a peculiar way of exposing intellectual shortcuts. An undergraduate can survive a lecture or seminar having skimmed the novel. Defending an interpretation in front of a tutor who has taught the text for 20 years is different.

Clara described finding herself annotating far more at Oxford than at Harvard because the tutorial system demands not merely comprehension but independent thought. “You need to really hone in on what you find interesting personally”, she explained. “Sometimes that requires talking to the text”.

That phrase – talking to the text – captures something central about Oxford’s conception of reading. The Faculty itself increasingly seems aware that reading now exists within altered conditions of attention. Alongside traditional forms of literary study, recent initiatives have experimented with shorter, curated encounters with texts. Projects such as LitHits and The Ten Minute Book Club present expertly selected but unabridged excerpts intended to encourage engagement with literature through more concentrated forms of reading. Similarly, Professor Marion Turner’s project “Why We Read Fiction” forms part of a broader conversation within the Faculty about what reading means under contemporary conditions. These projects do not abandon deep reading so much as ask how it might be sustained. Further, undergraduates are repeatedly told to “put themselves in conversation with the text”, while mark schemes place heavy emphasis on independence of thought. The institution imagines reading not as passive absorption but as dialogue: a sustained argument between reader and author brought to life in tutorials. The ideal Oxford student generates new ideas, rather than simply regurgitating old ones.

This expectation can feel simultaneously liberating and disorienting. First years, in particular, often struggle to know exactly what they should read or what intellectual direction they ought to pursue. Clara described the unusual freedom one tutor gave her to construct an entire syllabus herself for a paper on Celtic myth and folklore. “Nobody’s ever asked me that before”, she recalled thinking. Rather than receiving a rigid programme, she found herself building one through curiosity, association, and “hyperlink hopping”, tracing connections between Seamus Heaney, ley lines, Irish folklore, and ethnographic collections of myths.

Thomas similarly described how reading lists at Somerville are often extremely expansive. Tutors, he explained, “value giving you the opportunity to read what you’re interested in and develop academic interests or niches”. This freedom allows students to pursue highly individual intellectual paths, but it also demands initiative. 

American humanities education, by contrast, was repeatedly described by both Natasha and Clara as more collectively interpretive and more explicitly guided. At Harvard, Clara explained, students spend considerable time discussing texts together before writing essays. Lectures often provide strong interpretive frameworks and can occasionally resemble “performance art”. She recalled one Harvard lecture on Bartleby, the Scrivener delivered almost entirely in silence because Bartleby himself refuses to speak for much of the text.

Oxford tutorials can therefore feel comparatively austere. Students arrive having prepared essays alone and are then forced to defend or revise their thinking in real time. Tutors frequently withhold definitive readings. “It’s still a mystery to me what exactly my [tutor] thinks of a book”, Clara admitted. The effect can be disorienting but also intellectually productive. “Oxford really prepares you to generate thoughts about a book on your own”.

Yet, this raises a more complicated question. Oxford clearly preserves the conditions for deep reading more successfully than many universities do. But does it actually teach students how to read closely, or does it simply assume they will acquire those skills through immersion?

Thomas suggested many skills develop through immersion rather than explicit instruction. That assumption itself reflects a distinctly Oxford conception of literary study – that sustained exposure to difficult texts will organically produce better readers.

Historically, other institutions approached the problem more directly. Modern English as an academic discipline was shaped significantly by the tradition of practical criticism associated with I. A. Richards at the University of Cambridge. Cambridge’s English course developed forms of close textual analysis explicitly designed to train students how to extract meaning from dense passages of writing. First-year Cambridge students still sit papers intended specifically to cultivate those interpretive skills. Oxford’s closest equivalents – Old English and Chaucer set texts – often approach literature more through linguistic or sociological lenses, rather than through formal critical method itself.

This distinction matters because immersion alone does not necessarily safeguard against bad reading. Recent warnings from Oxford itself complicate any optimistic account of tutorials as a defence against intellectual shortcuts. Katherine Rundell recently argued that AI enables a “vast counterfeiting of knowledge”, warning that students can now plausibly produce sophisticated humanities essays without having meaningfully encountered the texts themselves. Yet Rundell’s diagnosis risks overstating technological novelty. Students have always improvised, strategically avoided reading, and performed understanding they did not possess. What’s more, her claim that students “could soon get degrees without reading a book” is still completely unfounded in Oxford, where students sit exams that are designed to test recall and understanding when faced with completely new questions. 

Oxford’s tutorial system may cultivate deep reading less through direct instruction than through pressure, repetition, and institutional expectation. Its strength is the freedom it grants students. That freedom, however, becomes its weakness as students aren’t guided on how to read. The system can struggle to distinguish between genuinely attentive reading and sophisticated forms of academic improvisation.

That ambiguity complicates any attempt to cast Oxford straightforwardly as a holdout against cultural decline. The University benefits enormously from selection effects. Students admitted to Oxford humanities courses are already disproportionately likely to possess unusually strong reading habits. English applicants, for example, must take A-Level English Literature or an equivalent qualification, which still generally requires engagement with complete texts rather than excerpts alone.

Even here, however, things are changing. Thomas noted that longer poetic works, such as The Canterbury Tales and Paradise Lost, are increasingly taught through selected sections rather than in full. The broader educational culture surrounding universities has shifted long before students arrive at Oxford itself. This echoes Horowitch’s findings about prep schools in the U.S. She notes that educators have shifted emphasis toward shorter informational texts and exam skills in recent decades, citing data that only 17% of teachers primarily teach whole texts in middle and high school.

And some behaviours now treated as symptoms of decline may simply reflect changing academic incentives. Discussing the emphasis on secondary criticism and “scholarly conversation”, Natasha described a culture in which students increasingly engage with criticism strategically, mining arguments for useful frameworks rather than lingering over prose itself. “You go in, pull out what’s useful to you, and then just kind of leave”, she said. This does not necessarily eliminate appreciation for literature. It reflects the structure of contemporary academic work. Still, she worried something might be lost. Deep reading is not merely the ability to finish books. It involves a willingness to remain inside uncertainty long enough for meaning to emerge.

That may be the real issue underlying Horowitch’s article. The question is not whether elite students can still technically read books. It is whether universities still defend forms of attention incompatible with acceleration culture.

Oxford remains unusual not because students there never skim or optimise – they do – but because its pedagogical structure still allocates time for and comes to expect sustained interpretation. Tutorials force students into direct confrontation with texts in ways many university systems no longer do. Yet Oxford also reveals the limits of immersion as a pedagogical philosophy. 

Perhaps the University’s real achievement is more modest. Oxford does not entirely resist the pressures transforming reading elsewhere. Its students optimise, skim, network, and strategically abandon material just like students at Princeton or Harvard. But the institution still creates spaces in which slow reading remains imaginable – where spending hours inside a difficult poem or novel continues to appear serious rather than inefficient.

Deep reading is becoming rare, but that’s not the real issue. The real problem isn’t that reading is disappearing altogether. It’s that our institutions are abandoning the idea that deep attention is a skill worth protecting in the first place.